I am indeed looking into an alternative to Google recently, but more because of my need of a good search mcp server for my coding agents. I am thinking about either exa or kagi, but I have no idea which one is better. Also exa seems not quite frequently mentioned in the community, wondering why.
I've had generally good experiences with Exa, I use it as an MCP in all my various coding tools and use the API whenever I build an AI thing that needs search.
Also an extremely happy Kagi user but can't speak to their API, haven't tried it yet.