Just gave it the first real try today, in the context of (a) understanding some programming topics and (b) finding opticians in my town.

Kagi is so. much. better than any of the DuckDuckGo, Google, Brave, SearXNG, Startpage, Ecosia, and what not.

They even have a search mode “Small Web” to show “results that favor noncommercial domains and topics”. Other modes include “Programming”, “Fediverse forums”, “Usenet/Archive”, “Forums” and “Academic” (to be selected under Settings/Search/Lenses).

And when Kagi accidentally does serve you some bullshit page, the button to block or de-prioritize the website in all future searches is right there. Conversely, one can give high-quality sites a higher priority in the results listings.

And one can set up regexes to automatically replace links to twitter.com or x.com by xcancel.com, or replace links to reddit.com by old.reddit.com, etc.

The monthly ~5€ for 300 searches (which I would use mostly for programming tasks while sticking to SearXNG or so for more mundane lookups), or even the ~10€ for unlimited searches, will definitely be worth it.