I’ve been using this search engine and I have to say I’m absolutely in love with it.
Search results are great, Google level even. Can’t tell you how happy I am after trying multiple privacy oriented engines and always feeling underwhelmed with them.
Have you tried it? What are your thoughts on it?
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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.
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From my brief interactions with the dev I believe they’re doing things the very hard way when it comes to indexing.
It might be the only choice once AI poisoning becomes prolific. It’s already corrupted the niche topics and soon it may overwhelm the topics with more human eyes on it.
I don’t need my search history linked to my payment data for future enshittification. At least Google (and DDG or whatever) is guessing and I can make that harder with a proper browser.
Been using is for several months. Definitely VERY overpriced (I’d say $3-4/mo for a search engine would be fine, not $10), but the results are great, and I love the quick answer feature. It quickly summarizes info from top results, helped me a lot in college, where sometimes your brain is melting and you want the answer NOW.
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However, Yandex works under Russian jurisdictions. Brave search is ok
At the risk of sounding incredibly naive, what kind of western censorship are you talking about? I’ve never noticed that as an issue with either Google, DDG or kagi.
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Thanks for elaborating! I don’t use search engines for political/news related queries so I guess that’s why I never noticed (or it’s so effective that I just accept it as the truth of course…). Either way, I agree that’s bad and I hope it’s not an issue with Kagi.
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It’s great using their Fastgpt which gives accurate results from various forums and websites, where other gpt based search engines lack. And got to try their Summarizer.
I recommend to use it as Secondary source (with tempmails) and Primary remains SearX for sure.
paid options for the elites: buy several multi TB hdd and host&curate a personal search index… to supplement conventional search results.
or personal AWS storage but thats likely to be risky and more expensive. also relatively difficult.
What would i be searching for that’s so difficult to find that I would pay for Kagi? Especially when there are multiple options for good free search engines.
I find DDG not great at finding what I need, where Kagi returns less results but they are more relevant.
There’s also AI features that can be integrated with the search results which helps.
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That’s not so much a filter bubble as it is noise reduction. No, I don’t want to have Pinterest results in my search engine. No, I don’t have an Instagram or Twitter account and therefore can’t see the content there anyway. I am developer, so I want to raise the relevance of GitHub in my results.
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You forget the part where they mentioned a different business model that allows to dump the ad-driven one, aligning the interest of the user and the vendor. In other words, a model in which the company gets the money from the user so that it can build a product for them, rather than getting money from others (advertisers, etc.) so that the user is someone who simply has to be milked for data or sold shit. This frame, in my opinion, changes quite significantly the otherwise dystopian nature of such (future) vision. The objectives in fact are very important in this discussion. Facebook, twitter etc. need people to spend time on their platform to give value to their customers (the advertisers). Creating bubbles, fomenting incendiary content, etc. are all functional to that objective. If the business model was different, the same might not happen.
In any case, the current features that exist (and that are not the speculations on the future in the manifesto) allow the users to customize the rankings as they want, without AI or kagi doing it for us. If I don’t want to see fox news when I search for something, I make the conscious choice and downrank it. If I want to see guardian and apnews, I uprank them. The current features empower users to curate their own results, which is very different from an opaque, black-box product doing it for us for specific reasons like might be the case of Facebook.
Ultimately, someone will make a decision about how to rank results in a page. Some algorithm needs to be used. What’s a better alternative, compared to me providing strong inputs to such algorithm, that does not raise red flags?
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In reality I did not read anywhere that they intend to create a profile on you. What I read is some fuzzy idea about a future in which AIs could be customised to the individual level. So far, Kagi’s attitude has been to offer features to do such customisations, rather than doing them on behalf of users, so I don’t see why you are reading that and jumping to the conclusion that they want to build a profile on you, rather than giving you the tools to create that profile. It’s still “data” given to them, but it’s a voluntary action which is much different from data collection in the negative sense we all mean it.
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I am currently subscribed and it is definitely a step up from other engines I have tried. The main feature is just that it seems to somewhat cut back the general blogspam and SEO fluff. It isn’t perfect but whenever I do compare it to Google, Brave or Duck Duck Go it seems to be ahead, or in rare cases similar.
The ability to lower/block sites is also quite nice. I also have a few raised sites, but that is really a minor improvement compared to blocking crap like Quora and Pintrest.
That being said the small plan is a pretty small number of searches so I need to pay for the unlimited plan which is quite expensive. I currently think it is worth it but it is definitely borderline value, not a slam-dunk decision.
I also have concerns about them focusing on things I don’t care about. Lots of AI features and a browser. I don’t want any of that, just focus on search, there is still lots of room for improvement, even if they are currently leading the pack.
Not saying you’re wrong, want to share my perspective: I agree with the AI, the quick answer saves me a ton of time by adding source links where I always click on to verify the answer (quicker than going through search results when I don’t know the terminology).
As to the browser - not really sure why they’re pushing for their own, isn’t FF good enough?
Yeah, the AI I am lukewarm on. I’m fine having them experiment, and it does seem that they are using it tastefully. It is something that I can see improving the experience in the future even if I feel it has little to no benefit to me now.
But yes, the browser just seems like a distraction.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
One YouTube video suggests a grim future
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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There’s some tradeoff here, keep garbage out and relevant results in. Definitely want to stay connected with others and share knowledge (such as websites that provide quality info)
… Okay, I just tried Stract, and its results are… Mostly not helpful.
My understanding is that Kagi makes an effort to tell you how they anonymize your search so they can’t tie it back to your account afterwards, whereas Searx is more dependent solely on the goodwill of whoever is hosting the instance. Both are good faith dependent in the end, but one has a profit motive for keeping that faith.
Edit: I hope Stract gets there and takes off one day, but today doesn’t seem to be that day for me.
The privacy policy is also a legally binding document, not just a promise that the company does. If they are found violating it, the GDPR fines are going to hurt and they would lose the customer base in a blink. Their privacy policy right now is exemplary, I am one of those who read policies before using a product and kagi’s is literally the best I have seen: clear, detailed, specific and most importantly, good from the privacy perspective.
Do they have an android app? I haven’t been able to find anything that looks trustworthy
I just added the search engine to my browser. I don’t see the need for an app when all of the results are going to open in the browser anyways.
I’ve used Quick Search since 2013. Simple, configurable.
Back then I had it tied to the search button (which no longer exists ☹️)
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I’m currently a Kagi user. When I first used it I thought it was an excellent alternative to Google, and well worth the price. However ever since they integrated Brave results, I’ve noticed a significant decline in the quality of results. The only reason I’m still subscribed is because I haven’t found a suitable alternative.
Yandex
startpage is already on google level and the defaults of some searxng instances are better the google results
probably because it literally proxies Google’s search results.
It is a privacy nightmare as they have your payment information on file.
https://kagi.com/privacy
I’m so glad that all companies always follow there privacy policy.
Seriously though even if they don’t track you an adversary could compromise them
They don’t, but a company built on that premise (private search) that does otherwise would be playing with fire. It caters to users that specifically look for that. I would quit in an instant if that would be the case, for example.
This is true about pretty much anything. Unless you host and write the code yourself, this is a risk. It is a risk with searXNG (malicious instance, malicious PR/code change that gets approved etc.), with email providers, with DNS providers, etc.
What solution you propose to this, that can actually scale?
I love it. Personally I don’t think it is too expensive, though I am probably a power user of search engines, as I need it a lot while programming all sorts of stuff… So maybe it is just me saying its worth the money, because I use it a lot
To me 100$/y seems a little much compared to Proton Unlimited and the amount of features there. Perhaps it’s like that due to their size and AI features
Running a search engine is just a lot more expensive than running a VPN and email service. The amount of data and processing power needed to have a useful search index is just so much higher