I will cut it short because I think we understood each other. I get your point of view, and I think it boils down to relative vs absolute harm. I think that consolidating the already established monopoly is worse, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, you seem to reach the conclusion of third parties (which is similar to what I also reached, meaning Kagi wouldn’t exist). The problem with that imho is that it doesn’t move the needle. It does not present an alternative way to provide internet services for companies. I am not sold yet on free labor and donations as the basis for the internet. I think there are a few cases that work (lichess being my favourite), but ultimately I don’t think it scales or applies to everything. Besides, that also works until the big dogs allow it to work, and if they do, they are probably still earning on it (the moment Google wants to shut down searx, it locks the scraping and goodbye).

I do like Kagi’s features, I do like their own scrapers results (personal/small websites, which I find much more useful compared to corpo blogs about tech stuff). I do like the concept of lens where I decide where to search easily, same for upranking/downranking websites in a custom way. I wouldn’t consider this event part of a bad track, I think this is still a reasonable business strategy, although I will hold them accountable in the future (as they grow, they should do more in-house).