Kagi accepts Bitcoin [1]. They also “do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account” [2].
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html
So you essentially have to make the same leap of faith as you would with a commercial VPN.
With a VPN you're hoping there's no logs at all, and it's pretty easy for a VPN vendor - entirely by accident - to keep some logs around. And then a search warrant lands, they look around, find the logs, and the promise is broken. And it's entirely possible for that to happen by accident. So if I pay for a commercial VPN that claims they don't keep logs, I'm gambling on their honesty and competency.
With a search engine you're hoping they don't bias search results to favour advertisers, sell your search results to advertisers, etc. And that's not something you can really do by accident. If Kagi is being honest, then they're not accepting money to modify search results, nor are they logging my searches, or building up a profile of my searches, or modifying seearch results based on that profile, etc. Even if it turned out Kagi goofed and really were logging all my searches and tying them to my payment account (maybe, eg, for perfectly innnocent reasons, like solving a bug), that doesn't actually change their value proposition to me all. They're either super evil and lying about everything they're doing, or they're fine, even if it turns out they're cutting a couple of corners.
Kagi is putting themselves in a position which is inherently easier to trust than a VPN vendor (or early Google), due to the nature of the business model.
Then there’s a non-zero chance that either the VPN or the search or both are actually honeypots which not only log everything, but have a whole monitoring and alerting machine setup.
You’re more trusting than I. I assume the VPNs are no where near anonymous. I assume paid search is no more private than any other search. I assume the government doesn’t get or need warrants to know what we do online (do you think Prism just went away or hasn’t been replaced with a superior iteration?)
If anything paid search is more privacy invading than free ones. With free ones when logged out they know your IP which could serve any number of people so it wouldn’t be shocking that the searches being look into came from someone else on your connection and not you (tor relies on this), whereas with paid search you must be signed in to use, with an email address tied to you and a cc tied to you, all plausible deniability goes out the window.
AFAIK the personalized results are not based on your search history, rather a personalized list of blocked, lowered, raised, or pinned domains. I think some people share their lists, not unlike PiHole.
> Save My Search History
> Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any searches by default. In the future we may add features that will utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this.
>Ideal solution would involve pay-per-search.
I guess if you're really hardcore and are willing to trigger a transaction per search.
But in reality it doesn't work becsuse there's a small transaction fee for every charge. So it's really hard to charge below a dollar without major penalties. You can get around that with a token system, but we go right back to square one. I guess that's one problem crypto mitigates.
