I think the more precise ask is: for long snippets, Kagi should always include the page’s meta description first when one exists, and then extend it with additional relevant on-page text.
In this example, the meta description already gives the clean high-signal summary (“A nonprofit dedicated to helping you understand your world…”), while the page body currently starts with a donation/nonprofit banner that is much less useful as the primary preview. The FAQ further down then contains the broader descriptive text that DuckDuckGo appears to show.
So I do not think DDG is necessarily doing something fundamentally smarter here. It may simply be showing an older crawl, or it picked a different body excerpt. The key product point for Kagi, in my view, is that long should be an extension of short, not a replacement with a worse excerpt.
A good rule could be:
meta description (or short snippet candidate) + additional relevant body text.
That would preserve the concise, curated summary while still giving the benefit of a longer preview.
