The perception of Kagi at HN is extremely positive, but in my personal experience the search quality reminds me more of Bing than Google, with Kagi sometimes surfacing puzzling results first. Also, I wasn't thrilled about giving them access to all my search data. As flawed as Google may be, I still believe they have better privacy standards than Kagi.
Same, I tried it only because its spoken highly here and I dropped it after paying for a year. I was not able to find what I wanted at least 25% of the time, not worth it to pay.
I use Kagi at home and Google at work, and IME Kagi results are much better compared to Google. It's easy enough to jump to Google by adding !g, but I never find myself actually using that... I do however end up doing the reverse, where I'll not find the result I'm looking for on my work computer and then quickly repeat the search on Kagi on my phone. I used to use DuckDuckGo on my personal devices before, and while it was mostly fine, I did have to jump to Google more frequently. In the end sometimes the results were better on DDG and sometimes on Google. I haven't really found any situation where Google results were better than Kagi (I do tend to prefer Google Images results, but I only very rarely use image search, maybe once a month).
There was also an instance recently where I was helping out a coworker get set up with something. I had done it earlier in the day, so I told him something like "type in $SEARCH_TERM, then go to the first page and copy the commands from there". He put it into Google, couldn't find the right result, tried a few variations, still couldn't find it. I pulled Kagi up on my phone, searched the same term, and slacked him the page while he was still looking around on Google.
