It's a simple answer because you don't pay them for that. They run a balancing act of providing you useful results while also surreptitiously shoving trash, that they actually make money off of, at you and hoping you won't notice or complain.
Our business model is selling subscriptions, not data.
(Kagi Founder here)
Even though you say you don't associate search queries with accounts, it's hard for me to get over the "mental hump" to truly feel that in my bones and feel comfortable entering a "private" query while being signed in. I know it's not entirely rational. I mean, maybe it is a little bit rational: I only have your word (some random person that I don't know) that you don't -- and, critically, will never -- log queries associated with account. But regardless, it's hard to feel private when I'm entering something into a form on a website where I'm signed in as myself.
Your concern is shared by many users and realistically speaking there is not much we can do, but hope to survive long enough to build trust.
It is somewhat ironic that the only business model that has hope of not being interested in private information, does require an account. While there is nothing inherently bad with accounts, all the other services we are competing with, that have been exploiting user data for years also made accounts have bad reputation.
User choice at this moment is really - use a free service that you know is doing absolutely everything it can to track your behavior (directly or indirectly contributing to ad-tech, even without you logging in), or use a paid service that aligns the incentives with the user (also requiring a leap of faith because other services before it burned the trust bridge).
I hope enough users will make that leap of faith with Kagi.
For now private mode has no ads, but sadly, it might only be monetizable with private ads in the future, similar to DDG..
I really like seeing more competition entering the search space and competing against Google, but it's a huge bummer when someone continually touts their "private" product while routinely ignoring comments asking for clarification around something that suggests it's not actually private.
Can you please shed some light on this?
I'd suggest a warrant canary. It's better than nothing.