I would say that most alternate search engines don’t perform as well as google. Kagi performs better primarily because you can downrank or flat out block certain domains and also upvote helpful resources so that those domains are more likely to appear in your results. Also there are no ads so you get just the results and nothing else. When you sign up you even get a list of most blocked and downvoted sites from other users like quora is top blocked so it’s easy to improve your results. They also pay for access to certain databases and you get access to little things like court records when you search for people by name or other little improvements. I don’t think privacy is the primary reason to use it at all.

Honestly it’s awesome I use a software at work so I upvote that site and block the site of the competing software for example so I get the correct help guide. I don’t understand why google doesn’t offer many of these features.