For me Kagi is the 2010-2015 Google Search experience. It just... works.
I basically pay only to have that. The rest are lots of niceties on top that I can pick if I want them or need them.
It respects your keywords, if it edits anything of the query it tells you why and how, and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I had to scroll to hit the "More results" button since I started using it.
Before I tried Kagi (I tried it out when it was invite-only for testing and then converted to paying user) Google was basically frustrating me with every single query. I had to scroll past the ads, ignore the stuff that looked like websites, ignore the first 5 results because they were useless, ignore the "other results from X" because nothing of value was ever found, then go to the second page, and still find maybe 1 result that was applicable to my query.
Kagi felt like a breath of fresh air. I have a few Googler friends that tried it out on my recommendation and prefer it and pay for it over Google Search, I think that speaks for itself.
TLDR: I find the information I want much faster and much more frequently.
Ad supported search is not incentivized to find you information as fast as possible; the goal is for you to click on ads.
I hate paying for anything. I am cheap as hell, but it saves me enough time that I can justify it. I felt google search was getting worse while I feel Kagi search gets better. Plus I can customize Kagi to ban entire websites or show websites, such as this one, more often.
I am not sure what the user experience of your setup is but with Kagi I can tell it to summarize like 8 sites and quickly read through all of them on the page.
Also, I didn't know how to use AI well with search prior to Kagi; the ease of use really helped me maximize its use.
My home is ad-blocked up the wazoo. I love signal and hate noise. Kagi gives me that.
I basically pay only to have that. The rest are lots of niceties on top that I can pick if I want them or need them.
It respects your keywords, if it edits anything of the query it tells you why and how, and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I had to scroll to hit the "More results" button since I started using it.
Before I tried Kagi (I tried it out when it was invite-only for testing and then converted to paying user) Google was basically frustrating me with every single query. I had to scroll past the ads, ignore the stuff that looked like websites, ignore the first 5 results because they were useless, ignore the "other results from X" because nothing of value was ever found, then go to the second page, and still find maybe 1 result that was applicable to my query.
Kagi felt like a breath of fresh air. I have a few Googler friends that tried it out on my recommendation and prefer it and pay for it over Google Search, I think that speaks for itself.