Most of the above examples of unnecessary searches could be avoided if the UI was designed to help the user avoid unnecessary searches instead of somewhat cloning Google's UX, which is designed around searches being effectively free for them.
Very much this. Probably 75% of my searches are “Just looking something up on Wikipedia” or “Just looking something up on StackOverflow”. If Kagi were to let me search these sites without the cost of a full Google lookup, its plan would work for me once again and I’d return to being a customer.
In the interests of fairness, they do support, and do not charge for, "bangs" that defer the search to that site. They even support creating your own custom ones which is really nice. Wikipedia is one of the default ones. According to their docs you can search it with "w! query", "!w query", "query w!", "query !w" or even add the bang to a "quick" list and use something like "w query".
Unfortunately, you do give up consistency and whatever filtering/ranking/customisation Kagi offer.
