I know the appeal of cynicism, but it’s not the best long-term strategy.

Unless you rely on the goodwill of people running open-source searches like SearxNG, you’re paying for your search services or providing them with reasons to enshittify by blocking ads. On google, duckduckgo, and many others you pay with your attention to ads and with your data. They have the incentive to keep you longer on the search page to show you more data, contrary to your goals. For Kagi makers the way to get rich is much more straightforward: make good search and get many paying users.

They have a direct incentive to care about your interests unlike all other search engines which make money through ads.

Because Kagi is a really good search engine, and because a search engine is the thing that it's most important to keep ads far away from.

I'm not getting it though because it's American, I ain't paying a subscription to an American company.