I would have said that it would be cool if this said what search engines include AI, but thats almost all of them

Unfortunately, as for the last month or so, Qwant has decided that I need to enable javascript execution on my browser in order to deliver the search results, which for security reasons I chose to have disabled.

Now using searxng, and I am pretty happy with it, using qwant as one of the sources.

why is the image so low quality

While I understand the note on Kagi requiring an account making it less private in theory, in practice you can pay using OpenNode and use an anonymous email to sign up which makes it impossible to really tie anything to the real person you are at that point (and functionally like other engines that may use backend fingerprinting to help personalize your results, just in the open).

Kagi provides a bit more detail in their FAQs: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#why-trust

That said it's still an American company, so that may be the deal breaker for some which is fair.

at this point I pretty much on ddgs !bangs. tbey are pretty amazing. are there any good alternatives to them?

Upvote for MetaGer. Pricing is ok and the service privacy-friendly. Would still love to see an independent index though.