New search engine, who dis?

Like many others I've become disenchanted with Google search. So many, in fact, that its dominance is starting to decline! Instead, I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default search for the last several years, on desktop and on my phone (with its dedicated application).

Several posts (the Daring Fireball blog, Ian Betteridge and Bart Busschots in the Fediverse) recently nudged me to try out Kagi. The idea behind their offering is that aside from a 100 searches/month free tier you pay a monthly fee and in return their interface is clean, sparse, and lacks ads.

Of course if you're paying, you need to have an account. Their FAQ states that they only collect the bare minimum of data to run the service and for now I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on that. Hypothetically it also allows you to set some personal preferences, but I haven't looked into that yet.

My usual first searches are vanity searches. That may seem silly, but I would hope that I know reasonably well what to expect there.

Kagi did not disappoint:

• My LinkedIn profile
• Several Facebook profiles with similar names (my own isn't public, and covered in dust)
• Some references to the time that I contributed to the DGD ecosystem (parts of the KernelLib, maintaining the network package)
• A YouTube account with all of 2 playlists (Dutch artists, and 80s/90s music, unsurprising)
• A reference to the WARN ACT bot, one of the two that I run on the Fediverse
• Some currently inactive static websites with my name on it still
• A reference to one of few mailing lists that I still vaguely read or contribute to
• My name in a list of Patreon contributors of the DTNS podcast

Unexpected blasts from the past:

• An ancient SourceForge.net profile that I had long since forgotten about (created in 2004)
• A reference to the time that I created a WordPress plugin (not sure I still have that file, and I doubt it still works)
• A name credit in iPhone in Action (2008) as found in part on this website for a modified bookmarklet to show the source of a web page on the iPhone? I honestly don't remember that, but seeing as the two authors were the people I worked with at Skotos that makes perfect sense
• And on that note, it found an archived version of that Skotos website as well, and some related pages
• An obscure reference to a Perl module from 2002 where I contributed some testing and a snippet of code

Weirdest find:

• My name in an Engadget post from October 2007 by Erica Sadun around an iPhone rumor. This predates my Twitter account, so I have no recollection how I might have passed on the link to that The Register article to her?!

All in all, some interesting finds and I hope it will prove to be equally useful with other types of searches. Fingers crossed!