> No. I am not paying and I am not seeing ads either, ad blockers existed long ago.

Forget the ads! Pay them because they are objectively better.

To me Kagi is a 2008 google with 2023 tech stack. An actual exhaustive crawler, with actual relevant results that neither goog or ddg serve to me.

It is still not there for product discovery and regional results. But if I am searching a technical topic, or prior art in a particular domain then it is just unmatched.

I am just using free tier right now but I think the privacy bit is a sweetener, the value with kagi so far for me is you can scope searches really well, add preferred sources, filtering. It's a bit like if you slapped a nice interface over all the google hacks that used to be possible. Lack of SEO junk is another sweetener.

Yeah, a lot of this is technically possible without kagi but if kagi doesn't suck I'll pay to not have to deal with the extra cognative load of wrangling google or ddg into spitting out sensible results.

I'm sure that's fine. That's where I was.

Except the quality of results I was getting was quite poor. And, that was my reason for giving Kagi "a go".

I think your point about total privacy is legitimate, though.