Kagi is priced for sustainability and has features like lenses (e.g., search your own list of niche community sites) and prioritization preferences (raise arstechnica, lower buzzfeed) deeply helpful for technologist searching.
Friends don't let friends Google Bing on DuckDuckGo.
$5/m for only 200 searches (reminder, 1 page = 1 search. So if you hit "page 2" you just burned yet another search from your quota) is insane. [1]
Love it or hate it but Neeva is also on the private search engine market, and you can get unlimited searches for 50€/y. I find their pricing way more reasonable.
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Search has a cost and your searches have historically been paid by advertisers. Recently, also by VC money.
With Kagi it is neither, nobody is paying for your searches but you. Price also should not be the only vector of comparison - quality of results (which we prioritize and are known for) speed and privacy policy should be considered too.
Of course I understand if none of that matters if one’s budge for search is $5/mo. In that case it will have to be VC subsidized search as it simply is not economically viable or sustainable to offer unlimited search (at least of Kagi quality) at that price point.
That isn't true at all from my experience. I just tested it and I was able to search for adult videos, etc.
I decided to try Kagi two weeks ago after hearing about it and trying their Orion browser on iOS. So far it has exceeded my expectations. Results have been on par with G/B/D. The new summerizer has been pretty good and I enjoy getting summary of the results at times to save me time (although I've had a few it couldn't summerize or wrong results in past two weeks). I also love the ability to prioritize sites for your future results and the summary ability of individual pages.
I will stick with the $10/mo for near future. It is small price to pay to support their current goals and intentions.
Put your money where your mouth is!
Google is a lot better at keeping a profile on you whether you like it or not.
This is a thread about search quality, and neither of your objections lower search quality.
Further, neither of the objections makes any difference in the practical world where Google ties the search terms to your account, and you don't have to log in to search, in the same sense that you don't log in to Google to have your search terms tied to you. After using kagi, then you just use kagi, and they don't save your terms.
Finally, Google has assertions in the TOS you agreed to about what they can do with your searches. So does Kagi. If you do care about search terms tied to you, you're welcome to read those and understand who has concern or liability for what aspects of your privacy.