Good news: kagi.com is mostly a shell over Google and Bings apis, but they do quality control and they are building their own index.

I have paid for months from my own pocket and since I started using it, search doesn't drive me mad anymore.

It is not perfect, but anytime I find a problem now a real human verifies it or ask for clarification within hours and a fix is made an pushed with a reference to my report.

Also: for some narrow searches like arcane git knowledge or some niche parts of history etc, search.marginalia.nu is actually a lot better than Google and DDG and Bing. I am actually serious! Much less spam and you find results that could easily have drowned in between "top ten" articles in any mainstream search engine.

I'm not a Kagi subscriber, but I'll be. Yesterday I was looking for a pdf reader app with a specific feature. Nor Google nor Bing helped me; result pages were almost 100% ads (most by Adobe). I was giving up. My first try with Kagi gave me exactly what I wanted.

Exactly.

Can I guess it wasn't a result of keyword stuffing with every result but Google and Bing "forgot" some of your search terms to show you more thinly veiled ads/"content"?

Yup. Nailed it.

The founder of kagi.com - " I was grateful to be the VP of Product at GoDaddy (2016 - 2018)." Thanks, but no thanks.