although good freemium examples like proton mail for example seem too good to be true with free vpn and all the jazz.
always such a shady feeling when using such services
They have a trial for 100 searches iirc. And they also occasionally share referral links to subscribers that are 3 month premium subs to share with friends so they can try
If you’d like to give away any free toasters with hackable embedded microcontrollers to prove your point here, I’m a willing recipient and will attempt setup of a searx instance.
I have a counterpoint to those claiming that paid are better.
By using a privacy oriented search engine, then they don't know exactly who you are. In theory just your IP. Maybe fingerprinting.
When paying they know exactly who you are. You have to trust them.
So in one case you can protect yourself, in the other you have to trust them.
There’s a link in the second paragraph to the technical details, including source code for the implementation and documentation for the required infrastructure.
But the tl;dr is that the tokens aren’t associated to your account. Unless you were able to snoop on the original request that generated the tokens (in which case, you’ve got bigger issues!), there’s no way to prove that a token is related to a specific account. A token only proves that an authorization server once granted access to some account.
Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic primitives, where information between a prover and a verifier can be authenticated by the prover, without revealing any of the specific information beyond the validity of the statement itself.
Edit 2: You should not be catching downvotes. You had a reasonable question.
There’s a link in the second paragraph to the technical details
I'm reminded of this mindset from the crypto scam surge.
Points at technical documents
"Well, it says it's secure so quit arguing that it's not secure"
Typically followed by
"If someone traced you/robbed you, then you were just doing it wrong"
Like, we've got high level white house officials feeding national security secrets to the Israelis because they just blindly implemented a "secure" Signal extension. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised people don't look past the cover.
But come on. "You can just buy some tokens and then you're secure" is painfully naive.
I’m out here trying to answer reasonable questions techie folks might have about the most promising possibility I’ve seen so far for getting our normie families off of Google.
What are you here for? Calling people naive pseudo-scammers? Get out of here.
I love to mock people who use the library by shouting "If you're not the payer then you're the product!"
Westerners are so baby-brained on this shit. Kagi can take your money and still spy on you. Yandex can not take your money and still not bother caching your search history, because there's no good way for them to monetize it. Nevermind GitHub or Wikipedia or literally any other public good being hosted on any website anywhere.
The delusion that you're safe using a free service is matched only by the delusion that you're protected because you paid someone money.