"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov
mozz@mbin.grits.dev to 
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I pay nothing for running SearXNG locally on my machine.
It's not even comparable in quality. It's like almost trolling to even suggest they are in the same league. If you don't want to spend 10 dollars, fine, but maybe stop pretending that your instance is somehow the best quality search engine that exists... :)
On top of that they're still paying using their time (and power).
Your argument clearly shows that you fail to see the benefits of doing it yourself. I get quality results from my local instance due to my persistence and work put in to adjust the settings necessary. I've balanced the privacy and functionality of the instance to fit my needs and it costs me nothing but a few minutes of my time each week to do so.
Kagi doing it for $10 a month sounds like they're turning a neat profit off of you; and you're refusing to accept that I have achieved levels of search competence that Kagi has without paying for Kagi or even using their free searches or service.
Whether or not it makes sense to you value-wise to pay or not pay for Kagi does not matter in this discussion. it only matters that none of the things Kagi can do that I find useful are things that cannot be done with SearXNG.
That is the way to go.
The nice thing is that I can customize it however I like too; change weights, choose which engines to pull from always, or even from search to search; so I'm not getting cruft.
SearXNG always rearranges the crap most engines serve to the bottom without fail.
TIL of this. Thanks.
My understanding is that a locally hosted SearXNG instance doesn't really give you any privacy, unless you "dilute" your searches by letting others do searches from your instance too.
Route it through a vpn with gluetun and it does...
To be honest the "Privacy" aspect can be taken care of in other ways; like using a VPN for query dilution, for example. You don't have to recruit 100 mechanical turks to do junk searches for you; although there are browser addons that can in fact do this automated searching for you...I've run them before.
SearXNG is a front-end that protects your privacy still. Hosting it locally dilutes it some; but provides maximal control; as you can use VPNs and control things much more tightly than you could if you hosted it elsewhere.