I do not understand how people get through their day without doing at least 2-3 searches an hour. If you're online, working or pretending to work, consuming all that "internetz info", how can you do that without also bombarding Google with Q's about translations between languages, conversion between metric/imperial, basic fact-checking, wikipedia-ing, looking up definitions of words, and such? Even while listening to music, I Google either a phrase from the song or, if I know it, the title plus "lyrics" to immerse myself further into it.
I truly appreciate Kagi's effort and their transparency when it comes to cost.
I will definitely pay money to become "not the product". Is search as important as Netflix? To me, the answer is hell yes. I just need my next search engine to be at least as good as Google. That bar is pretty high, regardless of what we say here on HN.
I'm in the same boat and will pay for Kagi, though I have a different interaction with a search engine and thought you might like the counterpoint. Notably, I don't use Google for most of what you described:
Translation: I use DeepL instead (google is doing poorly on Asian languages)
Conversion: not having much need for imperial but I use this for all unit conversion (though usually directly in my terminal): https://insect.sh/
Wikipedia: if I type Wikipedia+something my browser automatically use the wiki engine (chrome can do that too)
Word definition: on OSX I long press on the trackpad and the definition pops up (across languages, translation too for single words)
Lyrics: Spotify show them now! (admittedly that's a recent feature)
