Kagi is a subscription-based search engine that argues that paying for search is a reasonable thing to do in order to avoid ads and companies selling your information. They also have lenses, e.g. for searching the fediverse specifically. Anyone that wants to share their experience of using Kagi?
It’s not as good as Google from 20 years ago, but much better than Google today.
I didn’t choose it for the privacy, I chose it because I wanted to actually get results for my searches.
Google gets me answers about 20% of the time,
Kagi about 50%,
and (generic - not Kagi) AI about 80% of the time.
The problem with AI as search is that the other 20% is when it will confidently give me wrong answers and waste hours of my time, so I guess Kagi is still useful to me.