Nope, I'm completely unaffiliated with Kagi, just a happy customer for a year and a half or so.

I don't understand all of your objections, but it sounds like you're operating in a very strict "if I can't verify it myself continually, then I don't trust it at all", which I think is far too black-and-white. Trust exists on a scale, is built up slowly over time, depends on your threat model, etc.

I don't want an adversarial relationship with my search engine where they try to show me enough ads to make money to stay afloat and I try to block enough ads so my experience isn't miserable - this isn't any fun, and one of us will lose.

On the other hand, I can pay Kagi, and they are incentivized to give me the best service possible so that I continue paying them and recommend them to others. It's far more positive, and a better outcome for us both. And it's working - I have a much better experience on Kagi than Google or elsewhere, and I have kept paying them and recommending them to others entirely organically - I don't think there's even a referral program, I'm certainly not using one.

They say they don't collect my data, and why would they? They don't show ads, and if anyone ever found out they were lying their paying customers would leave in droves. Furthermore, they take actions to back up their claims, like integrating the Privacy Pass feature.

Finally, they don't allow you to modify your website ranking for others - they let you modify how other websites rank for you. You get to personalize how you want websites to be ranked for you when you make a search, which is a very cool feature.

Anyway, if you tried it and didn't like the search results, no problem! You can use something else. I don't think that your other objections are valid, though.