this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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i also use brave search a lot, switched after ddg downranked russian search results and the microsoft tracking scandal. but now i am reconsidering. besides searX, what are the best privacy focused search engines atm?
I just recently tried a few different ones because I want to get away from Brave Search. But they either had poor search results or some firm of censoring/altering search results. So I would also love to know if there's some search engine or there that can produce good results without bias i.e. actually just give me the relevant results I am searching for.
If you're willing to pay, Kagi seems to do a decent job.
So I just wrote out a whole big long thing about how I tested multiple searches and Kagi served up the best results out of them all. But apparently my comment didn't stick :/
Anyway, I would love to use Kagi but it would be incredibly expensive for us. The family plan wouldn't work because I use more than 2,000 searches in a month and with the exchange rate, the unlimited plan comes out at $40, plus whatever plan my spouse used or another $30 if the rest of the fam wanted to use it.
What I would love to see is if ISPs picked up Kagi. They make a deal for discounted plans from Kagi which they then offer to customers as an addon to their internet plan. Kagi gets more money coming in and regularly and people get to use Kagi at an affordable rate.
At the moment, Kagi is just another service providing privacy and usefulness only to those who can afford it. The poor (and ignorant) still have to content to be the product and give up privacy :(
I read their pricing info and I get where they're coming from, but it is expensive for an average user. Maybe if people adopt it, prices will come down? I have no problem with people making money on good ideas... but I also get that it gets expensive to pay for all these services. Between Proton, Tresorit, and my other services... I pay a fair bit for the extra protection.
I tried Kagi, but the results just seem like Google being re-sold, and there’s no way I could get away with anything other than the unlimited plan which is $25/month. Also I’m pretty sure it’s a company of one guy - I’m not sure if this is anything other than a pet project or how they would actually improve the results or become independent of google. Also not sure how I could trust their privacy claims as you literally need to be signed in to search. It’s frustrating though because I want to love their business model, and the presentation is very clean.
If you sign up with a masked address then they only have that. You can likely sign up for more than once if you're needing a new pool of searches, though obviously paying for searches might out you.
I did a bit of comparison... they're at LEAST using Google and Bing, probably a couple more. I tested with searches I'd already done outside of Kagi and it identified most of the relevant results I'd had to ID across multiple engines before. I do think the price is ah, pricey though, and I'd want more info before I used it for sensitive stuff.