Why pay for a search engine

I'm almost exactly one year into my Kagi purchase, and I've got to say I'm loving it. Since this was just an experiment, I purchased the smallest level I could, which is now Starter, but back then it was a bit different.

Some people want unlimited, and I understand that, but if you're on the fence, I'd suggest just getting Starter. Seeing how fantastic search can be is incredible. I can completely remove abusive domains (Fandom, Pinterest) from search results. I can get search results from only the small web. I just get better results overall.

For those curious, in the past year I've only made ~1700 searches. That seems low, but that's what it says. I have made some changes to my search habits, though. For instance, when I'm looking for a result on Wikipedia, instead of just searching for it, I go to Wikipedia, same with IMDB, and similar sites. Sometimes, I search for something that I know will need a result from a disallowed domain, so I use DuckDuckGo for that. And I still use DDG for work searches, and some other miscellaneous searches.

Again, if you're on the fence, just try it out. It is so, so, so much better than Google or DDG.

I've been doing the same but using the browser shortcut to select a search engine. If I start with "k " it searches with Kagi, with "g " it's Google, etc.

I've been using Kagi only for non-trivial searches, so the starter plan has been enough. For very local searches (mainly about a local business or finding where to buy a product) I use Google. And most of my searches are just looking up the url to a website (like searching "steam"), so any search engine will do (I default to Duckduckgo for that).