Right. So, my IP. Which is the same (IP-wise) as if I'd just searched Google directly, leaving aside the benefits of searching other engines simultaneously.

I've also seen people suggest we should open our self-hosted SearXNG instances to others and let random people submit searches to it thereby causing searches to appear to come from my home IP address. That strikes me as a terrible idea given what some people search on the web. I have also never run a TOR exit node.

I use Kagi myself and I was hooked after using their free trial so I'm comparing to that.

When I submit a search to Kagi, Google (and their other downstream search engines) gets the search from Kagi. Yes, that means I have to trust Kagi to some extent but as we can see, there are obvious problems with SearXNG whether using it myself or opening it to others.

The AI features are mentioned further up the thread as a negative but I disagree. I recently cancelled my subscription to ChatGPT ($20/mo) and upgraded my Kagi subscription ($25/mo) which gives me searching and access to all the most popular LLMs which I do use from time to time, mostly for code help. Personally, it's a great value.

I didn't even know about the AI features when I started paying for it. That "side" of Kagi is fully optional and very unobtrusive.