DuckDuckGo

After trying Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Qwant, and a self-hosted SearxNG instance, a blogger resubscribed to Kagi — a paid search engine — and wrote up exactly why nothing else stuck.

Google was the biggest letdown: "terrible" results, prioritizing multimedia over the plain text he was actually searching for — "I just want to look up some text."

The clincher wasn't search quality alone — it was Kagi's built-in custom CSS support, letting him restyle the interface in a way he couldn't reproduce with userscripts on any competitor.

Gabriel Weinberg's data: 86% of desktop users hit a search engine 10+ times a month; only 21% touch AI chat tools that often. His framing — people consume AI like they eat meat: some embrace, some limit, some avoid.

Simon Willison called the headline a strawman but flagged the Microsoft stat — 30% of the US working-age population using AI 90+ minutes a month — as "impressively" high. Then practitioners split on whether the tools even work.