Why not? For Google Search specifically, there is no lock-in (obviously yhe productivity suite has more)

There's no lock in but there's also no alternative. Bing is vastly inferior. ChatGPT meanwhile can be directly challenged by Claude, Gemini and several others.

I guess you mean free alternative. Kagi at least provides very competitive results.

Kagi uses Google as one of it's search provider, so is hardly competing with Google.

In terms of quality search results, kagi is ahead of google. Unless I misunderstand the situation, inferior search result are a natural product of google getting paid by advertisers rather than kagi getting paid by their users. Google won’t be able to get away from using their index to serve up adverts (rather than quality results).

My point is Google gets money when you use Kagi, so they aren't really directly competing with Google.

I haven't used Google for year, and I find better results than ever.

For me ddg and brave search have been fine with an occasional dose of chatgpt . I don’t miss google. I used Kagi for a few months and it was great but I got tired of them aggressively logging me out because I use a VPN that often changes IPs all over the US to find the speediest server. I understand why they do it, but I could not tolerate it forcing me to log back in every couple of days across devices. I was using 2FA so it was obviously me and not someone else using my account.

I use private mode on safari as my primary browser experience- so I’m never logged into anything. Kagi has a ‘Session Link’ feature where the URL itself logs you in. It’s pretty easy to get setup and then you never have to log in again unless you want to make account changes. I agree with you that it wouldn’t be worth it if I was constantly having to log in. Anyways, just something to consider, there is a solution.

There are other search engines…

I haven’t used google in years.