one indirectly owned by the CCP such as Lenovo?

You could say this about literally every Chinese owned company. Eliminate all Chinese and all American companies and there’s not a lot of goods left you could purchase. Even less when it comes to goods made for other companies in China by Chinese firms.

I’d rather pay for search, than to be the product of a search engine. Self-hosting a decent index is much harder than it seems. Kagi aren’t ontologically evil in the same way as Google or Microsoft so I think it’s the best option.