Search Engines
www.ioslife.devDespite being a free product, free search engines make a lot of money. Kagi’s Why Pay for Search says that, “In 2022 Google generated USD $224.47 Billion dollars from advertisement revenue while processing approximately 8 Billion searches per day. At 365 days per year this amounts to approximately USD $0.07 revenue per search. If an average user searches 5 times per day, assuming a 30 day month this results in Google generating USD $11 revenue per user per month.
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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The comments here perfectly show what’s wrong with this community, “You don’t agree that my favourite service is #1 you’re clearly biased/a bot/paid”
“Your fav service has this problem use xyz instead” “XYZ has the exact same problem” “ahhh paid shill you’re super biased”
“I’ve never heard of your website before, you’re clearly a paid shill/bot”
“Ahhh they use crash logs, nothing should ever collect crash logs because I like it when the software I have never gets fixed”
“How dare you even talk about something that isn’t free > free as in libre and not as in price oh wait no I mean as in price because I will never pay for anything”
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I totally agree with you critical thinking and discussion is the best that can happen but at least at the time of writing my comment i didn’t see any of it, most of what i saw was:
The only helpful things that I saw were when people pointed out spelling mistakes.
if it seems “horribly biased” let them know why you have that feeling so they can improve on it.
I also don’t see how a paid service is antithetical (nice word btw, never heard it before) to privacy > yes Kagi might be able to link all searches to each account (I didn’t do too much research on how they implemented it) but that doesn’t mean that its not possible to implement it in a way were they wouldn’t be able to do that.
So yea, critical thinking and discussion GoGoGo but “you’re wrong, I’m right lol”(obviously made up but some comments here (meaning this community not just this post) give me that feeling) is none of that
This is clearly biased. Your points against SearXNG are weak. And you purposefully ignore the huge privacy implications of needing an account to do searches.
I don’t think this is written by a bot, but I’d say it’s either a camouflaged ad or a rather biased article.
Edit: To be clear. I do not care that a certain company has a good privacy policy. I want verifiable facts, not unverifiable claims. Their backend is proprietary, while SearXNG is free software. There’s only one entity behind that company, which could be (or turn) malicious at any moment. Meanwhile, SearXNG is hosted by multiple individuals and organizations, you could even use a different instance each time, so it’s impossible to corelate your search queries.
So yeah, this is a rather biased article towards a certain company.
Thanks for your feedback. My goal was just to look through the privacy policies with this, but you bring up a good point that that might not be a good experiment and could less to false assumptions. I do wonder if Kagi has had any this party analysis to back up their claims since it is not OSS.
I don’t think a blog named “iOSLife” belongs here. Apple is one of the worst offenders in terms of privacy violations.
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Looking at your post & comment history it becomes blatantly clear that you’re the poorly written AI spreading propaganda here…
Hi, once again just gonna ask for help identifying where my site is on a blocked list. If you can’t, then I would appreciate you stopping from saying that. Thanks! :)
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Timeout. Go home for today.
The user mentioned a blocklist, but I’m not able to find that list either. If we are going to accuse someone of maliciously pushing an agenda, I’d like a little more proof before jumping on the bandwagon.
I also searched it on Google and DDG and didn’t find it on the blocklist.
At this point I can only assume you are trolling by saying the same thing over and over again. I’ve made it very clear I am not promoting anything, rather just looking for opinions on the best options.
Yes, they did but my domain isn’t on that list from what I can tell. I’d love to know the list you found it on.
I think the article appears biased because searxng appears to offer the same functionality as Kagi, in spite of being free, yet Kagi is shown to be the best in class for some reason? Also it doesn’t touch on the critique that kagi having a login potentially aggregates all of your searches into one account that is stored by one company.
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Kagi’s privacy policy claims that “Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.”
SearXNG is tricky because the privacy policy comes from whatever instance you are using.
Anecdotally, I have had better results from Kagi than SearXNG. The SearXNG instance I have been testing out keeps getting rate limited and mostly shows results from Qwant and Bing.
I don’t really have a bias as I am testing out all of these options and trying to find the one that works best for my family.
Kagi can claim whatever they want in their privacy policy. Where’s the code of their servers? Because I see none. How do we know they aren’t keeping logs that could be easily correlated (by themselves or a third party who access their servers)?
Even if we had the code, I would still be skeptical, we can’t be sure what code are they exactly running on the server side and having an account linked to every search is just awful.
SearXNG is anonymous while offering the very same features, if not better.
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You aren’t wrong about not knowing if SearXNG instances are running a modified version of SearXNG that tries to log you.
Fortunately, we don’t need to trust those instances. They do not require you to login, so there’s not an unique identifier (like an account) to associate your searches with other than your IP address which you can hide with a VPN, or even better, using a .onion instance (something that Kagi does not have at all AFAIK).
For using Kagi, no matter if you switch your IP address every time, if you delete cookies after closing your browser or if you buy a new laptop for every search query, you’re uniquely identified because you need to log into your account.
And for that account, you have to use a payment method. Sure, you can try and pay with a Monero to Bitcoin exchanger and do not give any personal information (and if we’re being realistic, we know most Kagi clients aren’t doing this). Even if you paid anonymously, you can only achieve pseudonymity because you’re associated with your account.
With SearXNG, I could use a different .onion instance for each query and be completely anonymous (that’s completely overkill, but it illustrates my point well).
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No. Kagi’s fault is needing an account, a unique identifier which all searches could be correlated to.
SearXNG could leak your IP if your VPN provider was keeping logs? Definitely. And so does Kagi. Tor could be attacked by a three letter agency and compromise your .onion connection to SearXNG? Definitely. And it would be easier to de-anonimyze you when connecting to Kagi, which doesn’t have an onion domain. Do you need to give SearXNG your email and/or payment information? Not at all. But Kagi requires it. Can you look like two completely different users when doing two queries to SearXNG? Easy. Not possible with Kagi. Do we have the server’s code? We do for SearXNG instances. We don’t have Kagi’s.
I think it’s pretty clear the privacy compromise here.
That’s a good point that I hadn’t considered. I do like the idea of SearXNG, but didn’t have great results when testing it. Maybe I should give it another shot on another instance.
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Friend, I am just responding to your false claims with information from the privacy policy so that other users can be informed with what is clearly stated
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If you notice, I am only including more information when someone (mostly you) has brought up concerns about one of the offerings. If you had brought up concerns around Whoogle, then this conversation would be about Whoogle instead of Kagi. I am not promoting anything and my post clearly says,
I’d love to have more discussion around the other offerings in my post and even ones not listed.
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If it’s a bot then why the spelling errors? Not understanding the logic here.
Ever see spelling errors in spam? They do that on purpose.
Right in email they’re trying to get around spam filters. This is a blog, aka a website. Somewhere in this thread (curse Lemmy clients) someone pointed out the misspelled words and they were rather basic.
As a web developer familiar with SEO: still not making the connection. And from what I’m seeing lately in the comments here and elsewhere Lemmy seems to be full of people just jumping to conclusions rather quickly.
Your response really doesn’t answer anything. Spammers and/or bots misspell words in emails. Okay? And that’s related how?
Bot output can have spelling errors. Example given. Simple as that.
You’re claiming that it’s written by a bot simply due to spelling errors. I don’t believe you so I’m legitimately asking what the motivation would be, and you just say “well they misspell.”
Guess who else misspells things? Have you read any recently news publication? They’re just full of spelling and grammar mistakes. Look at me — I can misspell thigns too, I must be a bot.
Yeah that’s not really an answer, and the reason I’d like you to actually think about it is because I believe you’re confused what the difference is between a “bot” and a simple text generator.
I simply answered that. Bot output can have spelling errors. Nothing more was said or implied.
I want to reiterate that I have no affiliation with Kagi or any other search engine, I currently don’t even pay for Kagi. I am just a human on the hunt for the best search engine to protect my family’s privacy.
That said, I just saw your update regarding Sentry.
Looking at Kagi’s Privacy Policy, there are two things to say in response to
“We do not log or store your IP address. Your IP address is used only temporarily when enriching location/maps searches, and is not shared with any other party.”
“Anonymous logs are shared with Sentry when bugs, crashes, or warnings occur for debugging purposes.”
Also:
“Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.”
I didn’t even read OP’s post but…
It’s Kagi not Kaji. If you’re going to criticize something at least get the name right.
Privacy is not anonymity… and it’s a pev of mine that people confuse this.
However, you can get pretty close to anonymity paying them in crypto:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
👎
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Hey could you point me to the blocklist that my domain is currently on? I am not able to find it on any public list. It also would be extremeley surprising to me if it was on a list as this is the first article I have shared with the world.
TIL I am a bot. :)
I also made it a point not to state anything is the best or the worst and mentioned that the choice is up to you and your threat model.
Also, thanks to @digger@lemmy.ca for pointing out my typos. I have fixed them now.
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Well now, that would’ve saved me a lot of time and research. I also wouldn’t have learned nearly as much from reading all the different privacy policies. Luckily, I didn’t do that which allowed me to create my own personal recommendations for my family and myself.
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I appreciate that you included sections of the relevant privacy policies. I like your approach.
Please run what you write through spell check. You misspelled: extremely, business, advertisers, educated, and default. The word October could be capitalized, but as part of a hypothetical search query, it could be lower case on purpose.
Lastly, Qwant is struck through in your last sentence. It’s unclear if you chose that formatting because you don’t recommend it (as stated earlier) or for some other reason.
Keep writing! We need more of this!
Oh yikes. Those are egregious spelling errors hahaha. Thank you for reading and the feedback!
Yes, I struckthrough Qwant since they are sending your IP to Microsoft with every search. :)
It might be worth throwing in something at the bottom of the page explaining why you struck it through.
Done. Thanks for the recommendation.
FYI that site is on the cbuijs list of malicious domains
ETA : improving(.) Duckduckgo (.) Com
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You’re saying ioslife.dev is on a list? I did a quick search on Kagi and didn’t find anything. Could you share more info about what you’re talking about? Thanks!
The list is called ‘cbuijs Malicious Domains’ according to my firewall logs.
You might want to ask them to take you off the list.
Do you have a screenshot you could share with me? I am searching “ioslife” on the GitHub page and not getting any results.
This is from RethinkDNS
Thank you! Is that setup via uBlock?
That’s RethinkDNS, their cloud based, but it looks the same for their on device.
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Can you ask for permission before self promoting next time?
Oh. Sure. I truthfully was just looking for some feedback on my findings and didn’t see any rules against posting articles written by self.
I did not remove your post because I can see your good intent and organic content. But Lemmy is starting to grow, so its better to refine things a bit more.
No worries. I appreciate you letting it stay up.
People aren’t allowed to post their own stuff now? That’s been the norm since forever.
You forgot the “for permission” part in a question sentence consisting of roughly 10 words?
Who do you ask permission from and how? Message the mods? Post a poll?
I assume that the Reddit format has carried over to Lemmy, and obvious things are obvious enough. I also assume that you are an adult who has used internet enough to be able to sign up for and use Lemmy.
When does “forever” start?
If nobody was allowed to post their own stuff, then things like official comic accounts wouldn’t exist. Or official accounts in general.
We wouldn’t want official accounts of any corporation in this community.
That seems unwise.
It would be better to have some known corporate accounts, than only unknown corporate accounts.
Before the internet even existed. You are aware that forums have existed before anyone made an account on Lemmy, right?
The etiquette of other forums don’t define the etiquette here. You’re aware that the entire internet doesn’t exist in a monoculture, right?
Kagi user myself. Great experience, worth the $10.
Side note: Your posts feels a bit like self-promotion 🫥
I don’t see how it’s self-promotion if there’s no profit to be made. In my book, it’s no different than someone making a text post here.
I think all of the “drama” in this thread could’ve been solved with me copy and pasting my words into a self post
Yeah, Kagi seems pretty cool so far.
Not trying to self-promote, just looking for feedback on my findings and to see if anyone has other opinions to share around the products
I paid for the $5 subscription with Monero and used an alias email at signup. I like it so far
that’s still only pseudonymity. with SearXNG or even with Duckduckgo, I can just open a new window of my browser with a different IP and be a completely different person. Hell, I can even use a different SearXNG instance and my search query won’t even go through the same server than before. With Kagi, that’s impossible. You must always be logged in your account. Every search you do, could be potentially linked to your account.