This is what their Privacy Pass extension is for. Once it verifies you as an user, it doles out a bunch of generic "arcade tokens", which don't have any identifying information. You lose Kagi's personalization features while using them, but your searches aren't tied to any account beyond just "Kagi", so you and everybody else using the privacy extension are the same person.

At least, as I understand it.

And if it changes, I will leave and stop paying. They are a user centric model. They thrive because of paying users.

So you won't pay for a subscription to use a search engine. Do you prefer the model that other search engines use where they take the content of your searches and use it to advertise to you?

Hoping to be constructive: how do you think search engines should operate? Or maybe how would you like one you consider "good" to operate?

Also wondering how you see something like Privacy Pass that Kagi announced recently: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

This is particularly useful in the context of a privacy-respecting paid search engine, where the Server wants to ensure that the Client can access the services, and the Client seeks strong guarantees that, for example, the searches are not associated with them.

Theu don't verify emails and the CEO has even suggested we can use a random string. Also, you can pay with Bitcoin. No forced KYC anywhere along the way.

they’re for profit

From my subscription cost, yes. This aligns my privacy goals with their need for income which is not the case for "free" advertising-supported products.