I mean, I think for average internet user the existing free alternatives are more than good enough.

I don't think I agree with that but I think ads and slop you get from the "free" alternatives are more damaging in subtle ways that people don't appreciate. I also pay to remove ads from just about everything I use and am shocked at just how much better that makes my life.

Every single time I accidentally use Google I am shocked at how terrible it is. People just haven’t seen the alternatives. I finally setup a family subscription to get my wife and kids in it and they don’t want to go back to Google now.

How do you deal with searches for local businesses? I've found these to be a big blind spot vs DDG / Google.

Am I searching for a local business? I go to Google.

Am I searching for the range of input voltages an Arduino can safely handle? Kagi.

Last night at a social outing I had to explain to a project manager who is supposedly an AI expert that the side project I run as a community resource can't be entirely free because it costs me non-trivial amounts of money due to its success. She was unaware that things like bandwidth, or email, or compute could cost anything. She even asked me what compute is. She even started with "I mean, I know you pay for the domain, but... What else?".

Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.

How many of those people don’t use an ad blocker? I know a lot of people who put up with that web experience, and it boggles the mind. Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? I’m quite close to giving up on Google because even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?