It’s so difficult to compete with free though. The monthly fee for kagi is a bit steep, which is not for everyone (>5 €/month), even if that is the ‘true’ price of searching the web. It does have some very interesting features though. A colleague of mine is always praising it, saying that the search results are better than anything else he has tried.

I started using qwant last year for the same reason and I haven’t looked back. Search results are excellent. I sometimes switch to Startpage as a proxy for google.