Kagi pulls data from a bunch of different sources - including Google - but as far as I know, Bing isn't one of them. Duckduckgo like you said is 90+% Bing, without some of the tracking-related results.

But even if Kagi were pulling mostly from Bing - which is fine - the experience I've had is way different.

When I search Bing or DDG, the results I get are roughly the same (some more promoted crap with Bing, even with adblock; but otherwise really similar). And those results are.....ok. Sometimes they're better than Google's default results, sometimes not. They're usually not as good as Google's searches in "verbatim" mode, which is more like Old Google.

But the search results I get with kagi seem to be generally as good as Google+verbatim mode, or better (sometimes much better). It's generally the best results every time, and without ad blockers, or enabling certain modes, or whatever. And I've gone back and compared against other search engines a bunch just to compare and try to see if Kagi was really worth it.

Plus, the ability to easily set exclude sites, or search contexts, or a bunch of other stuff is super nice. I don't use them every day but when I use them they can be amazing.

So they are a metacrawler that has additional first party crawlers? That’s actually pretty neat.