Technology

I pay nothing for running SearXNG locally on my machine.

Your search results look very different to mine:

Did you disable Grouped Results?

All the LLM-generated "top 10" listicles are grouped into one large block I can safely ignore. (I could hide them entirely but the visual grouping allows for easy mental filtering, so I haven't bothered.) Your weird top10 fake site does not show up.

But yes, as the linked article says, Kagi is primarily a proxy for Google with some extra on top. This is, unfortunately, a feature as Google's index still reigns supreme for general purpose search. It absolutely is bad and getting worse but sadly still the best you can get. Using only non-Google indices would just result in bad search results.
The Google-ness is somewhat mitigated by Kagi-exclusive features such as the LLM garbage grouping.

What Google also cannot do is highlighted in my screenshot: You can customise filtering and ranking.
The first search result is a Reddit thread with some decent discussion because I configured Kagi to prefer Reddit search results. In the case of household appliances, this doesn't do a whole lot as I have not researched trusted/untrusted sources in this field yet but it's very noticeable in fields like programming where I have manually ranked sites.

Kagi is not "all about" privacy. It's a factor, sure but ultimately you still have to trust a U.S. company. Better than "trusting" a known abuser (Google, M$) but without an external audit, I wouldn't put too much wight into this.
The index ain't it either as it's mostly Google though sometimes a bit better.
What really sets it apart is the features. Customised ranking aswell as blocking some sites outright (bye bye pinterest and userbenchmark) are immensely useful. So are filtering garbage results that Google still likes to return.

I wouldn't use "air purifier" as a metric, since it was already a big public story that surely any search engine that's even half paying attention would have made sure the results for are good. Probably some other consumer good is better for an un-preannounced test run.

(Also I'm not sure that searching "top 10 air purifier" and complaining that you got a top result of top10.com/air-purifiers and that's not what you wanted makes a ton of sense. FWIW, I did try "air purifier" just out of curiosity and saw a very clear result that DDG had the best results, Google second, and Kagi third.)

I repeated it for "good wireless router" and saw different results; for them, the outcomes were fairly similar with Kagi somewhat better (returning Wirecutter as the top result, and an obselete Stack Exchange answer as the 2nd, which okay it's not right but I get where you're coming from sir), and Google and DDG as secondary (returning PCMag and CNet at the top and Wirecutter only further down below).

I searched both Cory Doctorow's post and the linked 404media article in his post for "air purifier" and found nothing. What author are you referencing?

Dunno, I got entirely different results. Reddit, homeairguides, forbes, a bunch of listicles like consumerreports, wired, ny times, cnet and whatnot, and other websites.

That whole situation was such an overblown idiotic mess. Kagi has always used indices from companies that do far more unethical things than committing the extreme crime of having a CEO who has stupid opinions on human rights.
I 100% agree with Vlad's response to this whole thing and anyone who thinks otherwise should question what exactly it is they're criticising.

I don't like Brave (super shady IMHO) and certainly not their CEO but I didn't sign up for a 100% ethically correct search engine, I signed up for a search engine with innovative features and good search results. The only viable alternatives are to use 100% not ethically correct search indices with meh (Google) to bad (Bing, DDG) search results. If you're going to tell me how Google and M$ are somehow ethical, I'm going to have to laugh at you.

The whole argument amounts to whining about the status quo and bashing the one company that tries anything to change it. The only way to get away from the Google monopoly is alternative indices. Yes those alternatives may not be much more ethical than friggin Google. So what.

I genuinely won't even use Brave indexes on my SearXNG instance; I have the engines disabled. My search quality has not suffered; as most of my results end up being DDG or Yahoo anyways; and Brave was only ever duplicating results from other engines anyways.

I am fucking sick of monthly subs... Happily pay for kagi. It's really great at just getting you the results you need sorted right at the top.

I can do everything Kagi does for free...using SearXNG.

SearXNG

I'd consider it if they had some of the features Kagi has like raising/lowering/pinning/excluding certain websites from results, but every time I try it it still feels very light on features.

Why not use a bicycle instead of a car? Because it's 10 miles to work.

One search engine is a hobby project, the other ones competes with Google and gives better results and ability to filter them and prioritize them as you want.

Because it's not just that.

Maybe it's taken him this long to kick the tires and develop an opinion from daily use. There's nothing wrong with that.

So do DDG and a lot of other search engines. In addition to the time and cost of running a spider and maintaining a database (for little to no technological benefit these days), a lot of server admins will block crawlers that aren't googlebot or msnbot/bingbot.

It has its own index in addition to aggregating results.

Whether this is bad depends on your threat model. Additionally, you must also consider that other search engines are able to easily identify you without you explicitly identifying yourself. If you can't fool https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/, you certainly can't fool Google for instance. And that's even ignoring the immense identifying potential of user behaviour.

Billing supports OpenNode AFAICT which I guess you could funnel your Moneros through but meh.

Edit: Phrasing.