I was expecting a search engine since google is in decline, it's the best time and opportunity for proton search engine to rise with a browser that has access to other proton apps just like Chrome or maybe not. If proton gets competitive and had consumer approach then proton will also decline, anyways if its only a search engine this time, then its the best thing to happen.

+1 on collaborating, funding or buying Kagi. Make it a joint package that paying for Proton automatically pays for.

You can implement something like searxng. It's open source.

Kagi is ridiculously expensive, duckduckgo is a terrible Bing proxy with worse results, StartPage is a terrible Google proxy with worse results, Brave search is.. owned by Brave. A new search engine would be very good.

Too saturated. Don't do it.

There are so many private and less censored search projects out there that need support. I feel like this would be out of scope for Proton. Look into Brave Search or SearX

The idea right now for a search engine is useful. This would require tedious amounts of work to implement, ProtonVPN is already lacking on feature implementations on official apps as they're expanding too much.

Protonmail is a company that is mostly about mail and VPN. Lets stay there. Even the Pass I disagree with. For example, their web browser app is terribly done since implementation. They're diluted in all areas.

They should focus on the Mail, VPN, and Drive and nothing more than that for now.

Well i just use Floorp(a firefox clone) for my browser and use duckduckgo and it is great. So untill proton makes a search engine just use floorp.

Having a partnership or integration with Kagi would be huge since they're the only ones with a good search engine today.

Another option is to buy Neeva's consumer search engine (from before they were acquired by Snowflake), their search engine was really good (only one other than Kagi that I used) and may be able to get it for a really good price

Something similar to Kagi would be amazing. Buying Kagi and its team would be even better.

A web browser? No. There are already multiple good-quality privacy-focused browsers.

Hi;
In my opinion, a web browser would be a useless waste of time.
On the other hand, a really efficient and secure
search engine, with what that service entails (search history for example, stored in our drive) would be really great, a total goodbye to Google (because we have to be honest, their search engine is by far the most powerful)

There is DDG, Startpage, Brave Search and for browser Firefox, Brave, LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser and of course Tor Browser.
There is no need for Proton to do this. What we need is more people switching from Chrome, Edge and so on, to already awesome alternatives. Having Proton do their own Search Engine and/or Browser will just confuse more. A better Proton Drive and parity between all platforms is what Proton needs to focus on.

I don't understand all of the requests for Proton to create apps that already exist and don't relate to apps they already have. You want private search not based on any major search engines (except perhaps for some image searches for now) - Brave does that.

They have so many things to address already with their existing portfolio. Expansions should be thoughtful and make sense in their niche.

Creating a modern web browser and an independent search engine with its own spiders from scratch would be mammoth tasks in this day and age and, for a search engine, as well as requiring massive resources in terms of cache, storage, and so on. Well beyond Proton in terms of the financial resources that would be needed for either, I'm sure.

Besides, how many people would still be willing to pay for either a browser or a search engine? Even if there were 100 million Proton users willing to pay, that still would not raise enough anyway.

For a browser, at best you'd be looking at a fork or even a fork of a fork of an existing one. And nobody dare suggest Chromium! Basically you'd be looking at yet another Firefox fork, or perhaps a Waterfox - itself a fork off Firefox - one. Perhaps doable? But hardly a priority of any kind, given the number of privacy oriented browsers already out there, led by TOR browser.

For a search engine, it gets even more complicated. Yes, you could do a skeleton search engine interface, but you'd still have to go the same way as DuckDuckGo et al and get into bed with Big Bad G' or 'Big Bad Bing', one way of another paying for search results cache. It's a vexing problem, whichever way you look at it.

All that said, yes, it would be a nice idea though......

We already have DuckDuckGo and Brave search as the main two privacy-focused search engines.

Could Proton afford to acquire/merge with DuckDuckGo or Kagi?

Search: DuckDuckGo
Desktop browsers : Brave (Chromium based) and Floorp (Firefox based)
Mobile browsers (android): Brave (Chromium based) and Iceraven or Mull (both Firefox based)

Proton Search is an excellent idea for privacy online.

Proton Search- a new privacy-focused search engine

Kagi.com is superb.