Now you have a chance. Kagi is there.

I made my decision two years ago and I would probably do it even if it was just on par with Google, to support competition and to avoid supporting Google.

But in hindsight it is just exeptionally much better. There is no going back unless Kagi does something monumentally stupid.

I'm a Kagi user too. I like your enthusiasm, but I can't say it's been all that life changing for me. DuckDuckGo is ok too, I still use it on some machines when I don't feel like logging in. GPT has been more life changing.

Don't know what I am doing wrong but except the first few times I really didn't get good results with Kagi.

It might be that I rely a lot on precise queries and doublequoted words and also cannot get myself to use the conversational style that at least Google seems to prefer now.

It's not that people don't want to pay it's that it's difficult to pay small sums. The web browsers could solve this problem but they make money from ads so it's not in there best interest.

Jakob Nielsen's article "The Case for Micropayments" from 1998 still seems relevant. Nothing has really changed in 26 years so I'm skeptical whether it could ever work, but in principle it would be great for users and website owners to have that option.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/

And this was one of the hopes/goals/dreams that crypto offered that I really wish had come true.

How much of that is due to ad-tech companies like Google conditioning people into thinking that way? What if online payments weren't so god awful and allowed people to throw in a few dollars as easily as they might at a toll booth? That's still an unsolved problem too. Credit card companies have solidified their involvement in every facet of the process and the alternatives are non-starters for frictionless commerce.

I'm still happy to put my money where my mouth is and do pay for services which are genuinely useful to me. But this is not the kind of internet I imagined when growing up.