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As many of you know, I posted recently about my experiences and outlook on Kagi, the paid search engine. It's gotten some positive press recently, ironically right after I made my blog post about why I no longer liked or trusted it. This blog post was called "Why I Lost Faith In Kagi" and was a pretty simple quick collection of my thoughts that I primarily wrote so it'd be easier to find again later to link to people when discussing Kagi versus making it a fedi thread I couldn't search for easily later. Across the four social media platforms I linked this blog post on, I'd say it got a total of about 40 likes and few reblogs.
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
I say this because this morning I woke up to an email from Kagi's CEO, Vlad, who had seen the post and was upset about it. I have an email address listed on my blog (which is why I didn't bother removing it from these logs), which is what he sent his emails to. I am posting this entire email chain in this thread and will briefly post my thoughts about it, but I feel like it's something that needs to be seen. Please take note of the subject of the email as well (EDIT: It got cropped out sorry, the subject is "Fatih [sic] can not be lost"). Also, since the alt text would get extremely long with some of the transcripts, I've provided a text dump of the emails here for screen reader users and will offer a more abridged description in the alt text: https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
I’m just trying to use independent search engines with their own index/crawler. I used DDG for many years but the fact that it’s basically a front end for Bing and Microsoft started to bother me, particularly since they put ChatGPT into Bing.
I only know of Brave Search, Mojeek, and Kagi to be independent and private at this point. I don’t want to pay for Kagi, Mojeek has its uses but I wouldn’t use it as my main engine, so that left Brave Search. The company and CEO is sus, I don’t use their chromium browser, and their search results seem to emulate and optimize ranking based on the big guys (Google and Bing) but in 2024 search is hard to come by and it’s more important to me to be fully independent of big tech.
I saw this post earlier that mentions some other search options, along with plenty of other suggestions in the comments. Hopefully you can find something you like in there! I haven’t checked them all out myself yet.
Tldr: I like your ranking algo. Feels like a breath of fresh air reminiscent of the old days of search and internet
Long version: When I want to get results for a query, not for an intent per se, I use Mojeek.
It works best for certain types of queries. When I want to get out of the commercialized, centralized, sanitized, SEO-ridden bubble that is every other search engine, Mojeek let’s me find way more potentially obscure, unique, and satisfying results per query that likely wouldn’t rank favorably with the modern page quality criteria used by Google. Plus, compared to the same 5 websites you’ll see for every query on other engines because of that very criteria, Mojeek has way more diversity in sources.
With all these corporations incentivized to further commercialize and consolidate the internet and with the rise of AI as a source of knowledge, Mojeek is one of the places I hang onto to explore a web of humans instead of a web of reputation and money.
Thanks a lot for sharing such a detailed rundown of what you find Mojeek to be useful for. I’ve shared this with the wider team.
This being said, if you have things that you’d like to wing our way in terms of improvements, or feedback on individual results, our inbox is always open (aloe at mojeek dot com) and there’s a submit feedback button on results pages. Mojeek thrives and grows off of feedback, the good and the bad 🙏
I’m just trying to use independent search engines with their own index/crawler. I used DDG for many years but the fact that it’s basically a front end for Bing and Microsoft started to bother me, particularly since they put ChatGPT into Bing.
I only know of Brave Search, Mojeek, and Kagi to be independent and private at this point. I don’t want to pay for Kagi, Mojeek has its uses but I wouldn’t use it as my main engine, so that left Brave Search. The company and CEO is sus, I don’t use their chromium browser, and their search results seem to emulate and optimize ranking based on the big guys (Google and Bing) but in 2024 search is hard to come by and it’s more important to me to be fully independent of big tech.
We need open search. Like Wikipedia for search, or something.
I saw this post earlier that mentions some other search options, along with plenty of other suggestions in the comments. Hopefully you can find something you like in there! I haven’t checked them all out myself yet.
are you able to let us know what you use Mojeek for? Just interested in where we slot in
Tldr: I like your ranking algo. Feels like a breath of fresh air reminiscent of the old days of search and internet
Long version: When I want to get results for a query, not for an intent per se, I use Mojeek.
It works best for certain types of queries. When I want to get out of the commercialized, centralized, sanitized, SEO-ridden bubble that is every other search engine, Mojeek let’s me find way more potentially obscure, unique, and satisfying results per query that likely wouldn’t rank favorably with the modern page quality criteria used by Google. Plus, compared to the same 5 websites you’ll see for every query on other engines because of that very criteria, Mojeek has way more diversity in sources.
With all these corporations incentivized to further commercialize and consolidate the internet and with the rise of AI as a source of knowledge, Mojeek is one of the places I hang onto to explore a web of humans instead of a web of reputation and money.
Thanks a lot for sharing such a detailed rundown of what you find Mojeek to be useful for. I’ve shared this with the wider team.
This being said, if you have things that you’d like to wing our way in terms of improvements, or feedback on individual results, our inbox is always open (aloe at mojeek dot com) and there’s a submit feedback button on results pages. Mojeek thrives and grows off of feedback, the good and the bad 🙏