I’m surprised kagi doesn’t come up more in discussions like these. I’m pretty much full time on it and it’s totally replace google seedy for me.
(Not affiliated, just a happy customer)
That's reductive.
“Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. Teclis and TinyGem are a result of our crawl through millions of domains, focusing primarily on non-commercial, high-quality content.”
“Our unique results combined from all of these sources help you discover the best content you can possibly find online, sometimes from the quieter places on the web.”
Brave on the other hand is a totally independent index and while it's true that it depends on premium subscription, a paywall search engine cannot ever be mainstream or better than a free search engine that can optimize queries and search experience better.
Now, I know Google used to be like that but got worse but the point still stands, as long as the search engine isn't too bloated.
....friend, did you use Google 20 years ago?
It might be better at figuring out what actress your grandma is looking for...but struggles more with technical, scientific, or any sort of intelligent queries.