So there is not any trustworthy benchmarks I can currently use to evaluate? That in combination with my personal anecdotes is how I have been evaluating them.

I was pretty impressed with Deepseek R1. I used their app, but not for anything sensitive.

I don’t like that OpenAI defaults to a model I can’t pick. I have to select it each time, even when I use a special URL it will change after the first request

I am having a hard time deciding which models to use besides a random mix between o3-mini-high, o1, Sonnet 3.5 and Gemini 2 Flash

Why do you say that? I have had no reason to doubt their reporting

I have been pretty impressed by Gemini 2.0 Flash.

Its slightly worse than the very best on the benchmarks I have seen, but is pretty much instant and incredibly cheap. Maybe a loss leader?

Anyways, which model of the commercial ones do you consider to be good?

It’s not about privacy.

But I can address that first. It’s hard to argue that Kagi can be trusted with your data in my opinion, because they - unlike DDG and Startpage handles payments from you. So they know exactly who you are and what you search for. You have to trust them when they say they don’t log. This in itself is enough for me not to use them.

Besides that the main problem is that Yandex is a Russian company. Russia is currently invading a democratic peaceful independent nation.

A lot of countries including my own are sanctioning Russia and Russian companies. I feel that indirectly supporting a Russian company is contributing to the Russian war economy. The sanctions are there for a reason, to hurt the Russian economy, so that they are pressured to stop the war.

Kagi has a choice and they have decided to stay on the wrong side of history. They have multiple explanations online, but none of them is sufficient in my opinion. Staying “apolitical” is a political choice when there is an agressor.

FYI: Kagi uses the Russian search engine Yandex as well and have no plans of changing it.

Mentioning it, as to some it might be an issue indirectly financially supporting a Russian company.

Just search for Kagi Yandex and you will get plenty officiak sources