It isn’t paranoia when there are clear facts in here, the first fact is your queries are linked to your account, period. Second fact, you don’t control the server in any way or shape. Third, your identity is linked through your payment information, aka full legal details, not just through an IP. Comparing between all that and browsers fingerprinting is muddying the water, you can use searxng in the middle and anonymize the query, with no profiling cookies etc., adding few extra steps and it’s private for most people unless you are a person of interest, in kagi, this doesn’t exist! Even the anonymizer is ran by the same company, so much trust!

I am not paid to design kagi architecture nor I know the internals, but let’s say I can host that mentioned anonymizer myself (say in Canary Islands), and it pulls the queries from kagi who you have paid for by monero, then the company knows nothing about the user, no profiling, no tracking, nothing, that’s a great starting point.

If this doesn’t exist, using something like searxng is far better (privacy wise), not just as mentioned on how it’s more anonymous, but also it gives you the ability to blend in, rather than looking like a sore thumb in the logs.