He knew Bryan Caplan, and interviewing him early on kickstarted things, I believe.

I didn't realise Neeva had shut down. I tried it for about a week, but stopped using it because it wasn't as snappy as Google. In fact, I always seem to return to Google from every other search engine I try because of its snappiness — decades of tuning seems to have paid off.

I find Kagi snappier than Google. Plus the results you want are actually on the first page.

Kagi is the first alternative search engine that I actually use regularly instead of Google.

I used DDG for years, but more than half my queries ended up being prepended with !g because their results just weren't very good. With Kagi, I fall back on Google maybe once a month, and usually Google doesn't end up finding anything better.