Every time I see these posts about Kagi I wonder why you would not just use DuckDuckGo. Its free, the results are about the same and it has better filters for blocking AI spam.
With Kagi, the results are better than Google, and the first couple times I couldn't find something with Kagi and went back to Google, the Google results were even worse.
The only smaller search engine with its own real index is Brave.
The index was why I looked elsewhere.
The reason I switched to Kagi was because of their business model where I'm a customer not a product. So results are theoretically tailored for value to me not value to the company.