The team/person responsible for Woot sold it to Amazon, and then launched Meh the day their non-compete ended, along with a manifesto explaining how badly they thought Amazon had handled Woot.
I love Kagi, the results are great, the assistant is great, and I like customizing the search result UI as well to look as clean as possible. Its like having OG Google back.
Depends, I love it and am happy to pay for it out of privacy concerns and supporting a non-monopolist. It's got some neat features that I use all the time that google doesn't have. Is it's search results better than google? Maybe. Maybe not. I do know when I can't find something on kagi, google doesn't either.
I have no clue where I read it, that was back when meh.com launched eleven-ish years ago. I didn't find it in a hot minute of searching either. I did find these, some of which talk about the circumstances obliquely: