Privacy Is Not Free (and maybe it shouldn't be?)
Note: This post was originally published on August 10, 2025. Due to technical issues, it was deleted and I am publishing it again today.
We all like free stuff, but maybe we shouldn’t. Like many people, I loved gmail and google search when it first came out and used it for years. Then, a few years ago, I stopped to think about why these great products were free. What’s the catch? Well, I was. I agreed to use their products for free and in exchange, they took my usage history, search queries, and don’t forget cross site tracking, I’m sure. Then, sold it to whomever they chose to after building a nice Doug profile package.
First, I dropped gmail and went to a paid email service and it felt good. Great customer service and lots of features, like rules, folders, easy import from other services, DNS management, etc. Anyway, I switched over to them and couldn’t be happier. I still stuck with GOogle search.
A couple of years after that, I started considering the privacy of my searches. Not that I search for anything nefarious. Mainly things like user manuals, device drivers, reference to making ethernet cables, and other boring stuff. Things that many of us may search for on a regular basis. Either way, it is no one’s business but my own. So, I played around with SearxNG and self-hosted it as well as put it up in the cloud. I tried it both ways, but ended up just preferring it locally. Overall, it was pretty good, but Google and other search engines still seemed to provide more relevant results.
Recently, Google search results have been abysmal for most things I search. They try to make it convenient and give you everything right up front, but I just want links to go to and pick and choose the information I am looking for. It is supposed to be a “search” engine, after all. Not an answer engine, right? If I want quick answers, then I use one of the many AI companies out there or one of the open source local models I have downloaded in LM Studio. This nudged me to go hunting for something better. Something that would give me good results for what I was looking for and had privacy at its core. That turned out to be Kagi for me. Kagi gives me the great search results, control over the results it provides, a beautiful clean interface, and so much more. Not to mention their AI Assistant that lets you choose from a lot of the major models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Mistral, among others. I am new to it, so I am not an expert, but I do know that it is not just hype. They seem to deliver what they promise, so far.
It doesn’t seem like I am the only one that feels like this, either. Check out some others below.
There’s an (oversimplified) axiom that if a good or service (like Google search, for example, or good ol' Facebook) is free for you to use, it’s because you’re the product, not the customer. With Google, you pay with your attention, your behavioral metrics, and the intimate personal details of your wants and hopes and dreams (and the contents of your emails and other electronic communications–Google’s got most of that, too).