Complete discounting of geo-IP on request. Not currently possible:<p><a href="https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/179386" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/179386</a>
What quickly comes to mind:<p>No priority for news sources that are in a direct business relationship, every filter and setting can be modified without creating an account, heavily penalize advertising, no hiding of URLs, not filtering content for political reasons.
For me, it is mostly the feature of getting the results I expect when I input a search term. Over the years I've been conditioned to Google, and have learned to intuitively formulate search terms in a way that gets me what I want almost immediately when I use Google. When I tried switching to DuckDuckGo, suddenly the way I formulate my queries no longer resulted in the results I expected. This resulted in my falling back on `!g` over 50% of the time.<p>I've recently started trying out the Kagi beta and it is the first time I'm not `!g`-ing constantly. It seems to give me what I want with the queries I expect. At first I was a bit worried that it might not find my perfect balance of news-vs-older-content, but I was pleasantly surprised. Searches seem to result in a nice ranking of current events vs other information. It also brings back the "Discussion" search feature that Google used to have in a good way.<p>If the result quality continues to live up to my expectations I can see myself paying for the service down the line, but will see how it goes over time; as well as how the privacy stance of the devs progresses in regards to both privacy and data ownership of subscribing users _and_ of the subjects of queries (in relation to RTBF requests and such).
User interface. I'd prefer search results to appear above the fold. A few years ago Google started putting ads and contextual widgets above search results. Sometimes on mobile not a single result makes it onto the screen due to ads and other content appearing first.<p>I already switched to DuckDuckGo, and I'm happy with it.
Sometimes when returning results, the page shifts down after a few seconds because a top result is refined with sub links.<p>By that time I already moved to click on a link somewhere in the results, and the page shift makes me click on the wrong link.