Just try it? You’ll get a free trial, use a fake email, no payment details or use info needed as far as I can remember.

I believe also https://kagi.com/fastgpt is free to use.

It’s really cool, but the example doesn’t produce any sensible output? If you have created something like this, why wouldn’t you have your demo output something sensible like Fibonacci or 1337 or whatever.

Whoosh?

You can pay with bitcoin, which might help keeping the account entirely anonymous for some.

Yeah, you may be fine with the $5 plan, but that’s the lowest tier available.

Afaik they are not really running a profit yet, just expanding, so that’s an eye opener to how expensive it is to run a search business and how much value Google and others estimate they get from your personal information.

For now though their user base seems fairly much leaning towards business users that can defend this expense as part of becoming more effective professionally. Hopefully over time they’ll grow large enough to provide cheaper plans for regular persons while staying privacy focused and ad free.

Yeah there are some good solutions to achieve this, I’m a big fan of the libredirect project, but currently I’m just setting up the redirects I want directly in Kagi so any URLs in the search results are already rewritten to my liking.

It’s not, really, I switched from Google some years ago and had accepted my faith with DuckDuckGo, but then tried out Kagi. I use search so much daily for work, the relief of getting quality results again is immense and probably saves me hours per week. I get much better results from Kagi than I got at the end from Google, and I can tune them to my liking:

• block Pinterest results when I search for images,
• downprioritize shopping results,
• rewrite all Reddit links to go to old.reddit.com,
• unamp google AMP links
• summarize long texts / documents
• quick answer from the top 5 results

…and so on and so on. It’s just so effective.