It's hard to compare accuracy, but Kagi Translate provides so many knobs to tune compared to Google (formality, gender) and provides more translations... it's just a fantastic product. Maybe even more better than Google Translate than Kagi Search is than Google Search.

I've been learning German and, among other tools (dictionaries, LLMs, etc), I often use google translate for a sentence or two. I have _constantly_ been frustrated at the inability, when going from English to German, to force it to use a particular gender or formality level. I'm willing to give up at least some accuracy to get those knobs. This is an immediate switch for me.

Not trying to shill LLMs but learning German is way easier with them. I've ditched Google translate for everything but simple word translations.

For over a decade location-based "food near me" type searches are the only kind I still use Google as well.

I think this their only moat, but it is a pretty deep one. They had decades to hone their localization, presumably spending a ton of money on local human quality assurance and it pays of.

This will be pretty hard for any competitor to replicate, especially when they have to operate under more economic pressure than Google had to during their golden years. Certainly no competitor so far comes close to Google for local search.

Interestingly I noticed in a bunch of places in Europe, TripAdvisor was much better just due to higher usage / more data than Google. TripAdvisor's UI is pretty clunky but the network effect of just having enough people using it in a given place seems to be by far the most important.

Yep, I still use Google maps for food discovery. It's very good at that, still, and Kagi maps has a ways to go.