I will never use Kagi because requiring an account makes associating search queries with you trivial, though I don’t doubt it is a useful service.
Mullvad Leta was nice while it lasted, but an easy replacement is DuckDuckGo HTML. As the name suggests, it doesn’t require JS, reducing the attack surface and routes of browser fingerprinting. I do acknowledge that the search results suck about as much as Google, so I need to be creative with search queries.
A better option is a self hosted meta search engine like SearXNG or 4get. I get that the branding of 4get is off-putting, but it doesn’t require JS for frontend and is much simpler/leaner/reliable than SearXNG. Self hosted search engines are also only useful (imho) if used by a large group (as a public instance) to blend in, or behind a VPN that rotates frequently. This is to avoid association to you.
Kagi optionally offers something called privacy pass where they can verify that the user is authorised to access it, but not which user it is: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
I will never use Kagi because requiring an account makes associating search queries with you trivial, though I don’t doubt it is a useful service.
Mullvad Leta was nice while it lasted, but an easy replacement is DuckDuckGo HTML. As the name suggests, it doesn’t require JS, reducing the attack surface and routes of browser fingerprinting. I do acknowledge that the search results suck about as much as Google, so I need to be creative with search queries.
A better option is a self hosted meta search engine like SearXNG or 4get. I get that the branding of 4get is off-putting, but it doesn’t require JS for frontend and is much simpler/leaner/reliable than SearXNG. Self hosted search engines are also only useful (imho) if used by a large group (as a public instance) to blend in, or behind a VPN that rotates frequently. This is to avoid association to you.
Kagi optionally offers something called privacy pass where they can verify that the user is authorised to access it, but not which user it is: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
DDG is just Bing
but at least it allows me to disable ads and allegedly opt out of tracking
Main reason I like DDG is that it acts as a proxy (meaning I blend into crowd of all DDG users) and the HTML frontend doesn’t require JS or ads.
It uses Bing, when you use a search engine through an API you get more levers and dials to play with than an end user normally has
I did a side-by-side comparison with Bing from the browser and got identical results.