You mean Google, the OG surveillance capitalist, earning over 200 billion a year from advertising, that has its tracking code on almost every phone, app and website out there, and even has a fleet of cars to map every wifi SSID?
Great comparison to a user aligned small business that has “Humanize the web” as its mission and respects user privacy. 
I would like to address another deficiency concerning Kagi’s privacy. As previously noted, Kagi permits account balance top-ups through crypto (BTC/BTC LN) via OpenNote. We have extensively discussed the drawbacks of using BTC throughout this forum, so I will refrain from revisiting that topic here. However, it’s important to highlight that even when funding your account balance with BTC, Kagi mandates the submission of personal information, including your name and address, during the subscription process (after top-up). This step became mandatory within the last couple of months. While it is possible to enter arbitrary information, this requirement is clearly questionable and contradicts the principle of “privacy by default.”
Yes i noticed that to after creating a new account some time ago. That is really disappointing! It stems from their legal obligation to determine tax origin country (which kicked in after surpassing 20k users) . Just to clarify, all this data is managed by Stripe (addresses, payment info), and not by Kagi. They do this on purpose, as they don’t want to burden themselves with running payment services and holding sensitive payment data.
I guess if you have used Stripe before, it doesn’t matter (as they already have your payment data).
But still, other companies like Safing SPN also allow private account signups, paying in XMR and only asking for your country of origin (not your name or address) while complying with local laws.
Yes, I remembered something like this but I couldn’t find the source anymore.
I understand the potential legal requirement to do so. Nevertheless this is another drawback in terms of privacy compared to other privacy-friendly search engines.
Doesn’t Safing require phone verification during registration for this specific reason?
No, only the country code (prefix), e.g. +1 for USA.
There is no verification whatsoever. The username is generated by them for you, and email is optional. I consider this as best practices given their legal requirements.
Just noticed that on an older Kagi account, i only need to provide the country (no address). They even state on their help page:
What information is needed to accurately calculate sales taxes?
Only the country and, if tax rates vary within the country, the state or zip code as well.
But new accounts require an address 
I can’t confirm this. I’ve had my account for about a year, but I was still asked to provide my credentials. I remember that around 4-5 months ago, I was prompted to provide my credentials despite my subscription being active. If I remeber correctly my subscription would not have been set to renew automatically until I entered my information.
In the end it doesn’t matter. It just is another reason Kagi shouldn’t be recommend on this site. It’s certainly a great product, but in terms of privacy there are better options, such as the already recommended.
As always, anyone should be free to deviate from the recommendations on this site, if it aligns with his individual threat level. So in my case. Only because something is not listed here doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad product or not privacy friendly.
So, I decided to test and buy Kagi after reading through this post (I already used the 100 searches, so just bough the $5 subscription) and unless my memory is just really bad (Which, could be the case 
) I just entered a random address and that’s it. So I don’t know if that’s and issue per se.
You can always input false user information, even for your Google account. However, while this may enhance your account’s privacy, it doesn’t mean the service itself becomes privacy-friendly when you do so. Services recommended on this site should adopt a privacy-by-default approach. This means they shouldn’t request user data unless it is absolutely essential for their functionality.
I mean yeah but I never had Ads on Brave Search anyway, so I dont get it
I tried it few time, and didn’t get better results than from others I usually use (SP, DDG, sometimes Brave). It’s good they have sustainable business model, but I was hoping it will be much better for the price
The greatest benefit to Kagi is setting up lenses. Right out of the box you might not notice much, but if you set up some lenses, or find yourself using their quick answer or AI tools more often, the gap between Kagi results and other providers grows very large very fast, at least for me personally.
Also just QoL, but I love a service with custom CSS support like Kagi
Kagi has released an AI Image Filter feature:
Something like that was really needed! Google’s image search is already cluttered with badly generated AI images.
Of interest to folks here, Kagi just announced during their year-end community call that they are rolling out an implementation of Privacy Pass early next year (they did a dev demo live, so it’s very close), which will allow subscribers to search anonymously with Kagi unable to associate queries to their account (of course, you’d probably want to combine that with TOR/VPN, etc.).
They have a page now for it but all the links seem to 404. Seems very close though. Something that worries me a bit is that they require an extension, but that doesn’t necessarily make it fingerprintable. They don’t seem to allow you to sign up without an email either, I’d really like to see something like what Mullvad offers where you just generate an account number. Seems right now they collect more data for signing up than they could. Overall though Kagi is really cool and they’re clearly making strides.
I’d also really love to see signup with passkeys as an option instead of a password if they’re going to insist on an account. I think Kagi really has an opportunity here to show how a paid service can still be private on a technical level and not just through their privacy policy.
I think I saw on their Discord that it’s coming in Q1, so it should be just weeks away, if that. Regarding the email signup, they do no filtering or verification of your email address, so you can use an alias service, etc. with no issue.
I agree, and this topic has been discussed previously.
While the integration of Privacy Pass is indeed a nice feature, the main issue with Kagi is that you still need to create an account and provide certain personal information, such as an email address. Additionally, there’s no anonymous way to add funds. Kagi’s suggestion that users could use a fake email address or an aliasing service [1], or transfer XMR to BTC [2] indicates that they don’t understand the idea behind privacy by default. Implementing Privacy Pass is imo focusing on the wrong aspect of the problem.
Also not verifying the email seems like a security problem. If you mistype your email on sign up, then i guess someone else controls your account now. Good luck recovering anything if you forget your password as well.
Also in a thread I saw one of the devs said that a random email is the same as a random account identifier, but not only is it not even communicated to the user that they don’t need a real email, even if they know that it’s still a human trying to generate randomness and not a machine so they’re going to do a pretty bad job.