I personally love Kagi. Any time I have to use something else, it now feels painful.
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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Privacy
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I agree but it is way too expensive for me. I use more than 10 searches per day and I'm not paying 10$ per month for search.
Out of curiosity, what issues are you having with SearXNG? I’m self hosting and recently have noticed a lot of timeouts across many of the engines I have enabled. Just wondering if you’re having similar experience
OP probably isn't self-hosting it. I haven't got around to self-hosting it either and:
- a majority of instances no longer include Google
- many instances return absolutely bogus results
- the ones that return reasonable results have a 50% chance of getting 'Suspended: timeout'
The rate-limiting has hit once-reliable instances really hard in the past few months.
Past few months? I’ve tried several instances since over a year ago and absolutely never did I get decent results, unfortunately. They always get rate limited by Google and/or some other error occurs.
It was decent until a few months ago. Now it's Chinese language, or just useless garbage that tangentially relates to a word in my search.
Swisscows is Bing, Kagi has multiple sources. If you've not enjoyed using Bing in the past then your decision is pretty much made for you there.
Swisscows is conservative shit imo, go with Kagi instead. They even block normal porn.
Kagi requires an account, therefore associating all your searches to your account. With DuckDuckGo HTML, you can restrict it so it can't access JavaScript (which it doesn't do anyways), therefore reducing the risk of fingerprinting or other tracking.
They came out with Privacy Pass a while ago for this reason: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Sooo, the solution is install an extension by Kagi that can read all your traffic? Still doesn’t seem all that private to me
I have never tried Swisscows but I just want to say that Kagi is fantastic. Absolutely the best search experience I had in years.
I use Kagi and it works well. Seems to give results on what I'm looking for. It gives me the website I typed in rather than a billion other things with a different name first
Swisscows blocks "violent and pornographic content". I don't know why you would use it, since it's a pretty broad spectrum of content and we don't know what the criteria are
I have not thought about that. I don't really care about porn or violence, but you have a good point regarding unknown criteria. It's probably a ploy to "protect the children" while just so happening to also filter everything other than propaganda.
Kagi is great, probably the best I've tried, but expensive. I just use DDG for now, until my financial situation improves.
You should rename thread from browser to search Engine options.
Aside from that can i ask why not something more „popular“ like startpage or DuckDuckGo?
And to answer your question: im an avid duckduckgo User and i used the kagi trial and it was actually a good experience. Still gonna Stick to ddg but it seems capbable
If you don’t mind paying, give metager.org a try
Just use searxng on your pc with podman and set a start up script podman start searxng now you can use it on localhost: 8080 and is better than public instances as is less blocked by ip
Another reason I need to learn reverse proxies and start self hosting stuff. Architecture is my hold up and Tailscale has SSO, with entities I want nothing to do with.
No need for reverse proxy or complex stuff, just download podman desktop and download the searxng image and you can play it it will just work
_
I used Swisscows for years, and they were my favorite in terms of quality of results.