For the past 4-5 months I've kept three browser profiles, which I use simultaneously to compartmentalize things across work/personal/hobbies and to try out different browsers and search engines. I use Kagi on two of them and Brave Search on the other (I gave up on DDG as it disappointed me too often; Brave seems slightly better than vanilla Bing as they combine it with their own index).

The difference in results quality is stark. On Kagi I have to !g maybe once every few days, and usually I don't find what I'm looking for on Google either, but on Brave it feels like I do it for a third of my searches, often for ones where I actually know exactly which result I want and am using the search engine as a shortcut. So whatever Kagi is doing, it's definitely not "Just Bing".

From their Discord, it is apparently some combination of Bing+Google+their own small index, which makes sense because for niche searches where Bing and Brave completely fail, Kagi's results seem to closely mirror Google's, with the benefit of its result boosting and filtering features. For more common searches it seems to match or surpass Google regularly.

I've just switched to the annual plan to lock in my current $10 unlimited searches rate, and will re-evaluate after a year. I can't justify $25 a month, but looking at my history (and guessing how much I'd need if I moved all of my Brave searches to Kagi) I may not actually need more than 1000 included + 200-500 pay-as-you-go searches per month, which is juuuust on the boundary of what I'd be willing to pay.