I've been using Kagi for over a year now.
I can't go back to ad funded search.
Also the phrasing you used in your question was surprisingly poetic with all the Os.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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Seconding Kagi. It makes searching feel as it did before bloat became the norm.
Thirding Kagi. Their research assistant is pretty good too, if you don't recoil from AI like a vampire to sunlight.
as I get older I use search engines less and less since I alredy know the website I want to use and just tipe in URL directly, but when I do need to search some term I tend to use qwant since it is european and private. It tends to be less cencored in my expirience.
For a few years I was a happy (paying) Kagi customer and like mentioned in other comments already, for me there was no going back: it works great, it's bloat free with even a focus on small web, and a lot of cool features. Then, the new US President arrived with his team and their shitty politics. As a EU citizen I could not trust US services anymore and I was not willing to send them money either...
I went back to the French Qwant. It's far from being perfect (they're working on their own index but so far I think they still use Microsoft's Bing), at least it protects my privacy from Microsoft's (and it works fine).
Would I be US citizen, I would happily keep paying for Kagi. It's really good. Much better than anything else, imho.
I have DuckDuckGo set as default everywhere (with all the AI n such turned off), and I only revert back to Google sometimes when shopping or doing deep research. It still just does some things better, but it's worth avoiding if you don't need it.
You may not find lot results with this web engine but it is kinda refreshing :)