That whole situation was such an overblown idiotic mess. Kagi has always used indices from companies that do far more unethical things than committing the extreme crime of having a CEO who has stupid opinions on human rights.
I 100% agree with Vlad’s response to this whole thing and anyone who thinks otherwise should question what exactly it is they’re criticising.
I don’t like Brave (super shady IMHO) and certainly not their CEO but I didn’t sign up for a 100% ethically correct search engine, I signed up for a search engine with innovative features and good search results. The only viable alternatives are to use 100% not ethically correct search indices with meh (Google) to bad (Bing, DDG) search results. If you’re going to tell me how Google and M$ are somehow ethical, I’m going to have to laugh at you.
The whole argument amounts to whining about the status quo and bashing the one company that tries anything to change it. The only way to get away from the Google monopoly is alternative indices. Yes those alternatives may not be much more ethical than friggin Google. So what.