In a previous post I’ve taken a look at how I can combine a private LLM with Internet search. My setup: An Open WebUI instance hosted at home together with Ollama, the Llama3 LLM and Brave as a search front-end. While this works well for some kinds of searches and not so well for others, I was wondering if there are also other options for private search with LLM capabilities that require less self hosting. Here’s an interesting option I came across: Kagi.
Initially, Kagi started as a privacy respecting classic search engine. As far as I understand, they use their own search index and do not rely on other search engines like Google and Bing. For details, see here. Instead of showing advertisements and creating a personal profile to sell to others, Kagi is subscription based, so you are the customer and not the merchandise. I had a look at Kagi some time ago, but didn’t go for them at the time, because I perform most of my searches with an LLM these days. Recently, however, Kagi added an LLM assistant for search, which provides search results as part of its answers and can also be used without search interaction for generic questions. Just like ChatGPT, Perplexity and others, but anonymous and with privacy in mind.
Several different LLMs of popular companies such as OpenAI, Google, Mistral and a number of Chinese players that are hosted externally can be selected. As Kagi actas as a proxy, the prompts are sent anonymously. Also, Kagi deletes search- and LLM interactions after 24 hours unless the result is bookmarked. In other words: One can ask questions anonymously, but there is no guarantee that the content in the question is not stored and used for something else somewhere externally. So one has to take care not to provide personal information in search queries.
Kagi also has additional features such as LLM translation services, which come in handy as well. For normal search, privacy is taken to the next level with a browser plugin that will send anonymized tokens instead of using an account, so search queries are completely anonymous. This does not work with the LLM search assistant yet, but it would certainly be a nice additional feature for the future.
Overall, I would say Kagi is a very nice privacy respecting option for search and LLM interactions and I have decided to stick with them. In addition to Kagi, there are other interesting privacy respecting AI tools out there, have a look at this article for some ideas.