I guess we all kinda knew that, but it’s always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
I don’t fathom paying to have your search history catalogued in correlation to your payment info. This will end as it always does, either hacked or enshittified.
Kagi has started using search results from Brave’s search index. The LGBT community disapproved of this because of past homophobic actions by Brave’s CEO Brendan Eich.
How are you supposed to self-host a web crawler and indexer without getting a giant server bill?
Having this service at least slightly centralised makes sense ressource-wise - but assuming crawling and indexing is free is just foolish. I’d choose something like kagi but I guess many people will rather cheap out and go for the next free service not realising that that company has to make money another way to make up for the high cost of running a search engine
I’d choose something like kagi but I guess many people will rather cheap out
I often feel as though these paid-for services aren’t delivering a meaningfully better product. After all, it isn’t as though Google’s problem is that they don’t have enough cash to spend on optimization. The problem is that they’re a profit-motivated firm fixated on minimizing their cost and maximizing their revenue. Kagi has far less money to optimize than Google and the same profit-chasing incentives.
If there was a Github / Linux distro equivalent to a modern search engine - or even a Wikipedia-style curated collaborative effort - I’d be happy to kick in for that (like I donate to these projects). For all Wiki gets shit on ask Spook-o-pedia, they do at least have a public change history and an engaged community of participants. If Kagi is just going to kick me back the same Wiki article at a higher point in the return list than Google, why get their premium service when I can just donate to Wiki and search there directly?
If I’m just getting a feed of paywalled news journals like the NYT or WaPo, its the same question? Why not just pay them directly and use their internal search?
Other than screening out the crap that Google or Bing vomit up, what is the value-add of Kagi? And why shouldn’t I expect to see the same shit-creep in Kagi that I’ve seen in Google or Bing over the last decade? Because I’m paying them? Fuck, I subscribe to Google and Amazon services, and they haven’t gotten any better.
