The author did not mention that you as a end user can customize rankings for every website and build custom searches (lenses), which are in my opinion the features that make Kagi unique and more useful than other meta search engines. And to my knowledge you cannot replicate those in SearNXG.

one detail that’s often glossed over is that Kagi primarily functions as a middleman between you and other search engines, like Google. In other words, it’s what we call a metasearch engine.

Yeah, I've known this. I'm... ajdlfjk about it.

What it can do, however, is make content less visible or harder to find, based on the criteria it uses to filter and rank results from its sources.

Aaaand this is kinda the secret sauce. While the starting material is what you get in other places, Kagi allows you to improve it with your own rankings and filters on top. For example, every time I find an AI slop review website, I immediately downrank it in my results. I also uprank trusted sites. This at least tilts the scales in my favor when searching, instead of accepting what Google wants me to see.

But, yeah, I agree Kagi is not discovering new material not known to Google, but it does have a higher chance of surfacing it.

it’s not fundamentally different from what other search providers are already doing.

I haven't compared search engine features in a bit. Maybe it's time.

I encourage you to try SearXNG

OK, I will.

I tried Kagi (100 query free trial if you supply a fake email address, I didn't test whether a real one works). It was nice in some ways but gave about the same results as Duckduckgo. I didn't subscribe.

No fucking way I am clicking that URL.

noai.duckduckgo.com