I just add the search to firefox and you can get the same functionality without needing to use another site to get to the one you want to search on.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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Brave Search has !bangs and an independant search index. Kagi relies heavily on it.
Can I use Brave search as default in firefox?
You can manually setup any site to be your default search in Firefox.
Yeah, I figured it out after I posted. I'll give this a try for a while
Kagi (paid) advertises a huge list of bangs with the option to customise them yourself.
For those who maybe breeze past it in the article linked, here's an unofficial tool for searching all of the zillions of Kagi bangs: https://kbe.smaertness.net/
They have all the usual, !g for Google, !gi Google Images, !b Bing, !ddg, !brave, etc, plus like a billion niche ones.
Searxng uses bangs but you have to double them up (i.e. !!aur btop or !!ddg search).
I love how your first example was AUR.
I use arch BTW.
I started to try and use kagi a few weeks ago. It has bangs.
Kagi is giving out money to Yandex, which is Russian.
Is that one a paid service? Have heard good things about it but never tried.
Yes it’s paid, but the quality is worlds above Bing, DDG, or Google. The best description I can make is that it’s what Google Search was about 15 years ago, back when there were no AI results, no ads, no artificially promoted results, and you could vote on results and block domains from appearing in your searches. Back when Google Search was actually good.
So it doesn’t do anything new or groundbreaking, it’s just what a search engine is supposed to be, in a time when every other option has abandoned that goal in the endless search for more revenue.
I can find valid results with Kagi 90% of the time compared to about 40% with Google. There are some things I was been looking for using Google for several years without success that turn up as the top result on Kagi.
It just works.
I've seen so many people talking about it that I tried the free trial. It has been giving good enough results. My reference is usually duck dck go since that's what I've used for years, and I only fall back to google when really need to expand my search, but google has been so useless about almost everything that anything else is a win.
I'm not sure if I'll pay or keep using or not, but for now I activated it as the default on my browsers and devices to get a feeling.
I like the idea of a proper business where the business model is clear and where they are making their money. They even have changelogs with their updates and it seems they keep improving things focused on the user, which is nice.
it's paid, but you get 100 free searches if you wanna check it out
Is it 100 a month? I thought it was 100 total, no specified time frame. It's intended as a trial period not a free tier.
it's 100 a month (edit: wrong 😭)
It says here it's 100 total: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.htm
The Trial plan is limited to 100 total searches. This plan is suited for those interested in exploring Kagi and curious about paid search engines.
youre right I think it reset for me when I cancelled my sub
Subscription search seems at odds with privacy.
Unlike free search where there's definitely no incentive to sell your data to keep the lights on, right?
They came out with this feature recently that makes any sort of tracking technically impossible:
I'm currently using Startpage, which is dutch
I also use them, and have liked the results.
Probably because they pull from Google
Andisearch admitts, among other commands, also !bangs
Andi is 100% free and anonymous, no logs, no ads, no tracking, random proxie, sandboxed results.