phluxbox

It costs money to run a service. If you are not paying for that service, there is an obvious incentive to monetize your data. If you are paying a reasonable price for a service, that business can sustain itself without using advertising.

Your billing address is not something advertisers can use to track you. Sure, if you use Kagi to commit crimes you may not be anonymous to the police. But there are a lot of people who do not want to be profiled by ad networks, yet do not consider providing their billing information to be a privacy issue.

Your comment about "the aura of superiority" is dismissive and a little confrontational. The commenter you were responding to was clear about why he likes Kagi - better results. I agree with him.

I find that searches for product reviews and similar commercial terms have much higher quality results than google. I also find that I get better results when I am searching for errors or lines from logfiles. Even when quoted, I find that Google will often return results that partially match my quote ignoring the important part, which makes the search useless.