Premium search engines claim to protect users' privacy and save them from seeing annoying ads while still getting the desired results. Some people have tried Kagi, but although it meets these criteria, they are currently not willing to pay for this search engine.
Why wouldn't people pay for a premium search engine?
1. More manual effort for targeted search results
There is still no search engine better than Google at providing tailored search results. Kagi lets you customize what you see, but the process is more hands-on.
When searching on Kagi, you can select the shield icon and decide if the results are relevant or not. For example, you can pin websites; If they aren't helpful, you can block them completely.

While this feature is useful, people like the way Google shows more targeted results right away. Many browsers also have privacy features like “Do Not Track,” so you can at least make your searches a little more private.
2. People don't mind seeing targeted ads
Many people have no problem seeing targeted ads on search engines, websites or social networks. Instead, people started experiencing problems when intrusive or irrelevant ads appeared. For example, if a website is unusable because it has too many ads, find an alternative.
Paid ads are easy to ignore. But if your opinion differs, consider signing up for a paid search engine instead.
3. Not everyone likes a different interface
No one likes to use programs with outdated interfaces. Unfortunately, people always have this feeling when using paid search engines. You can extend this to almost any search engine besides Google.

While everything else is neat initially, the interface looks like it's 20 years old once you look. Beauty is important to many people, and Google search results look beautiful. What's more, you can access tools like Maps and get overviews – like the weather forecast for a destination – more easily. Google's interactive widgets like this make finding simple information very easy. You can find some of this information (like weather) in Kagi, but you have to do a specific search.

4. Some search results seem out of date
Beauty is important, but people are willing to compromise aesthetics to get the results they are looking for. Unfortunately, many search results in Kagi are outdated.
For example, when searching for a city, the article author gets results from blogs that haven't been updated in years. This would be fine if the information was correct, but much of the content isn't even formatted anymore (i.e. some images won't display themselves).
Some questions are also outdated. For example, one query still has information about COVID-19 entry requirements. Furthermore, some of the images in the search results look like they haven't been updated in years.

Should I pay for a premium search engine?
While many people wouldn't pay for a premium search engine (for the reasons above), some might think otherwise. If you don't like seeing paid ads in search results, removing them through a premium search engine might be a good idea. Kagi starts at $5/month for 300 searches, increasing to $25/month for unlimited searches.
The option to choose whether a website is relevant or not in Kagi is appreciated by many users. This is also definitely one of the better private search engines. Google does most of the segmentation for you, but it's a nice feature nonetheless. However, this feature alone is not enough to get people to convert.
While paying for privacy is something to consider, there's no denying DuckDuckGo has a better experience than Kagi. So if privacy is a big concern, consider looking into DuckDuckGo first.