Yeah, I totally get that. Made me feel a little unwell at the beginning as well, but considering that search is one of the main, key features I use daily, multiple times, it is totally worth it.

I pay for a search engine, because:

• High-quality search results
• No ads
• High customizability
• No weird SEO optimized Website results which help me not at all, and I lose hours in a year clicking them, going back and looking for another result
• Did I mention no ads or sponsored content?

Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I've ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).

Just simple searches like "Best gaming headphones" or "Realtek Driver Download" and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.

And you can directly define, which sites you'd like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.

Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.

And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.

Lastly, I created a so-called "Lens", which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I've defined - see image.

Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.

+1 been with Namecheap for many years and have many domains with them. Also very happy with their support.