this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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I think the article appears biased because searxng appears to offer the same functionality as Kagi, in spite of being free, yet Kagi is shown to be the best in class for some reason? Also it doesn't touch on the critique that kagi having a login potentially aggregates all of your searches into one account that is stored by one company.
Kagi's privacy policy claims that “Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.”
SearXNG is tricky because the privacy policy comes from whatever instance you are using.
Anecdotally, I have had better results from Kagi than SearXNG. The SearXNG instance I have been testing out keeps getting rate limited and mostly shows results from Qwant and Bing.
I don't really have a bias as I am testing out all of these options and trying to find the one that works best for my family.
Kagi can claim whatever they want in their privacy policy. Where's the code of their servers? Because I see none. How do we know they aren't keeping logs that could be easily correlated (by themselves or a third party who access their servers)?
Even if we had the code, I would still be skeptical, we can't be sure what code are they exactly running on the server side and having an account linked to every search is just awful.
SearXNG is anonymous while offering the very same features, if not better.
You aren't wrong about not knowing if SearXNG instances are running a modified version of SearXNG that tries to log you.
Fortunately, we don't need to trust those instances. They do not require you to login, so there's not an unique identifier (like an account) to associate your searches with other than your IP address which you can hide with a VPN, or even better, using a .onion instance (something that Kagi does not have at all AFAIK).
For using Kagi, no matter if you switch your IP address every time, if you delete cookies after closing your browser or if you buy a new laptop for every search query, you're uniquely identified because you need to log into your account.
And for that account, you have to use a payment method. Sure, you can try and pay with a Monero to Bitcoin exchanger and do not give any personal information (and if we're being realistic, we know most Kagi clients aren't doing this). Even if you paid anonymously, you can only achieve pseudonymity because you're associated with your account.
With SearXNG, I could use a different .onion instance for each query and be completely anonymous (that's completely overkill, but it illustrates my point well).
No. Kagi's fault is needing an account, a unique identifier which all searches could be correlated to.
SearXNG could leak your IP if your VPN provider was keeping logs? Definitely. And so does Kagi. Tor could be attacked by a three letter agency and compromise your .onion connection to SearXNG? Definitely. And it would be easier to de-anonimyze you when connecting to Kagi, which doesn't have an onion domain. Do you need to give SearXNG your email and/or payment information? Not at all. But Kagi requires it. Can you look like two completely different users when doing two queries to SearXNG? Easy. Not possible with Kagi. Do we have the server's code? We do for SearXNG instances. We don't have Kagi's.
I think it's pretty clear the privacy compromise here.
That’s a good point that I hadn’t considered. I do like the idea of SearXNG, but didn’t have great results when testing it. Maybe I should give it another shot on another instance.
Friend, I am just responding to your false claims with information from the privacy policy so that other users can be informed with what is clearly stated
If you notice, I am only including more information when someone (mostly you) has brought up concerns about one of the offerings. If you had brought up concerns around Whoogle, then this conversation would be about Whoogle instead of Kagi. I am not promoting anything and my post clearly says,
I'd love to have more discussion around the other offerings in my post and even ones not listed.