Ask HN: Why do you trust Kagi?

I pay for the quality of their search results. I don't place any special trust in them.

This is not because I have a reason to consider them untrustworthy; I work on the assumption that we have reached peak enshittification, and that everyone on the web is selling my data.

For one, I would like to see competition, because I believe that it may help the enshittification problem. We need regulations and a sane amount of competition. So I'm happy to help smaller search engines survive as a business.

Second, Kagi has implemented privacy pass: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html. So there is actually a way to use Kagi in a way that they cannot track you. This is very neat.

Not sure how much "trust" I actually need there. It's mostly convenience for me where it's easy to kill results from websites you never want to see again. This process allows for getting terrific results real quick after you start using it. Also not having ads is great, because you know the result ordering isn't affected by that, and your ad blocker won't be breaking your experience every now and then.

On top of that it's pretty fast and the price is right.

What's to trust? Either a search engine gives me useful results or it doesn't. Of all the search engines I've tried, I get the best results from Kagi.

As to data collection, I appreciate their claims a lot, but "trust" is a relative term. I think it's very unlikely that they're less trustworthy than companies such as Google. It's likely that they're more so. But even if they aren't, I'm not in a worse position than I would be if I didn't use them.

Their stance on Ukraine is bothering me. If not that, I’d be trusting them 100%. Had to revoke all recommendations and start actively point out to others this.