I've been experimenting with Kagi recently. At first I thought it was good but then I was searching for a model number for some niche Honda motor and Kagi wasn't any help. Neither was Duckduckgo
Google found it for me, though.
Having said that, I recently switched to Duckduckgo as my main search engine although I'm open to suggestions.
I agree that we need to get off of Google just because like you said - they are the gatekeepers. I don't trust a large company with that, much less Google
I’ve been playing around with kagi and am actually super impressed with the search results for finding info about a product to purchase. Google results were full of your-search-term-best-reviews.com SEO crap but kagi found info that didn’t pop up even several pages into google search. So it might be how popular/commercial the search term is and google is still better at finding obscure niche things.
Ya I really like how they remove all the "listicles" top 10 BS list pages that are all just SEO content farms
I think for general things Kagi is great. I looked up some stuff about WW2 and it brought up great articles. The AI summary thing is really cool, although I think they just use the ChatGPT api.
Ultimately I stopped using after my trial because if I'm going to pay for a search engine I want it to be at least on parity with the free options