Panda-na
One thing that concerns me about Kagi is that the CEO does not seem to have a very sophisticated or, erm... correct view of what constitutes personally identifiable information in a privacy context and why people want privacy.
This blog post goes into some detail, with screenshots from Kagi's discord channel:
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Here's a direct quote from the CEO, Vlad:
People who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than 100 in the entire world. definitely not typical Kagi users.
unless they are criminals, in which case they don't care if they have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
Personally very creeped out that Kagi's CEO would pull the old "only criminals have something to hide" card when questioned on discord, but advertise privacy-friendliness on the company's website.
Also quite funny that he feels qualified to decide for others if they really need anonymity.
There are also some quotes in there where he implies that all privacy concerns can go away by using an email alias to sign up, as though fingerprinting data and the content of your search queries somehow don't count as PII:
personal information is what you can be identified with as an individual. no information to submit to Kagi is personal information except if you use your real email address to register
Not to mention some other yellow flags - venture capital backed startup, not paying taxes for a while, originally an AI company, developing random other things unrelated to core search (Orion browser, email service)
Weird vibe, not my thing. Would rather have Brave or DDG than a startup whose CEO has such "creative" views on privacy.