this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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My 100-search trial expired this week and I was literally planning on subscribing later tonight. This has made me think twice.
But it takes me back to why I tried Kagi in the first place: What else can I use that respects privacy?
I don’t think any of them do completely. DuckDuckGo uses Bing, so is Microsoft; Google is… well, Google; Brave is apparently really shady; I’ve never thought much of the results from Bing directly. Startpage seemed ok but apparently uses Google.
What else?
I also like something to be integrated into the browser. As a Mac user, I can’t add new search engines to Safari (and have actually switched to Orion, but may now switch to Firefox or back to Safari).
I use Startpage and am happy with it. Yes it uses Google, but Google can't track you as they can only see that the search came from the Startpage server. You also don't get any of the AI summary or sponsored link bullshit. Beyond that, you could try SearXNG which can aggregate results from many engines.
Yeah I had SearXNG running via a Docker container and it was pretty good. I didn’t like having to use a domain name and expose it over the internet though, because Docker is running on my NAS. I guess I could give it another try using Cloudflare tunnels so I don’t have to open anything up.
Or else go back to Startpage.
Also as a Mac user who went from Safari, ended up using Orion up til recent Kagi drama, and found LibreWolf. It works well and I’ve found it to have better compatibility versus Orion. I’ve used that with Searxng for more private searches.
I use SearXNG and an app called KeywordSearch on iOS and Mac to search natively via SearXNG. It even syncs my preferences between devices.
You're not going to have much luck finding a search engine with good results that doesn't depend on google or bing. Kagi is no different. Using a searx instance is probably best if you're looking for something without official agreements with bing or google. Edit: Here is a list of independent search indexes I just discovered in another thread https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/