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

[0] https://kagi.com/

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?

(Kagi dev here)

Kagi is privately owned US corporation.

> 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.

Thanks for the explanation.

> But most plainly, we have no incentive or reason to do otherwise.

One reason is: to improve your services. Other reasons could appear over time.

> Sadly I can not think of a way to verify them (let me know if you have one).

The privacy claims could be verified by recurring external audits.

> The privacy claims could be verified by recurring external audits.

Not in reality. Nothing prevents a bad player from misusing user data once an audit is done. External audit would only be a good cover.

One way for Kagi to have more incentives for privacy of their users would be moving to EU where there laws much more stricter.

I trust Yandex more than I trust Google, because Yandex doesn't give a shit about me. I'd certainly use an English-language Chinese search engine.

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

> they'll send you a signup link within a week or two

Is it though? I think I've been on the wait list for a few months now.

$10 per month (last heard), if they plan to start charing.

I'm biased so here's an independent take on your options: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

Set up searx and aggregate results from the ones you want (e.g. startpage you can route through a different proxy or vpn). Lets you clean out the crap and rewrite redirect urls to the original ones, etc.

Yandex is pretty good for image searches.