Makes it easy to ensure that I'm always on old reddit and wikipedia with the better (older :p) layout. Also allowed me to clean up a lot of the results that I knew were from low quality domains, such as getting rid of pinterest since results from it almost never led to anything useful.

I also enjoy the lenses, I hated how the Google results for recipes tended to only make already frustrating recipe sites even more frustrating to dig through. The small web lens is also very nice for when I'm already searching for a niche topic.

Besides that, I also reflect the vague description of the search results seeming to be better.

And of course on top of that, there's the lack of tracking and putting my money where my mouth is regarding preferring to pay for a good privacy preserving service.

My experience has been that Kagi's customizations are the key selling point, allowing you to block and bump domains to meet your needs:

* I have Wikipedia pinned, so if there's a Wikipedia article it's always the top result, whereas Google has lately started downweighting Wikipedia much of the time (as a simple example see COVID-19).

* I have Pinterest blocked entirely, so I never see results from them. As an example, try "living room refurbishment ideas".

* I have MDN upweighted, so it tends to rank higher than random people's blog posts for web dev queries.

I tend to just ignore or hide the posts I find very annoying, but I understand that isn't necessarily how everyone is.