Welcome to Kagi, the paid search engine full of surprises, which today opened an account in the Fediverse!
@kagihq is the very interesting project for a paid search engine, without tracers and with an accuracy in identifying results such as to exclude all Google spam.
Those who believe that #Kagi’s costs are too high, should reflect on a small detail: if Google lets all those searches be done “for free”, who pays those costs? The answer might seem simple: “advertisers”.
Yet this would be an incomplete answer: like saying that rain is caused by clouds!
In reality, those costs are paid by users, by being milked and letting Google extract their “value”, a bit like in the human farm in Matrix…
We first heard about Kagi on the @lealternative website (unfortunately, since then the prices have increased a lot, raising many doubts about the sustainability of the project) and recently Cory Doctorow also talked about it on @pluralistic
In any case, we are really happy that a service like Kagi’s, effective and respectful of users’ privacy, has landed here in the #Fediverse.
I’ve tested kagi and agree that the search results are great. What I don’t like is that it’s making anonymous searching impossible, since I have to be logged in to use it (or use my unique token as part of the url for mobile searches).
Ultimately this means to me that in a private window mode (or even logged out with a fingerprinting resistant browser) I do not have the same degree of anonymity I enjoy even when using Google, let alone DDG or others.
I like the idea of not being dependent on google, but exposing my entire search history to one single entity is not my answer of choice.
Also, fun fact: Kagi owner believes only criminals want privacy and GDPR doesn’t apply to them, because they said so!
thanks, it’s clearly a red flag , you saved me some time: one less tool to chec k on later!
Thanks, that’s an interesting read.
I know that’s one person’s opinion and not a thorough research, but that’s still plenty of red flags.I’ve used the 100 searches in the free trial, thought the search was fine, better than Google’s these days. The subscription is a bit steep so I held off, kinda glad I did after digging more into this.
Having what little employees they have also make a mac-only browser, AI stuff and email that their user base doesn’t seem to want is all a bit weird.
Buying a t-shirt factory (wtf) with the money they could have used to potentially lower the subscription, but decided to burn through it to give out free t-shirts. That just screams narcissism-driven to me.Their vague statements on privacy isn’t convincing at all.
Some variation of “we don’t care about your data” isn’t in any way compelling evidence that you care about protecting the privacy of said collected data.In my opinion they lack focus, commitment and conviction into what I thought was their primary mission at first glance: being a privacy-focused no nonsense search engine.
Although that’s probably on me for reading what I wanted to see between the lines and that never was their stated mission, which would explain a lot.it is better than the competition but it will never be like Google before 2019 because they’ll never build their own index.
people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than 100 in the entire world. definitely not typical Kagi users
unless they are criminals, in which case we don’t care that they don’t have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
If this is where you’re drawing the “believes only criminals want privacy” argument from, that’s not exactly what the quote says. The wording sucks, but it’s saying:
- Very few people need anonymity.
- Anonymity seekers aren’t our target market.
- The criminal subset of anonymity seekers are even more “not our target market”.
(This bit about criminals is completely unnecessary, though, and its inclusion makes me inclined to believe that Vlad looks down on people who want anonymity. I’m definitely not a fan of this guy.)
If you think search engine giants like Google can’t track you when you’re not logged in, you think wrong.
I’m using a browser setup hardened against fingerprinting, block all known trackers, and cookies are barred from cross-site activity.
Might not be impossible to track me regardless, but at least I’m not giving them everything with a chef’s kiss on top.
Afaik blocking trackers makes your browser stand out more. You can’t avoid fingerprinting, so best bet is to hide in the masses - so as close to most common resolution and default settings etc.
It’s worth remembering that you don’t have to do all your searching on one platform. I certainly don’t.
I’m going to do a search to see if I can find out what this guys searching for!
…why’s he think he’s so special, anyways? Searching on 5 different platforms…what is he? CIA?
OH CRAP! WHAT IF HE’S CIA??? HE’S COMING TO TAKE MY CORN!!! HE’S BEEN SPYING ON ME IN MY WEBCAM EATING CORN NAKED!!!
Username checks out
First thing in their privacy statement:
- Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.
You can claim that they are lying but I personally do not think they do.
Google is not private and they track you on every web page, building up a profile of your searches, weather you are logged in or not.
@viking you are right: this is a serious criticality. However, Kagi aims to provide an optimal search service, but it is not focused on anonymity.
From that point of view, Brave’s search engine is much better, which has improved a lot
I subscribed to the lower tier for a while, but I kept running out of searches early on every month, and the price of the higher tier is just not excusable. So I found myself adding the !ddg bang most of the time to avoid spending my Kagi quota.
And as good as Kagi is, it’s still primarily a meta search engine, organizing results from the dominant actors. So it’s not like the price is justified by them having to crawl the entire web themselves. Their own crawler, Teclis, is currently small web only and can probably best be described as an interesting project.
Instead of making search cheaper or more affordable, they spend subscription money on creating AI services and various other non-search distractions. Maybe that’s good for some people, but I don’t want that shit. I just want a good search engine at a justifiable price. And for that, sadly, Kagi fell short.
For me, it took me several months to use the 100 trial searches. Paying $5/month for like 20 searches isn’t worth it for me. Also just not into getting more subscriptions… wouldn’t matter if it was just 50 cents/month for the basic plan. If they had one-time-payment no-expiration option like 1000 searches for $10, I’d probably lean towards getting that.
I pay 5 euros for a VPS at Hetzner and self host my own SearXNG metasearch engine without compromising my privacy. Unlike Kagi, I can search without limits and without the AI stuff that even Kagi has started getting into.
Lmao fuck off with your ad
Aaah, now I get it. You guys made an account to post on. I saw the headline and I was busting my head how in the world a search engine would federate within the fediverse…
Mastodon posts tend to get funky when they federate, because Mastodon has this (annoying) norm of starting posts with mentions. So OP mentioned the community on the first line, which became the first part of the title - @fediverse. Second, it mentions Kagi as a tag instead of name, which gives the @kagihq. And then comes the first sentence as the rest of the title.
It’s a great example of Lemmy/Mastodon interoperability working, but not being quite there yet.
But it’s a Friendica post, not from Mastodon. You can’t write such a long posts on mastodon
Depends how the instance is set up. But yeah, it’s the norm many places in the Fediverse, not just Mastodon - I should have double checked! :)
Mastodon posts tend to get funky when they federate, because Mastodon has this (annoying) norm of starting posts with mentions. So OP mentioned the community on the first line, which became the first part of the title - @fediverse. Second, it mentions Kagi as a tag instead of name, which gives the @kagihq. And then comes the first sentence as the rest of the title.
I’m not writing from Mastodon, but from Friendica
It’s a great example of Lemmy/Mastodon interoperability working, but not being quite there yet.
The mentions problem seems to be only for PieFed, but it doesn’t happen with Lemmy
I think it should be reported as an issue to PieFed developers
It seems you’re right - the title field from Friendica doesn’t federate well to PieFed. So I probably misinterpreted the confusion about the title. :)
@rimu@piefed.social
@RootBeerGuy in fact the title could be misunderstood… 😐
By “entering the Fediverse”, do you mean that they created an account on mastodon.online?
@rglullis yes, exactly. To avoid misunderstandings, I changed the title (I hope he updates Lemmy too)
Well, this is certainly a lot less exciting than what I first thought.
Kagi lied about its privacy claims and I can pull up the thread about the user who exposed it & the CEO got into this ridiculous evasion over it but I’ll let you do it for me. KAGI SUCKS 💥
Thank you for the reminder. The name was tickling my brain but I couldn’t remember. The CEO acted like a major creeper. Must have gone to the Musk School of Bidness Mismanagement.
The number of searches i get for the $5 should roll over to the next month if i dont use them all. No way i will be able to convince anyone to switch to this when they will run out of searches every month
That’s a valid criticism.
On the other side: Pay for a year at once and get 3600 searches/year. The rollover also doesn’t happen, but the effect is drastically reduced. Also get a discount overall.
I’m not saying that kagi is perfect, but fuck google sideways. Eat the rich. Pay for the product or you are the product.
I’ve been using mojeek and ddg, but I’ve been considering setting up SearXNG on a server.
Good news !
I use and prefer Kagi myself but what does this have to do with this community?
I can only speak for myself, but I like to keep posted when important people and organizations are opening accounts on the Fediverse. :)
It’s funny that Kagi included “fediverse forums” functionality in their search before they decided to join Mastodon - one would think the search functionality required a bit more.
It’s hip to like Kagi because it’s not Google.
I think I stopped paying for Kagi at the third or fourth controversy I heard about, I can’t remember which one. I wasn’t exactly happy about the implication that paying for Kagi means giving money to the bigot founder of Brave.
Every complaint I’ve heard about the owner has been ridiculous. I don’t know about the bigotry though. It’s better and has been since it wasn’t hip if it’s actually hip now. I’m swapping between it and my own searxng instance.
@willya these days, I still get excited when a fairly well-known entity opens an account in the Fediverse.
I would never use a browser that requires an account. That’s insane.
