I pay for Kagi because it shows me what I ask for, and not what google and their advertisers think I should see. It gives me fine-grained and permanent control

I pay for Kagi because it shows me what I ask for, and not what google and their advertisers think I should see. It gives me fine-grained and permanent controls over my search experience. I have Pinterest and other annoying sites blacklisted. It actually respects advanced queries including quotes and boolean operators. A search engine requires so many resources that there's just no way to make it ""free"" without turning it to absolute garbage. Google and DDG keep getting shittier and returning worse results. The time I spend slogging through all the crap on google to find the information I'm actually after far outweighs the cost of my Kagi subscription. Besides all of that, if I search for anything on google, it will be advertised at me for weeks or months to come. That just isn't acceptable to me.