I've been using this search engine and I have to say I'm absolutely in love with it.
Search results are great, Google level even. Can't tell you how happy I am after trying multiple privacy oriented engines and always feeling underwhelmed with them.
Not open source. I find Yandex to be objectively the most superior search engine for all purposes, as they work outside Western jurisdictions. Better privacy than Google/Bing.
If you want a "private" search engine, Searx metasearch with "default language (all)" option works about 85% as good as Yandex.
Edit: 85% is only meant for text/link results. Yandex also has reverse image search, video search and other things with no competition in sight.
If you want lesser private but more ordinary results, Startpage is great.
Everything else is same tier or bad/useless. DDG (western censorship), Ecosia, Qwant, Google, BingGPT and others included.
At the risk of sounding incredibly naive, what kind of western censorship are you talking about? I've never noticed that as an issue with either Google, DDG or kagi.
DDG (uses Bing index) censored a lot of non-mainstream portals both at socialist left and conservative right spectrum, pushing Western neoliberal agenda websites that run Washington/Brussels propaganda. This was done during Ukraine conflict and seems to be a continuing theme, probably even for Israel genocide. Some call DDG as a "diet Google", since Google/Bing have done the same thing since long ago.
I am not sure how Kagi deals with this problem, since it is a different style of search engine, putting users in their own search bubbles, and has its own indexing to begin with.
Thanks for elaborating! I don't use search engines for political/news related queries so I guess that's why I never noticed (or it's so effective that I just accept it as the truth of course...). Either way, I agree that's bad and I hope it's not an issue with Kagi.
I recommend keeping Yandex as second opinion, and Searx with "default languages (all)" results option as third opinion. Relying on one for news is very problematic for critical thought and truly free, democratic discourse.