I also used Kagi, but decided to cancel my subscription last year when it was revealed they pay Yandex for their search, which is a Russian company that ultimately fuels the Russian war on Ukraine.
Once Kagi stops transferring money to Russia, I’d be happy re-subscribe.
Not quite independent as it’s a meta-search, but I developed a subscription based one at search.waterfox.net. Pays for the infrastructure costs and remains ad/tracking free.
Nice! I couldn't see the list of search engines that are included in your meta-search, the FAQ currently seems to imply that it only serves Google results?
If you give users the option to include / not include certain search engines in their results, so their money never goes to those particular engine companies, that could be of interest to some Kagi refugees.
I ended up vibe coding my own meta-search engine (augmented with a local SQlite database of hand-picked sites) so that I could escape Kagi, but I'm excited if Waterfox Search is an alternative I can recommend to others!
- How many people use only Google search engine nowadays? More and more people use chatbots, with Google search.
- Google search also does not provide good results for finding stuff in all walled gardens, so we also use niche search engines for individual platforms. I am not sure if it finds good results for posts in facebook and x.com
- I also use my own index of pages, YouTube channels, and github pages. Contains tags, page scoring system, related links, social information like number of followers etc.
I am always annoyed using it, how bad it is these days. Then I try the alternatives such as Duck Duck Go and they manage to be even worse.
Qwant is semi-ok but it also omits tons of things that Google Search finds (and also is slower, for some weird reason).
Google's UI nerf is also annoying - so much useless stuff. In the past I could disable that via ublock origin but Google killed that for chrome.
We need to do something against this Evil that Google brought into this world.