I used Swisscows for years, and they were my favorite in terms of quality of results.
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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When choosing a browser, both Kagi and Swisscows are good options if you are looking for privacy and reliability: • Kagi: Known for offering high-quality search results, without intrusive ads and with a total focus on privacy. It is ideal if you want to avoid tracking and try something different from traditional search engines. • Swisscows: It also prioritizes privacy and security, with the advantage of being based in Switzerland, which has strict data protection laws. It is a reliable alternative, especially if you want to avoid sharing personal information. Tip: If SearxNG is not meeting your expectations, it is worth trying Kagi to see if it better suits your needs. Swisscows is also a great option for those seeking privacy.
Swisscows is conservative shit imo, go with Kagi instead. They even block normal porn.
Kagi is great, probably the best I've tried, but expensive. I just use DDG for now, until my financial situation improves.
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 personally love Kagi. Any time I have to use something else, it now feels painful.
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.
Same. Questionable leadership but a very solid platform.
What's up with the leadership?
Well, there was the inclusion of the Brave and Yandex indexes which ruffled some feathers for sure, but I personally lost faith in Vlad as decent human when they outright refused to add a widget linking to suicide prevention resources to searches regarding suicide because they would introduce “moral bias”.
Adding a widget for suicide prevention hotline on top of 'how to kill yourself' result would be manifestation of one such bias - in this case moral - meaning, human interference into search results for moral reasons.
They support Yandex from Russia
Is it through direct financial transfers or do they use it as another search engine?
Do you happen to know in what way yandex is affiliated with the regime?
Thank you. Vlads reply is a bit weird, especially since there is other topics that show yandex poisoning "good search".
Users deserve access to the best possible information, not information filtered through our political lens.
Except "the best possible information" is filtered. That's the whole point of a search engine is to 1.Find and 2.Filter. If your search engine is turning up Russian propaganda, that is NOT "the best possible information".
any nation's major search engine is going to be turning up propaganda.
imo it's better to include it & state where it came from so people can discern.
personally i don't believe the entire population of any country are all bad people and increasingly siloing global citizens from eachother is only going to increase the kinds of toxic nationalism which dangerous regimes use as fuel
There's a difference between disbelieving an entire nation of people and disbelieving a state-sponsored propaganda factory.
which is why i'd say clearly identify the source so people can discern.
afaict if you want to fairly criticise kagi its for not moving fast enough on adding clear source referencing & adding methods for users to filter out source types.
is there something i'm missing? are there other reasons to suspect bad faith on kagi's part?
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
I have never tried Swisscows but I just want to say that Kagi is fantastic. Absolutely the best search experience I had in years.
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
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.
If you don’t mind paying, give metager.org a try
_