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But the author tried Kagi and the results don't appear to be noticeably different, filled with scammy adspam just like Google and Bing. Kagi's results seem to mostly aggregate existing search engines [1], so this isn't much of a surprise. Perhaps a subscription-based service that operates an index at Google's scale might help, but no such thing exists to my knowledge.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

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Right, but Kagi has built in tools to make it easy to fix that. Blocking those spammy sites from ever showing up again. Moving certain sites up the ranking, and so on. These features mean that over time my Kagi results have become nearly perfect for myself.

This is addressed in the article. As Hacker News readers and expert computer users, we have a bag of tricks that we can reach into in order to make our searches perform better. With a similar level of effort and an expert user's intuition you can get good results out of any search engine. Not so for the average user. In fact, again paraphrasing the article, Google's original claim to fame was that you didn't have to spend a lot of time doing exact keyword matching and fancy tricks in order to get good results.

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