Comment by wkat4242
7 months ago
I don't know why this is flagged into oblivion. I'm sure most HN users won't agree because Kagi is very popular here but I don't think the arguments are bad or overblown.
Personally I don't use Kagi for 2 reasons: It's not significantly better than what I already have (SearXNG private instance) and I don't really subscribe to the "everything must be paid on the internet". I'm much more comfortable running some dockers and putting a privacy barrier between myself and google, as I do for my searches, for my phones, computers etc. Of course this kind of tech solution is not an option for everyone, but I don't care about everyone :) $10 is a lot of money for me and I rather spend that on something I control like 2 VPSes.
Also I think that once things go commercial eventually they will reach a scale where they will want our data too. After all, data is like free money. A business will never say no to free money. By due diligence law they're not even allowed to. Kagi has that luxury now, but once they become big and own half a northern californian town for their campus they no longer will. That's the idea of enshittification.
My only reason for not using SearXNG is it seems like the complete opposite of what you want for a search engine replacement. The one shining point of using Kagi, Google, Bing or DDG is that only ONE search engine is getting my search query. With SearXNG you've now taken your search query and sent it all over the place which I don't personally believe is better. My goal is to get my searches OUT of other companies hands, not thrust it directly to all of them all the time.
Additionally, by running a private instance you have effectively given all these companies a spotlight onto YOU. Only your searches are going to come from that instance and these companies already have enough information they can figure out WHO is making that search pretty much right after you click through the first result.
Just from the available public instances you can quickly see that other search engines may block your requests for one reason or another but your server will be constantly retrying to query them from time to time. Last thing I want is to find my IP addresses on some sort of "naughty list" because I wasn't honoring some 403 error my server was getting every time I searched something.
There is nothing that says other search engines won't wise up and figure out how to stop searx from "abusing" their search functions so it almost feels like the only sure way to ensure search privacy is to run your own crawler, for better or worse.
Yeah my goal in using SearXNG is really getting better results, not privacy, that's more secondary for me. It's pretty good at filtering out the clickbait crap. I guess every engine promotes its own clickbait.
And of course I block cookies and ads heavily, bypass paywalls, the works. I'm sure I'm pretty trackable anyway with so many addons. Also I'm probably one out of 10 that uses my specific OS/browser combo. So with fingerprinting they have got me anyway.
I run it on a VPS so I don't really care, that one is not used for exit traffic of any other kind except an IRC bouncer. And if I really need to I can just switch to another IP :P