I’ve also seen Kagi’s result quality start to decline in the last few months, and I now automatically bang to Google for anything local.

My unsourced theory is that they’ve optimized getting their search costs down, at the expense of some edge cases that don’t show up in their KPIs.

I’m still a satisfied customer, the product makes me two Starbucks coffees a month happier than I would be still using Google for everything.

I work at Kagi. We don't have KPIs that track search quality in that way (we don't have any frontend tracking at all, so we can't know if you click any of the results), and we haven't touched much the sources of data we're using over the last few months. We've also had conflicting reports about this problem, so I'm wondering if it's not variable quality over time and place of our upstreams that's a problem.

That said, we're aware that it's currently something we have to improve, "!g best cafe" is not where we want to be. We're working on it, but if you have specific examples/suggestions, please do submit them to kagifeedback.org so we can track them.

Appreciate the response and insight. Rooting for you guys, I’ll be sure to submit feedback in the future.