I haven't gotten around to trying out Kagi, but I had the same experience with DuckDuckGo, and I haven't used Google search in enough years that I'm no longer sure of the number. Suits me just fine. At first, I would search on DDG and fall back to !g if I didn't find what I wanted, but I haven't bothered with that in a long time.

All the recommendations for Kagi. I never imagined I would pay for search, but after using it for free the value proposition was abundantly clear.

Yeah, thanks to Kagi I haven’t used google’s search in a long time, and I’m happier for it.

Kagi made me realize how truly toilet-paper tier Google's "product" is. Kagi lets me block domains. Kagi doesn't fill my first search screen with ads.

F google.

For me who started using Google around two decades ago it is even more infuriating:

Google, both search and everything else, used to be top notch.