Both very possible reasons. At the same time they also pay for Kagi and don't (seem to?) intend to purposefully use Google directly so another possibility is they often have to use computers they don't control or regularly use but logging in to Kagi is friction and it won't have their usual extensions anyways - that's something I ran into using Kagi. Or perhaps even other reasons still. It's why I enjoy asking - you learn more than always assuming you know why with your personal biases.
Speaking of personal biases, I don't mind paying by any means... but that only works when it's an option. There is no way to pay Google to remove search ads (short of building and maintaining privately hosted front end for the API which does everything google.com and associated does) so I have a $99/y personal account and run uBlock Origin. On other things worth too small an amount to be worth the transaction cost or just plain not something you can pay for I leave the blocker on - if not enough of us are interested in paying to remove ads for it to be a worthwhile method then it's probably not going to result in the downfall of the service for those of us to block them. Similarly I pay for YouTube Premium but if I find myself on a computer I can't or shouldn't log into I don't mind utilizing an ad blocker. Heck, this has gotten to be such a complex topic I'm a paying user for YouTube and subscribe to a Patreon only to need an adblocker to skip the sponsored sections of the video! It can really get quite interesting how people consider these different nuances in different ways. Anything from just don't care about the effects to it being impossible to use any sort of ad blocker morally and everything in-between.
I also don't really mind AI generated stuff, it's no more always spam and junk than the human generated web - and it's not really free either, just cheaper. That's probably getting a little disconnected from search provider consumption though.
I find paying for a real search engine the only option now that there is one. Along with Orion being the only option for a zero telemetry browser makes it simple for me.
It’s a really nice internet these days but I can’t judge or compare the nuances since I never used gmail, chrome or Google
Speaking of personal biases, I don't mind paying by any means... but that only works when it's an option. There is no way to pay Google to remove search ads (short of building and maintaining privately hosted front end for the API which does everything google.com and associated does) so I have a $99/y personal account and run uBlock Origin. On other things worth too small an amount to be worth the transaction cost or just plain not something you can pay for I leave the blocker on - if not enough of us are interested in paying to remove ads for it to be a worthwhile method then it's probably not going to result in the downfall of the service for those of us to block them. Similarly I pay for YouTube Premium but if I find myself on a computer I can't or shouldn't log into I don't mind utilizing an ad blocker. Heck, this has gotten to be such a complex topic I'm a paying user for YouTube and subscribe to a Patreon only to need an adblocker to skip the sponsored sections of the video! It can really get quite interesting how people consider these different nuances in different ways. Anything from just don't care about the effects to it being impossible to use any sort of ad blocker morally and everything in-between.
I also don't really mind AI generated stuff, it's no more always spam and junk than the human generated web - and it's not really free either, just cheaper. That's probably getting a little disconnected from search provider consumption though.