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, 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.
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!!!
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.
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.
Lmao fuck off with your ad
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.
