Newspapers were always partially advertisement driven.

But I think everyone would agree with me that Newspapers were better when a substantial base of their $$$ came from their subscriber base.

Nothing is absolute in the world of money. There's always additional sources of money elsewhere. From this perspective, I think we can argue that purely advertisement-driven media is what is most dangerous. Search is an important part of modern digital media, so thinking of the economic realities of funding, and how those economic incentives shape the website and future business is important.

Maybe it fails, but Kagi is trying something new. And that's good enough as an experiment for me. I dunno, maybe I'll revisit the idea in 5 years or so, that's really not much money in the great scheme of things.

At very least, Kagi now has a "Fediverse search", and now that "search-lemmy" seems to have died, I need something like Kagi to more easily search Lemmy.world and other Fediverse locations. (Google ain't so good at this yet).