I found Kagi[0] from somewhere on HN -- they make pretty strong privacy claims, and are in a closed Beta stage right now (you can give them your email, and they'll send you a signup link within a week or two). They're planning to charge a fixed rate for their search engine once they're out of beta later this year.
So far, it seems to be working really well for me! Results are pretty excellent, and they support the DDG bang queries (like `!g`) if you ever need it
How do we know these privacy claims are true? What if Kagi was Chinese or Russian, would you still trust it and why? And how do we know Kagi doesn't end up the same way as DDG?
> And how do we know Kagi doesn't end up the same way as DDG?
Being a paid service means Kagi's incentives are very different. Instead of selling your data or profiting from feeding into ad-tech food chain, we are interested in selling you a subscription. This changes everything as the number one thing in Kagi's universe becomes what the users want, different to DDG, Google and other ad-supported search engines.
> How do we know these privacy claims are true?
Sadly I can not think of a way to verify them (let me know if you have one). But most plainly, we have no incentive or reason to do otherwise. Note that the only private information Kagi asks of the user is an email address, need to create an account, and those concerned can use whatever email they want.
I second this. I use this full time now. A helpful HN user told me about hyperweb for iOS which I use to make Kagi my fulltime search engine on iOS. I have been VERY happy
So far, it seems to be working really well for me! Results are pretty excellent, and they support the DDG bang queries (like `!g`) if you ever need it
[0] https://kagi.com/