I don’t like to ever assume negative intent without good evidence. I think I’m taking the neutral rather than optimistic view here. If you want me to speculate whether this new company is good or evil, that would just be my speculation; it would depend how they intend to make money out of it, from my gut instinct I can’t say they give me any specific Google vibes yet.

The freedom to decide what software am I allowed to run on my PC is important for me though

I’m right with you there, and it’s proprietary software that threatens that, nothing included in this announcement does though.

But how it’s implemented means everything. Google’s play integrity is corrupting because it’s designed to lock vendors in to Google’s proprietary ecosystem. You’re not getting that from this ‘language’ alone, it could be the case but it’s a massive leap at this point.

They haven’t announced anything other than a vague outline of what they’re trying to solve, it could be implemented in so many ways at this point.

That was my take, yes.

In what sense?

This kind of anthropomorphisation is bad, it shows a lack of understanding of the technology, it’s a terrible idea.

Any particular reason for moving from Mullvad?

I’d like to use SearXNG as well but experience the same - I’ve tried a lot of different instances and settings but I always seem to get worse results than searching directly in the source search engine, for some reason? (note I don’t use Kagi so this isn’t an endorsement for them either)