Well, because I tend to find crypto full of scams, and I think search engine that both blasts crypto in your face and is apparently based on it is likely to be built on a shaky foundation. I think decentralized search is likely to be slower, and very slow if based on waiting for crypto processing to happen.

To me, this is like walking up to a car wash that's proudly saying "run by Madoff". It doesn't matter how good the car wash itself is, I am concerned about it's long term viability and judgement vs getting funding from almost any other source.

Distributed is also very likely less private because you have to send the data to multiple places, or you have the issue of waiting for consistency across front ends. If it doesn't have multiple servers, then it's the backend that has to be distributed right?

Look, it might be a fine search, but if you doubt Kagi for needing an account, I would doubt this for the crypto association.

You are paying them for the service and the costs to make a custom search engine. The only thing they keep track of is the number of times you queried the service. They don’t track queries or even see them. You don’t have a search history and can’t see previous searches because it’s not tracked

There are no ads. They aren’t just proxying your search like DuckDuckGo.

They display ads at the top of your search results and that’s how they make money.

Kagi does not do that. In fact their search results give you statistics on links/returns about things like trackers etc. there aren’t ads in Kaji returns.