I feel like there are probably some ad based search engines which are privacy and service oriented, but in general even for those there remains a misalignment problem. Hence if I don’t want to be a product now or in the future, what good search engines are there that I can pay for?
And what do you think Kagi uses? They rely heavily on the same Bing and Google. If you played around with them you will see most of their searches are identical to what you would get if you did a bing search and then follow up with a google search, you’re not getting much more. The fact of the matter is that there are only 2 real choices of search engines. Google and Bing. There’s a massive gap between them and every other independent search index.
I didn’t push for Kagi… You’re spilling out my point though
I’m just saying that saying “use DDG because it doesn’t use a Russian company’s search engine” while ignoring that DDG uses objectively more evil companies is stupid.