I pay for kagi because it’s genuinely less frustrating to use than searxng, duckduckgo, bing, and whatever shit Google is up to these days.

They’re fine search engines but after years of using them I found they annoyed me sometimes; their limitations will surface if you use them long enough. In contrast, I haven’t ran into a kagi search results page yet that has annoyed me by not finding what I expected to see.

The problem is that Google was good for a long time and then that became the bar everything is measured against. None of the free ones I tried came as close to that Google-like search from the before times as this paid service does.