I guess with a search engine it’s hard to selfhost a search index so you usually have to rely on third party services like DuckDuckGo to get relevant results.
AI models don’t have this issue they can be run completely offline without any network connections. They’re already trained with a certain dataset they don’t need to be constantly up-to-date like a search engine which needs to index new sites constantly.
DuckDuckGo’s AI and Brave’s Leo both probably have much better privacy policies than the other big tech AI chat services, but if there’s very accessible private alternatives then I don’t really see much of a reason to use them.
At least on iOS and macOS there’s Enclave AI which makes it very accessible for people to access this technology on low powered devices like their phones and laptops.
I haven’t looked into Android options tbh, I’m not really a big fan of AI overall but I think we should be strongly pushing people towards offline solutions if they have to use AI for any reason.