You don't pay advertisers with Google. Advertisers pay Google. Google is incentivized to give you useful results so that you continue coming back and using them for search. If they gave poor results people would stop bothering to use their search and they would get less ad impressions. By paying a flat rate to kagi there is less incontive to maximize the amount of searches people do over time.
Of course you do. That’s the whole point of ads. Where do you think the money comes from?
Ads manipulate you in order to spend more on the advertised products. The consumer ends up paying for them.
This is only true if they are not exploiting an unfair market position.
Google is incentivized to improve the system for both advertisers and users.
Aren’t we seeing evidence of this incentive structure spinning in the opposite direction at Google? Shitty results mean more searches leading to more ad impressions.
When people say that Bing or DDG is good enough to use instead of Google, it is obvious to me that they are only searching in English. Kagi was the first search engine that could compete.