Performance-Fresser — Episode 19
I have been supporting Kagi since before it launched. Not because I enjoy paying for things that used to be free. Because my time is not negotiable and my search results are not advertising inventory. Ten dollars for hours saved in research every month is not an expense. It is a rather obvious decision.
Thirty percent of a knowledge worker's day goes to searching for information (Forrester). One full month per year lost to bad results (Slite, 2025). Not obscure things. Things that should have been the first result.
The Decay
Google's trust score dropped from 7.05 to 5.73 in one year. Market share fell from 91.47% to 89.57%: the largest annual drop in a decade. People are not leaving because something better arrived. They are leaving because Google got worse.
Leipzig University studied 7,392 queries across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Finding: higher rank correlates with lower text quality. The majority of top results are affiliate-monetised. Algorithm updates have, and one does enjoy this quote, "only a temporary positive effect." The spam war is over. Spam won.
The AI Overviews Tax
Half of all US queries now trigger AI Overviews. The organic click-through rate dropped 61%. Zero-click rate with AI Overviews: 83%. Eighty-three out of a hundred end in an AI summary.
37% of finance-related AI Overviews contain inaccuracies. Google removed health queries entirely in January 2026 after recommending gluing cheese to pizza and eating rocks for minerals. The feature that was meant to save you a click now gives you wrong answers faster. Rather efficient, that.
58.5% of all Google searches end without a click to the open web (SparkToro, 2024). For every 1,000 queries, only 360 clicks reach an independent website. The rest stays inside Google or goes nowhere. The search engine no longer connects you to the web. It replaces it.
The Alternative
When a search engine is free, you are not the customer. You are the inventory. Every result is a negotiation between what you need and what someone paid to show you.
When you pay, that negotiation disappears. The product becomes the answer.
I use Kagi. Two independent selfmade crawlers (Teclis, TinyGem), curated sources, no ads, no tracking. The best result quality I have seen from any search engine, and I have tried most of them. 50,000 paying subscribers. The incentive is search quality, not ad revenue, because you are the customer, not the product.
Brave Search runs its own independent index: the only one outside Big Tech in the western world. 50 million queries per day. No surveillance. No ads. Built from scratch, funded by users, not advertisers.
The price of a good search engine is a coffee and a slice of cake per month. The price of a free one is your afternoon.
The Pattern
Google Search was the fastest tool on the internet. Then it became an ad platform with a search feature. Then it became an AI summary engine that sometimes, when the mood takes it, gets the answer right.
Each iteration made the company richer and the user slower. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button still exists. The feeling, rather less so.
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