Anyone using their own searx-ng, the metasearch engine? Have you tried Kagi? How is it comparatively when it comes to quality of results given that with searx I can customize the engines and such.
SearX has some advantages. It’s free, except for the compute and labor costs. It runs on our infrastructure, so SSO is easy and we have complete visibility on what’s leaving our perimeter.
Ignoring nuanced search quality evaluation, SearX main disadvantages are (1) it’s only available on our network, so if you set it as the default search that feature breaks if you’re not at the office or on VPN and (2) it’s slow. Users get a blank page for a meaningful moment before results show up.
Kagi is snappy AF and adds solid AI features. Their Universal Summarizer (which isn’t actually LLM powered) works well and the fastGPT is the new standard for open ended information retrieval IMHO. (I have a Perplexity subscription I don’t bother to use)
What I want from Kagi is (1) a single payer team plan that gets all the features, (2) more information & contractual guarantees about privacy. I argue that Google is a terrible default, but the brand is trusted while Kagi is still mostly unknown.
Now, the real benefit of SearX would be integrated custom search providers for in-house data sources. We haven’t done that, and I’m not confident we have the resources to do it well. This is also something I’d love to get from Kagi, but it’s not well-aligned with their current roadmap. I’m content to use them to search external data and pursue other solutions for internal stuff.