The examples I’ve found fall into “caveat” territory.

From the adware company blog:

Fortunately, Google Search has a special operator for that: quotation marks. Put quotes around any word or phrase, such as [“wireless phone chargers”], and we’ll only show pages that contain those exact words or phrases.

Caveats:

Quoted searches may match content not readily visible on a page.

Quoted terms may only appear in title links and URLs.

Snippets might not show multiple quoted terms.

Quoted searches don’t work for local results.

I would be ticked if quotes didn’t work. My screenshots do show them working.

An example of them appearing to ignore quotes came up. When they pull this, I can ignore the results below the error/red line:

Further discussion:

I can’t reproduce but I wanna! (Prolly not kids though)

if its individually paid, you don't have privacy.

FOSS and paid are not mutually exclusive, but Kagi is not FOSS and of dubious transparency/trustworthiness.

Also Kagi is not operating a search engine, but a search aggregator mostly dependent on Google. They don't need much upfront capital to operate.

An actual search indexer competitive with Google is too expensive to be profitable without (tens of) millions of paid users or hundreds of millions of free ones (i.e. bing and maaaaybe yandex?).

True google alternatives are therefore only going to come out of big capital (MSFT), or less likely a government (EU?) funded company. There might be an argument to be made for decentralized search as well, but the only actual contender in that field right now is a crypto thing that probably relies mostly on bing/google. Still, a decentralized open indexer may actually make some sense in theory.

If I wanted to pay to talk to people, I'd go to a therapist.

Responding to the human who typed:

I know Lemmy doesn't like it

Explaining many Lemmings seem to like it, and attempting to explain why some may bristle at its mention

That’s all :)