It's working on my end.
Is "Grouped Results" disabled in settings?
They have attempted to make this but you have to be rather specific to trigger local results. "Chinese takeaway" will not trigger it for instance but "Chinese takeaway near me" will.
Improving this is hard but a possibility I see would be to have certain categories of search default to region-local (as in: country, general region) or location-specifc (town, borough).
Searches on the topic of shopping, taxes, bureaucracy etc. should automatically make results local.
Searches on the topic of restaurants, shops, leasure, transport etc. should be location-specific.
Determining these topics would be the hard part though; especially given that it'd have to happen in multiple languages.
Certainly better than the U.S. in that regard but I wouldn't consider Germany "resilient" either.
Sorry, can't answer that as my crystal ball is broken at the moment.
I think it could be because Google may offer them quite a bit longer hardware support. They had to go with some industrial SoC for the FP5 to get Qualcomm to offer even a half decent hardware support cycle.
Whether this is bad depends on your threat model. Additionally, you must also consider that other search engines are able to easily identify you without you explicitly identifying yourself. If you can't fool https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/, you certainly can't fool Google for instance. And that's even ignoring the immense identifying potential of user behaviour.
Billing supports OpenNode AFAICT which I guess you could funnel your Moneros through but meh.
Edit: Phrasing.
I think you're underestimating how huge of an undertaking a half-decent search index is, much less a good one.
I personally have not found Kagi’s default search results to be all that impressive
At their worst, they're as bad as Google's. For me however, this is a great improvement over using bing/Google proxies which would be the alternative.
maybe if I took the time to customize, I might feel differently.
That's the killer feature IMHO.
Your search results look very different to mine:
Did you disable Grouped Results?
All the LLM-generated "top 10" listicles are grouped into one large block I can safely ignore. (I could hide them entirely but the visual grouping allows for easy mental filtering, so I haven't bothered.) Your weird top10 fake site does not show up.
But yes, as the linked article says, Kagi is primarily a proxy for Google with some extra on top. This is, unfortunately, a feature as Google's index still reigns supreme for general purpose search. It absolutely is bad and getting worse but sadly still the best you can get. Using only non-Google indices would just result in bad search results.
The Google-ness is somewhat mitigated by Kagi-exclusive features such as the LLM garbage grouping.
What Google also cannot do is highlighted in my screenshot: You can customise filtering and ranking.
The first search result is a Reddit thread with some decent discussion because I configured Kagi to prefer Reddit search results. In the case of household appliances, this doesn't do a whole lot as I have not researched trusted/untrusted sources in this field yet but it's very noticeable in fields like programming where I have manually ranked sites.
Kagi is not "all about" privacy. It's a factor, sure but ultimately you still have to trust a U.S. company. Better than "trusting" a known abuser (Google, M$) but without an external audit, I wouldn't put too much wight into this.
The index ain't it either as it's mostly Google though sometimes a bit better.
What really sets it apart is the features. Customised ranking aswell as blocking some sites outright (bye bye pinterest and userbenchmark) are immensely useful. So are filtering garbage results that Google still likes to return.
That's not what flakes are important for at all.
Though unless you already know what flakes could do for you, I agree, you don't need to even think about flakes. They only concern one specific aspect of Nix and aren't even the only solution to that problem.