this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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No, it's just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn't something that should be controlled by anyone who's in it for a profit.
How so
Yeah, this is not the case as they run on a subscription based model.
I used Kagi for a while. I stopped because it's prohibitively expensive, and rather than prioritizing lowering prices they kept giving me AI features I did not want at all - hell, it's the kind of shit I was paying to get away from. Mix direct support for Russian companies into the mix, and you have an expensive AI fueled multi-purpose web monstrosity that supports war crimes. No thanks. I just wanted a search engine.
Their search results were good though. I wouldn't mind supporting a subscription based model, but I'm sick and tired of tech bros and their bullshit.
Why would you conclude that a subscription based model makes them immune from corrupt financial incentives? Quite the opposite. That's my whole point.
You still haven't explained the incentive, just postured that it must exist.
“If you’re not paying, you are the product”
Nobody offers services for free, the money has to come from somewhere
Well, yeah, they're run by a corporation, which I guess means they need to show infinite growth to return value to stockholders. If so they can keep growing on subscriptions for a while, but eventually they'll turn on their customers. So fair enough.
I think that's part of my problem with them honestly. They seem to always want to grow and do more, but I would rather have seen them focus on search and make the subscription more affordable. But as they need growth I guess that's not possible.
Up-selling and cross-selling. It's just business. Who's ever going to pay $25/month if the $5/month plan does everything anyone ever possibly needs? Their lowest level pricing model relies on making you anxious about running out of searches eventually, not finding everything you need within that window each month, and not having effective enough tools to find what you need at the basic level. You may personally reject that you need anything more than the basic plan, but the company's financial incentive is to convince you of the opposite, and don't think for a second that they're not eventually going to try to convince you that you need to upgrade. It may seem like $5/month and $25/month are not that far apart, but multiply that across some arbitrary number of users, say, 100,000, and you're talking about $2 million dollars PER MONTH of potential revenue on the table. And there's no guarantee they're not going to eventually start pushing even more expensive products and plans.
They have partnerships with other businesses too, and while those seem like nice enough businesses on the surface, they're still businesses and they are going to have motivation to find ways to drive traffic and prime you to get subscriptions to them too. The problem is not that these partnerships exist or that there's anything wrong with them, it's that they're another corrupting influence when money is involved and changing hands.
To be clear, I'm not saying anyone involved is evil, that they're actively doing this now, that they are even necessarily moving in this direction, or that they're even slightly corrupt at all... yet, but they're swimming in the corrupting waters of subscription-based dark patterns and they can't help but be influenced by them. The lust for profits will inevitably drive them mad. It always does. Enshittification does not make exceptions for good intentions.
Every SearXNG instance I've tested has been terrible for my test queries. Any chance you can account for that?
Up until a few weeks ago I was running my own private SearXNG instance and it's not just you, even I noticed on my OWN instance that it had progressively gotten worse. Initially it was great so I just left it be but then the performance and results just became horrible. It was hit or miss if the thing would even load or not when other instances on my server like my akkoma, piefed, redlib, forgejo, etc all ran smooth as silk.
Eventually I ditched SearXNG and switched to 4get which much better and faster results. thing never goes down and the search results have been fantastic.