I started using Kagi since someone on HN suggested it as a paid ad-free engine, it supports some of the "bang" features that DDG supports, I'm still debating paying for Kagi, the content is not emphasized by an AI, but by other people using the search engine. You can upvote or downvote results interestingly enough.
I'm pretty sure that Kagi (partly) uses Bing API, so this may affect their pricing. (I am currently a happy Kagi subscriber.)
Was not aware, my understanding is they have their own crawler, but also of note, you can custom create your own bangs and make it point to any other search engine as long as it has a query parameter you can shove your search query to.
It will probably have a net positive. After seeing Google and MS chasing hype instead of focusing on a better experience for users I've moved over as of this week.
Yes but they use the Bing API. If their costs per search exceed their revenues per search new users won’t help them