[recursive]

> but its no big deal to scroll past those

For some of us it is. If your search engine's revenue model is based on advertising to its users, their relationship is fundamentally adversarial. This affects all of their decisions, in ways that are sometimes hard to identify. Witness the slow decline of google search result ads.

If users are the direct source of revenue, then everyone's interests are aligned.

Also, I, and many like me, value a lack of ads much more highly than you do. Which is fine.

[protimewaster]

I don't think it's necessarily the case that interests are aligned just because users are the direct source of revenue. Many services that rely on users as a direct source of revenue still have interest alignment issues for various reasons.

For example, I don't want to log into or provide payment information to my search provider, because I don't want to voluntarily provide personal information. Compared to Kagi, I can use traditional ad-based search in a relatively anonymous way.

[recursive]

It's not sufficient, but I'd argue it's necessary.

[rvnx]

40 to 60% of users get the free search results, and the comfort of not having ads with a simple "Hide element" extension.

It's hard to beat.

[MostlyStable]

Avoiding the ads doesn't fix the alignment issues. Even without ads, modern google search is dramatically worse than a decade ago, and I'm personally pretty confident it's because their interests and user interests are not well aligned. I don't have to worry about that with Kagi.