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I would mention that I use Kagi as a search engine, which doesn't retain search queries (outside a subset for a limited period of time, like a percentage retained for 7 days to counter DDoS attacks). They also have functionality to let people

people who are more paranoid than I am

pay anonymously via cryptocurrency and use search tokens that don't link individual searches to each other.

https://kagi.com/privacy

Maximizing anonymity with Kagi

We strive to give our customers the possibility to maximize their anonymity. Users who want provable anonymity guarantees may access our service by:

• Creating an account with a pseudonymous email address
• Paying for their plan using cryptocurrency
• Accessing our services via Tor service
• Anonymously authenticating using the Privacy Pass protocol

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

In general terms, Privacy Pass allows “Clients” (generally users) to authenticate to “Servers” (like Kagi) in such a way that while the Server can verify that the connecting Client has the right to access its services, it cannot determine which of its rightful Clients is actually connecting.

I'd also add that, search query and AI prompts aside, one's aggregate YouTube history is also likely to have privacy implications, as I expect that most people have watched a lot of content on YouTube and done many searches on it. In 2025, I can't suggest a reasonable, privacy-oriented drop-in alternative for that, though.

EDIT: Social media is its own can of privacy worms, but at least there people basically understand that they're putting content out there for the world to see, albeit maybe wanting to do so pseudonymously.

EDIT2: Actually, I haven't been using it, but Kagi does have a video search, and a bit of experimentation shows that it does appear to index YouTube. I guess I could use that to hide search queries, though obviously YouTube will still have a "videos watched" history, as one would still connect to YouTube for a video itself. And it's gonna come with some limitations; NewPipe and similar mobile clients don't have functionality to issue search queries to anything but YouTube directly, so one wouldn't be able to use a mobile client for searches. I also don't know whether they permit filtering on everything that YouTube does (or, if they index multiple video sources, whether it's even possible to filter things on all those criteria; different video services may not expose the same information).

EDIT3: It also appears to only return 48 results per search, unlike YouTube's search Web UI, where I believe that you can just keep paging through more results as long as you want.

EDIT4: Ah, they show what they index in the search options, since they let you choose which source the videos are from. Apparently it's YouTube, Vimeo, TED, TikTok, Twitch, Daily Motion, and PeerTube. Huh. I didn't even know that it was possible to search Vimeo at all. Last time I went looking for a YouTube alternative, I remember looking at it, seeing that the main page had no search form or list of videos, and thinking that there wasn't any way to search it at all.