You entirely missed the point of my comment. All the search engines you linked to in the article serve ads to generate revenue. Kagi does not serve ads because they generate revenue from subscription fees.

Giving money to charity does not mean that you will get customizable search results.

Two years ago, on June 1st, 2022, Kagi introduced a search engine that challenged the ad-supported version of the web. Kagi Search instead works for you, the user, and not an advertiser paying for your attention. At the time of launch, we did not know if anyone would pay for their search engine and web browser, but luckily, here we are two years later at the forefront of a movement to humanize the internet’s most-used products and put the user back in the driving seat.

The first paragraph of the Kagi blog post you linked states exactly this fact.

Literally no search engine out there is “free”. The “solutions” you linked sells your data to advertisers and gives part of it to charity.

Try using Kagi search. It’s a subscription based search engine, but it’s much more customizable and doesn’t serve ads or push shopping pages at you as solutions. You can save a filter on there to exclude results from

Reddit and Quora if you don’t want to see them in your searches, but you can also specifically mention websites to whitelist if you find they give you good results for certain types of searches.

I still use Google occasionally because the one thing Google is great at is recommending products to purchase.

Yeah it seems more like they decided that maintaining that specific feature isn’t worth it because not enough users are using it. It sucks, but that’s just how it goes with closed hardware and software ecosystems.