Welcome to the enshittified google. It is becoming increasingly useless to find anything that's not recent and popular.

I’m making an effort to switch to Kagi this month; tried it?

It is good, I have been using it for almost a year. But I found the quality of results to have gone down as they seem to remove words from searches now, you have to explicitly quote them. It reminds me of how google behave in that sense.

I have used it for well over a year, despite being a stingy freeloader for many other things. I have never hit the usage limit.

Shopping results are terrible, but that is a good trade to have better technical results.

Yeah, it's like they're optimizing for very specific metrics that no longer correspond to what users actually want in a way that has negative side effects. Perhaps there's some short phrase that could describe such behavior...;P