as I get older I use search engines less and less since I alredy know the website I want to use and just tipe in URL directly, but when I do need to search some term I tend to use qwant since it is european and private. It tends to be less cencored in my expirience.

For a few years I was a happy (paying) Kagi customer and like mentioned in other comments already, for me there was no going back: it works great, it’s bloat free with even a focus on small web, and a lot of cool features. Then, the new US President arrived with his team and their shitty politics. As a EU citizen I could not trust US services anymore and I was not willing to send them money either…

I went back to the French Qwant. It’s far from being perfect (they’re working on their own index but so far I think they still use Microsoft’s Bing), at least it protects my privacy from Microsoft’s (and it works fine).

Would I be US citizen, I would happily keep paying for Kagi. It’s really good. Much better than anything else, imho.