"... didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to ..."

"... I thought their aspirations were higher ..."

It sounds like the decision to send search queries (and money) to Kagi was based at least in part on reasons other than the quality of the search results

This is interesting psychology

What if all (cf. only sum of) the money sent to Kagi was actually invested in an alternative way to search the web without using an index created by a corporation or a non-profit with commercial subsidiaries

Defensive HN replies may focus on the quality of the search results from commercial indexes, e.g., "Google is the best. That's why everyone 'chooses' it."^1 But if the consumer is choosing Kagi based on other reasons, e.g., "investing in additional search infrastructure", then clearly there is more to these decisions

For example, some search engines claim to be planting trees or some such. Nothing to do with the quality of the results

1. Apple is being paid 20+ billion for choosing Google as the default in iOS but Apple's choice is not based on the money. Yes, that makes sense