Comment by Vingdoloras

That might be because Kagi currently has "only" 43,508 members, according to their live stats. That number might be too low for you to be able to expect someone in your personal circle to already be using and talking about it. The number being this low isn't a bad thing, though. Kagi is already profitable and the number is growing, that's all that matters for now. There's a free tier that gets you 100 free searches (I'm testing it myself right now, haven't used it enough to really have an opinion on it yet).

Regarding your point b: Heavily disagree. Even ignoring HN's seeming love for Kagi, surely you must have noticed the narrative about how AI is fixing search? People asking ChatGPT or Bing instead of googling things? Why would they do that if they were satisfied with Google? Also, Google search quality worsening has been a common news headline for years now.