Yeah, I've read around their documentation and they have a pretty compelling reason why one should prefer search engines where you directly pay to the search provider instead of relying on third parties such as advertisers to pay for your search usage.

I save way more than I pay for Kagi because it doesn't give me sponsored results and other garbage trying to make me waste money.

It’s been worth it for my spouse and me. Happy to pay for a product rather than being the product.

That actually looks really amazing! I really want more services to actually compel users to pay to support them, and make it a good decision to do so. I think this is the best suggestion so far. Thanks mate!

Yes, I tried that and have now got to the susbscribe or move on phase.

Went back to DDG and results really are not in the same league as Kagi so I may just cough up.

The search results are good but the limited searches make me anxious for running out. If it grows enough to the point where they can sustain themselves by offering the unlimited tier for $3-5 I might switch but not with the current pricing.

My problem with Kagi is that they're still running at a loss and they think AI will be their savior.

And their AI currently gives extremely wrong information but the devs think that's fine because the point of their AI is to be fast not accurate.

I liked it as a search engine but at this point I can't see it surviving. If they raised the prices to where they lost a lot of customers and still can't get to positive numbers they aren't going to fix it by having AI give you wrong answers.

By free search allowance, do you mean the one time trial of 100, the 300 per month if you're paying $5, or something else?

Kagi is the only one that consistently gives me much better results than google. The fact that it's not riddled with ads on the first page was a big incentive for me to give them some cash. It actually improved my productivity at work a whole lot. This actually made me think how shitty google has become when I was preferring results given by an error prone AI compared to just searching for it. Now with Kagi, I can actually find the stuff I'm looking for and only use AI in case I can't find it there for some reason. Totally worth the monthly subscription for me.

I hit the threshold in a week, but it was because I got engaging results.

Ideal search engine for falling into unexpected rabbit holes. It's scratches the itch of really exploring the web.

You have to blacklist the AI farm sites though

You can add search engines to Firefox in the address and search bar.

Go to the site you want to add, click the address bar for the drop down to show, then there will be an icon for that site with a green plus to add it.

If you use the search box it's even easier. If you're on the site the icon on the left will have the green plus symbol for it.

During that time, we would find interesting web pages through people and/or specific interests.

I beg to differ, during that time I found most of my interesting content through AltaVista and its weird cousin HastaLaVista, and aggregators like Portal of Evil (though, bad example, I seem to recall PoE was pretty much the same time as google).

Happy paying customer here, it's great to see the innovations they're making and their interactions with the community.

I too am a happy customer. The ability to tweak individual site ranking especially makes searching the internet so useful again.

I tried it but unfortunately it's very similar to Google search just without the trackers, and sometimes the results are a bit worse (worth it for not having the trackers though)

DDG just uses Google's search engine, minus all the trackers.