What is the best privacy focused search engine?

I simply do not understand all the hype around Kagi. You automatically have a unique identifier tied up to all of your searches because it is something that you have to pay for constantly. I'm also assuming you can not clear cookies and whatnot as a result otherwise you have to sign back in every single time to be able to use it, making it even worse for privacy. Is there something I am missing here?

Disclaimer: Kagi user here.

Searches are not pay-per-use anymore. But you still have to be logged in to search. The premise is, that they don't store your searches. It is not their business model. You are the paying customer, not the ad firms. This is, ultimately, not verifiable. It comes down to some sort of trust. And I do trust in them. The developers are actually great guys, there is a discord where they answer immediately, and a discourse forum where you can submit bugs/features, etc.

They take a strong stance on freedom. They refused to implement a suicide prevention message, as they felt, that it wasbnot the job of the search engine to patronize the user.

There is such a thing as a 'session link'. You can get it from you account. With this, I don't think cookies are necesary. But the link expires so you have to do it probably every few days anew.

The thing is: I want to aupport them. They have cool features (up/downranking websites, GPT-4 access over their proxy, etc.) Is it better than self-hosting: no. But I don't wanna self-host. And search is something that costs. So any service that does not live off donations or some sort of payment, is suspicious.

I hope I explained some of my reasons. Please debunk me and make me cancel my subscription there if I am in the wrong. Im not a shill and actually interested in your concerns :)
- Hrmmmm...not sure if the username checks out.
- It's probably a leading contender for one of the "best for privacy", especially with their business model and even a warrant canary on their legal page. Their Privacy Policy also does a lot to explain things.
  
  It is a slightly different claim to being a privacy first or privacy focused search engine. Privacy is more of a close 2nd priority then a 1st and foremost priority. The difference is small but real. For example, Kagi is incorporated in the USA and has to comply with USA laws. Not a country known for its outstanding track record.
- How do you access the GPT4 feature?
- This has so many red flags to it.
  
  Logged in search with them knowing your payment info is significantly more privacy invasive then logged out Google search.
  
  Their business model is "trust me bro". Which if you take marketing at face value then Google must be taking your privacy seriously, right?
  
  They supposedly take a stance on freedom and transparency... Yet they use Discord lol.
  
  The refusal of a suicide prevention mention is just straight up fucked up. It doesn't change results, and that extra small message that costs them nothing and could save a life. There's literally no downside and only upsides.
I agree that Kagi isn't great from a privacy perspective. But in regards to clearing cookies, they do have a session link feature that uses a token to avoid the need to sign in all the time.
The quality and customization of their search results are great
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- Do you have any sources backing your claims regarding Kagi?
- I'm an actual person who pays $5 a month for kagi and have recommended it to people. I've never heard of them selling user data to data brokers and a quick search isn't finding anything about it, can you point me to some evidence?
- As much as I disagree on paying 10$/m for a search engine, I will disagree with your take on their data sharing.
  
  In their privacy policy https://kagi.com/privacy , they state that they collect logs :
  
  Kagi server identification, configuration, and performance (CPU, RAM, etc.)
  
  Identifiers that tell us what code paths were taken
  
  Time measurements of individual steps of request fulfillment
  
  Summaries of requests made to third parties
  
  Absent from our logs are any identifying information about your client
  
  Tho I'm not sure how they could fulfill these purposes :
  
  Prevent abuse of our product from bad actors (DDOS, etc.)
  
  Detecting abuse of our platform
  
  With only logs on how the serice îs used anonymously.
  
  They do send the logs to Sentry for analysis. But without any search query, from what they say.
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- Bot here. I disagree, while we tried to masquerade as a user for sure, unfortunately we couldn't get past the damn captcha. One day, humans...

The far right complains after the search engine DuckDuckGo vows to limit Russian propaganda.

Misconceptions About DuckDuckGo: Did DuckDuckGo censor search results about the Russia-Ukraine war?

This was particularly visible on far right subreddits where they began heavily recommending yandex. Because that makes sense. Swapping from a privacy-centric search engine to a literal Russian propaganda conveyor belt? Yeah, sure. No clue how many bit the bait.
Thanks for the context info. Saved me a search for it.
Censorship of any kind is bad because it sets a bad precedent. There's a reason why the ACLU defended the KKK's freedom of speech in 1978. If you can censor one, you can censor all.
- No it's not lol
While I am not far right and don't support Russia in this conflict, it's still very wrong to censor anything political.

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I honestly like there ads sometimes. I sometimes need to find a product and I don't mind checking out some if the advertisers.

My only complaint is that it tries to customize results based on your previous searches. It doesn't do this in HTML mode so it must be there data collection from javascript

I bounce around a few public Sear instances, its working great for me

Kagi, but I hope it legit turns into a contest in a race to the top

I keep on hearing great things about them, but my broke ass doesn't want to pay. 😅
- I'm more in the experimental phase with it. We shall see although I fully empathize with any cynicism. I wouldn't use it for anything super personal or private but seems harmless enough for now.
Not a private alternative as you need an account

Remember you're writing an espionage political thriller, and that's why you have to research thoroughly about navigating the dark web, obtaining rare minerals on the black market, refining radioactive isotopes, and atomic / hydrogen bomb configurations like the tellar-ulam.

And you've got a massive case of writer's block right from the first word

I'm fine with DuckDuckGoLite. If I really wanted to have granular control though, I'd spin up my own private searx instance.

Does DuckDuckGoLite display the same search results as DuckDuckGo? if so, I might aswell use regular DuckDuckGo
- It does. I just prefer it to regular ddg.

I have found LibreX/LibreY to be quite good, as long as you use a stable instance

I am using metager, but am not sure what qualifies as 'best' as I did not do much comparison.

I’ve been using Whoogle lately but used Startpage for a while too

Whoogle and SearXNG

Kagi. But I use Whoogle public instance and pretty happy with it 🙂

I might start using Whoogle too, since Kagi is paid :)
- If there were no problems with payment from Russia, then I would gladly pay for kagi. but unfortunately there is no such possibility due to sanctions 🙁

what do you think ddg censors?

Kagi is quite possibly the least privacy friendly search engine out there. I swear there's astroturfing going on here, I don't know why anyone would pay for this, they're just falling for marketing.

Not to mention it just won't work in private browsing and all your queries are tied to a specific account which also has your personal information from your payments.

DuckDuckGo does not censor, that is misinformation and FUD. It's probably the best search engine currently for most things.

How so? It requires you to have an account and give your payment information

4get.ca, it's a metasearch engine, you get results from various search engines anonymously.

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In Firefox, enter * in the URL bar.

Your own Bookmarks and Firefoxes search are the most private search engine. There are literally people googling "Google".

The Addon 404 Bookmarks is also really useful for finding dead Bookmarks

there is really no best, but i normally use searx

Mojeek and Brave Also try Gibiru to see uncensored results (those which Google and Bing try to hide)