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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I never had faith in Kagi. If anything gets shilled too much in a cultist manner, treat it like a red flag, no matter closed or FOSS.
I mean, that seems like a really sceptical way to live. Often things get shilled because people are just happy with the service and think the business is doing things well. I am a kagi user and have brought it up to some others, including outside of lemmy, because I find it produces better search results than ddg etc. And it’s a definite step up from google in privacy
Use Searx with “default [all]” language option. Use Yandex with a VPN. This combo is superior to anything else. Why? Because Yandex is Russian, and unlike western search engines, they ignore DMCA law result removal requests.
Yandex results are almost better than the old 2007 Google, with reverse image search and video search being the king as well.
I used Qwant extensively, until they became another business. DDG was made by a CEO that was in data selling business before, and censors for west government agenda, like Russia bad or Israel good. Mojeek is okay but… Yandex has no competition. Startpage is proxied Google, okay but also dicey ownership.
Digdeeper has a decent comparison of search engines on his blog.
We’ll try and get that okay up to a good and then a great as time goes by! There’s a submit feedback button on results pages if you’d like to be a part of that.
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Yours is one of the only names that still carries respect for me. Indexing is extremely hard when the competition is Google, Bing and Yandex, but people need the result quality. Everything else will be fine with time and effort.
🙏
Being skeptical of anything online isn’t really a bad thing IMO. There’s so much garbage to wade through.
I spun up a docker container for searxng
Next step is to make it public to help other people and blend your data/traffic
My host-fu is weak and the uptime is terrivle right now… Trying to figure out why the container just crashed randomly
Open a search app to the public? So their searches come from my IP address? No fucking way, unless I’m missing something.
I’m still trying to understand searxng, does it start with nothing and build up its index each time you search? Will your results be rubbish for a while?
It just culminates results from a bunch of other engines
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I see that makes sense. So what does making it public/blending traffic do?
Makes it harder to fingerprint/differentiate traffic
👍
I am suspicious of anything I see being pushed as heavily as Kagi is pushed by it’s alleged users.
We’re just vocal because we’ve been suffering over the enshittification of Google search for so long.
There are numerous other popular search engines out there though.
yeah they suck
Seems like this one is in good company then.
zing?
Successful CEOs need to learn to shut the fuck up.
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They promote their search engine but their users don’t get to see ads. I don’t know what’s wrong about that. Every company advertises with its products. I don’t see what’s reprehensible about that.
They’re right, anonymity and privacy are two different things. Since you have to pay to use Kagi, you’re not anonymous. But they allegedly don’t know what you as the user search for when using their search engine. So they’re being honest here and how can honesty be bad here? Anyways, we’re on privacy@lemmy.ml, not anonymity@lemmy.ml or whatever.
While I still give you this one, they’re technically correct. The word “AI” isn’t there but they mention AI features, haha. It’s a bit debatable since Vlad said “kagi.com” - which doesn’t mention AI or AI tools. Only when you go to the pricing page there are mentions of AI tools.
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Am I the only one thinking Lori comes across as a bit of a dick here?
Yeah kind of, but the CEO needs to learn that not everyone will like their products, you cant convince everyone.
The person said that they dont want to engage with the discussion, then the CEO should have just let it be.
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Holdup, what did the tumblr CEO do? Havent heard about that, im curious.
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What’s wrong with having boundaries?
Seems like people making people mistakes. Not anything horrific.
How can anyone worry about IP addresses when the search engine also knows your real world payment credentials? That and privacy don’t really mix.
So, this means Proton is not private either? Any product you pay for cannot be private?
There is a difference between anonimity and privacy.
Email is inherently not private. Even if your own provider zealously protects your privacy, if the person you’re emailing uses Gmail, that’s all she wrote.
They know the names of their customers but they don’t know their search queries. There’s the privacy. At least that’s what they said. Since Kagi isn’t Open Source it always comes down to trust.
I enjoyed reading the article. To me, the perspective of the owner reminds me of the owners of Brave in that they are Libertarian in ways that seem aligned with mainstream views at a glance but the Venn diagram also overlaps with a disdain for regulation, while portraying a (potential) facade of being eternally infallible and trustworthy while also being a for-profit company.
Elon Musk also comes to mind in that his intelligence leaves him vulnerable to overlooking the nuances of conversations and alternative point of views. I think there’s a general over reliance on artificial intelligence as a savior that will be fully embraced that will lead to large issues in the short/long term for Kagi.
Personally, it always felt a little bit like astroturfing hearing all of the kagi fanboys in every privacy thread, but for what it’s worth, seeing them show up live In the flesh in this thread as well makes me feel a bit less like I’m talking to bots lol
Personally, I self-host my own version of searXng that only uses search engines that don’t track my IP address. I’d say that those results are good enough 90% of the time, and when I need something more granular, I use a publicly hosted version of searXng that uses Google in its results
TBH, OP sounds like a bit of an
entitled douche, edit: not the most appropriate descriptor, but I do think OP should try and look at the situation from another perspective.In their blog post they complained about lack of transparency and noted numerous issues with Kagi that caused them to lose faith in the company. The CEO personally responds to explain themselves (i.e. make things more transparent) and OP sticks their fingers in their ears and acts liked they’re a victim because the CEO attempts service recovery.
I’ve made public complaints about companies before. I wish I received such tailored and personalised responses.
You wish the CEO of a company would harass you?
You wish a CEO would give general denials and the same non-answers you see in a comment thread while pretending to engage with you in good faith?
Fuck off, the CEO gave no new info or perspectives and just showed himself to be the asshole that recent emerging evidence had been showing he was.
Jesus. How do you function if an email constitutes harassment?
I get “harassed” daily by hundreds of spammers. I just don’t reply or give it another thought. Things OP could have done.
You and I have a very different idea of what constitutes harassment.
Are you the CEO?
Sure, why not? Though please don’t spread it around, I’m currently under deep cover pretending to be an Australian who frequently comments on Australian news and is registered with an Australian-themed instance.
It’s all part of my evil plan to have the first multinational company with their global headquarters in Antarctica.
I haven’t seen many public diatribes against Kagi, but the ones I have seem to be like this person. They complain very publicly based on their perception of Vlad, spend their days in Discord fomenting drama (which seems like something only children should be doing) and are so fragile that they think getting measured emails from someone they went after publicly is a form of harrassment. It’s absurd.
I can only hope this was written by a teenager, otherwise it’s a pretty rough way to live as an adult.
After reading your comment, my calling the OP an ‘entitled douche’ was not the best response. I remember the fragility of being a teenager, and even being a young adult… While unlikely, if the blog’s author does come across these comments, I would rather they take a moment to consider things from Vlad’s/Kagi’s perspective rather than just take my comment as a personal attack.
Did we read the same article? His responses to GDPR were very concerning, and I say that as an American.
I agree with you. I wasn’t referring to the actual contents so much as OP’s attitude about the e-mails from the CEO. I think Kagi could benefit from hiring, or at least consulting, with specialists in the field to better define their position. It’s clear that OP has legitimate concerns.
Right?! Super easy to be “privacy focused” when you just flat out refuse to acknowledge anything as personally identifiable information!
I’m still considering giving it a try. I’ve been using the free perplexity app to do all my searching with recently and that’s worked pretty well, but not perfect.
I’ve been using both Perplexity and Kagi for searching things, and it’s working out pretty well for me. The main thing that I find Kagi useful for is filtering to Fediverse results (which tends to be mostly Lemmy threads).
It’s pretty expensive though…
Just try it. You can always cancel your subscription if you don’t like it (or just pay once without subscribing). I’ve been using it for half a year now and absolutely love it.
I’m still on the free first 300 searches. Looking like I’ll subscribe.
Im with Kagi on this. Wtf is wrong with someone sending you emails to an email you decided to make public. This person is projecting how fragile their argument is by reacting this way.
Vlad was doing the right thing discussing it in private first before they probably address this stupid attempt at causing drama. I read all of the shit they posted and it sounds to me like they are nitpicking/strawmanning AI features which are very VERY optional.
there’s nothing wrong with that. continuously messaging someone after being told more than once that the recipient doesn’t want to continue the conversation, though? that’s not okay.
I get that but it’s a dick move by the author of that article to publicly speak bad about a product and then don’t even wanna listen to what that person who made that product has to say to defend it. Especially if there’s some false information that get’s spread by that article. I’m not saying anything written in that article is true or false - just explaining the situation from Vlad’s view.
it’s a post on a personal blog of a person on the internet. a blog post. not an article.
What kind of non argument is that lol
Blog post or article - whatever. The effect is the same: It’s on the internet, people read it and get influenced. Just because I picked the wrong word doesn’t kill my point. I’m sure you get what I meant.
Personal blog on a public Internet is kind of an oxymoron.
The blog post is close enough to an article.
Christ almighty
Wow, those unsolicited emails are icky
I enjoy kagi as a service that I’ve paid for, but yeah… stuff like this makes it hard to enjoy with a clear conscience.
I think the op already said this, but at least this shows that a product like this (with a little more focus, transparency, and integrity) could be sustainable.
I had no faith to lose. Its a search engine sign into. How could that be private.
They allegedly don’t know their user’s search queries. That’s how it’s allegedly private.