I feel like this is a fair, even if incredibly skeptical, take on kagi. I am a kagi user and I had that exact thought when I started using it. How can you even function as a search engine if you dont capture searches at least in aggregate--so you can tune or shape your algorithms?

That said, I didn't start using them strictly for privacy. I started using them because they were giving me the best results I'd gotten from any search engine in a long time. And I didn't have to

And while I wouldn't necessarily say Kagi is the gold-standard for privacy, their business model is, at the very least, aligned with providing good search results. Google is an advertising company masquerading as a search engine. They have some incredibly perverse incentives for how they delivery results.