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?
If you’re looking for an open source search engine that’s building its own data set, one exists (and it’s totally open source and free).
If you’re looking for something that collates other engines’ contents, SearXNG is also open source and free.
Kagi isn’t really unique in any way here; their most unique quality appears to be linking your searches to an account, requesting money, and promising not to sell your data at a later date.
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.
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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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However, Yandex works under Russian jurisdictions. Brave search is ok
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.
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.
I’m not a fan of them doing business with Brave and [how they handled criticism from the community] (https://programming.dev/post/8285794).
For context: They edited their anwser and said the old one was bad. https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave
IMO the previous link provides better context, as it provides a look into what the leadership said within that thread before trying to clean up their optics, as well as showing other examples of what the company was up to.
The original behavior, and the censorship on Kagi-run discussion platforms is quite telling.
It’s not open source, at least to my knowledge.
That’s the problem, though, given the cost of indexing it. I’m not sure there’s a single open source search engine that doesn’t rely on some sort of proprietary software. My philosophy is that if the product is free, you likely are the product.? We would almost need a donation-based search engine to get around that, which would likely would not be sustainable.
No it is not. They are “increasingly open source”, whatever that truly means.
It means that they are open sourcing an increasing number of components? In the very same page they are linked: browser extensions, libraries they use for their AI features.
It means absolutely nothing
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.
From the looks of their own promotional material, the opportunity to build your own tailor-made filter bubble…
Search experience tailored to you and your needs.
We encourage you to evaluate and change results.
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 ie Twitter account and therefore can’t see the content their anyway. I am developer, so I want to raise the relevance of GitHub in my results.
You’re correct. I saw a small red flag and missed the big one. Kagi Corp says it ultimately wants to filter out search results that don’t match:
- Your favorite corporate brands
- Your political beliefs
- Your religious biases
In this future, instead of everyone sharing the same Siri, we will own our truly own Mike or Julia, or maybe Donald - the AI. And when you ask your own AI a question like “does God exist?” it will answer it relying on biases you preconfigured. When you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it will do so knowing what kind of food you like to eat. The same will happen when you ask it to recommend a good coffee maker - it will know the brands you like, your likely budget and the kind of coffee you usually drink.
Kagi has three separate pages that lay out this ideology that promotes data collection and segregation from others first, and privacy last.
I appreciate your rose tinted glasses, but when you wear them, red flags just look like flags.
You skipped political filter bubbles, which can be manipulative indeed. And in their aptly named manifesto, Kagi Corp promises just that:
You could customize an AI to be conservative or liberal, sweet or sassy!
In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized… AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data, knowing its incentives align with yours.
Isn’t that thoughtful of them? A bubble where you are alone, a bubble they want to build.
You will pay the company,
you will give up your data,
and you will be happy.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?
If Kagi Corp’s goal is to create a user profile on you, then whether they’re using your data to serve you ads or not is irrelevant.
This is the Privacy community, not the “You will give them your data and be happy” community
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.
It’s still data given to them, no scare quotes needed. And if that data includes your political alignment, like they say in their manifesto, a data breach would be catastrophic. Far worse has been done with far less. (And even if there isn’t one, using their manifesto to promise a dystopia where you are nestled in a political echo chamber sounds like a nightmare).
And even corporate brand loyalty is mentioned in their manifesto.
When DuckDuckGo complained about Google’s filter bubble, even Google had the good sense to downplay it. Kagi seems giddy about it.
I was introduced to it by an IRL friend of mine very early on and was very sceptical. I then tried it many months later and what actually convinced me most are its “advanced” features. They’re features that should obviously be in any search engine but since there’s been practically 0 innovation in this space in the past decade or so, this is very refreshing.
The results being on par with Google at the worst also helps.
Pretty much everything about it is really great. The only thing that’s not great is that you’re required to identify yourself with every search. I’m not aware of any alternative for a paid search engine though. They claim to not log or otherwise abuse your PII and it’s believable but there’s still a risk.
I guess the price is also kinda high but it’s justified AFAICT.Btw: [email protected].
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.
I’ve had better results than on Google in many cases. Also leaves DDG and other privacy relevant alternatives in the dust.
But, unless you are a power user it’s hard to justify the cost. Very pricey.
I use the family plan with my wife. So we end up at $7 per month per user. Which IMO is ok. Given how important search is for our every day internet usage, I can accept this price.
I rarely have to jump to the second page of the search results to get what I want, so I am really happy with Kagi.
The starter tier is only $5/month for 300 searches, which is more than enough for your average user.
I can get not wanting to pay for search, but I wouldn’t call $5 “very pricey”. In fact, I’d be so bold as to call it reasonable.
Maybe I am not average but I blow past 300 pretty easily. I also think you may underestimating how much people search on their phones.
Same here. I tried on the starter plan but had to upgrade. According to my account I have made 802 searches since January 4th. So 17.4 searches a day on average. This means that for a 31 day month I am looking at 620 searches.
I am also a heavy user of bookmarks and browser history. So I don’t rely on search to open specific sites (like searching for “facebook” which is one of Google’s most popular queries). So someone who is in the habit of using search for direct navigation is probably going to be a good chunk higher.
That being said I work on the computer and do a fair number of searches for my job. So I can believe that a light user is pretty comfortable at 300 searches a month. But moderate searches or people who use the search engine for navigation will need the unlimited plan.
I just checked and performed more than 300 search queries in the past 4 days.
I have 2000 searches in the past 7 days… 300 searches a month seems so miniscule
I just checked my history and performed 611 searches this week on this device alone. 300 is not even close to enough for a week. $5 is way too expensive for that.
Personally I love it. Being able to boost results from some sites while depriotizing or even banning others has been real helpful. Not having unrelated “sponsored” content cluttering up the results is certainly nice as well. The results themselves feel like Google from ten years ago, relevant and on point.
I’ve been using it as my primary for quite a while, it’s pretty awesome and the development pace is pretty good.
I’m not really a fan of the lead guy, some of the comments he’s made on the forums are less than great, but the product is top notch.
Care to elaborate on the comments? I haven’t read any of them.
Some interesting moderation choices that suggest a lack of support for the LGTBQ+ community, a business partnership with Brave, and a really shitty take refusing to add help numbers for self-harm related searches.
You can get the cliff notes of it from this post and comment to it: https://lemm.ee/comment/8016834
This made me sad. I actually thought I found the search engine I was looking for and now I get this shit.
For context: They edited their anwser and said the old one was bad. https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave
I would argue that the new answer is still bad.
The search results were top notch before adding Brave, indicating to me that they aren’t really needed.
“People complain about all of them” is probably a factual statement, which is why evaluating each source independently is valuable. I don’t think it justifies completely dismissing criticism.
It is indeed disappointing.
I know what you are referring to with regards to the LGBTQ+ matter, but the only source is the user who reported it (with a screenshot that did not show anything), the same user who used some completely dishonest and bad faith arguments* to slander the CEO guy. I wouldn’t take that at face value and I have absolutely no problem to see, instead, a reason to moderate their comments.
* the CEO of kagi has a website with a “best country ranking”, which is just a stupid page with 15 criterias chosen to rank which country is the greatest. The argument was that the guy must be a racist/white suprematist because the top countries for the most part were white (and wealthy. Duh). Apparently they were especially pissed about the fact that he decided to include the Olympic medals pro capite, despite the fact that it’s one of the few metrics in which first world countries were not at the top.
with a screenshot that did not show anything
the screenshot shows a thread on Kagi’s Discord that’s been deleted almost immediately after that screenshot has been taken, while other user’s calls to “stop shoving LGBTQ down our throats” have been left up.
The screenshot shows an off-topic comment that complains about other comments being “left up”, and the CEO that answers that nothing has been deleted, in fact (I suppose in regards to the topic). The thread in the screenshot was (going to be) deleted because it’s off-topic, it’s a meta-conversation that doesn’t add anything to the general discussion, if not noise and chaos (and tbh, following long conversation in discord is already terrible as it is).
I guess it’s the word of two different people in that Mastodon thread vs the word of the guy who moved all discussion to his personal Discord server to begin with.
The second person (I think) referred to the thread in the screenshot when they said “I saw it disappearing live”. I have no problems believing that the guy deleted that thread, it’s an off-topic thread. What I have problem to believe is that the guy specifically deleted comments from queer folks (which is the point of this post). And again, the person who started the Mastodon thread is someone that - in my view - has no credibility at all, considering the completely dishonest way in which they carried out the conversation.
Not sure what the screenshot you posted is supposed to prove. He closed a thread on the kagifeedback site asking to move the discussion (if needed) in Kagi Discord, where - in fact - happened (although with very little benefit for anybody). AFAIK it’s not “his personal Discord” server, it’s Kagi’s server, and I believe most of the conversation (including the one in the “incriminating” screenshot) happened in
#general. I am really not sure what your point is.Either way, it doesn’t matter what I believe. What I know is that the person making the Mastodon thread is someone in bad faith and with (in my opinion) completely bad takes. Someone who makes such a post, in my opinion is a moron.
It’s interesting that in your previous month-old comment you mentioned “a paraphrased and reinterpreted (in bad faith) piece of a comment” from the CEO, which confused me, because the Mastodon thread also includes the content of a comment the CEO tried to scrub.
But you did write this gem:
Now, since my mother tongue has the unfortunate responsibility for having coined the term “fascism”, I think I have at least an idea of what it means.
…appeal to ethnicity is pretty funny
That is not what Ethnicity is.
We are talking about the same thread, right?
https://nyan.lol/@zicklepop/111716010186646210
This one.
There is no comment that the “CEO tried to scrub”. There is only a discord screenshot of a meta-conversation about the fact that the user claimed their comment was deleted, and the CEO answers that nothing was deleted to avoid this very same accusation, and then says he will delete this (the meta) thread (because it’s off-topic).
Not sure what you find funny though, however,
a paraphrased and reinterpreted (in bad faith) piece of a comment
referred to:
and his response is basically that inclusivity is why there is no innovation in tech anymore. i think he wants to get acquired by 37signals.
Which is completely arbitrary. Even wanting to read the comment of the CEO with malice, he said “politics”.
…appeal to ethnicity is pretty funny
This has nothing to do with ethnicity, it has to do with words and meaning. Calling someone a fascist for such matter is completely bananas and - frankly - disrespectful towards the people who died fighting the actual fascism. The CEO can be an idiot, or a tech bro, but he expressed his views and let others express theirs. This is pretty evident from their forum.
We are talking about the same thread, right?
Oops. I was looking a few comments up in this very Lemmy thread, somebody linked to this other Lemmy thread.
I do think it is super important to discuss whether a tech bro is just making a quick cash grab product in order to get bought out by a larger corporation, though. As seen with the Skiff tech bros.
Yeah, that thread linked (https://lemm.ee/comment/8016834) references the same Mastodon thread. I know because I followed all of this few months back.
I do think it is super important to discuss whether a tech bro is just making a quick cash grab product in order to get bought out by a larger corporation, though. As seen with the Skiff tech bros.
Oh yeah, this is definitely interesting, but…while email is somewhat binding as a service, a search engine is not. Give me 2 minutes and I have changed the default search engine on all my devices away from Kagi. If that will be the case (despite the fact that so far, I have no reason to think it is the case), it will be super easy to move away. I think if I were a Skiff customer without a custom domain, I would still be crying instead.
“ a lack of support for the LGTBQ+ community,”
Are you saying that the GUI doesn’t have a setting for rainbow coloured buttons?
op provided a link. maybe you should click it?
The link just goes to a comment that links to a screenshot of Discord where someone complains vaguely about moderation to the CEO. I wouldn’t exactly call that evidence. More harboring a personal grudge
I think the fact the CEO only wants to handle criticism in a private, controlled Discord server already says a lot about how the conversation is going.
Wow, some people need to lighten up. I’m an ally. It was a joke based on the word ‘support’ and the subject of software. Fucks sake.
Edit: fucks sake people, lighten up. I’m an ally.
then maybe you should realise that the LGBTQ folks have seen too many serious remarks similar to yours to consider them funny.
Oh fuck off.
10/10, great allyship. remember to also make some kitchen jokes, and then act offended and keep repeating that you’re a feminist when women call you out on it!
I have been using it since September and enjoy it. (Paid with crypto of course)
Didn’t know they accept crypto payments, that’s cool
They accept bitcoin, but i paid it with my monero via a swap service. Though the ought to accept monero directly.
I think it’s great. It’s the only search engine where I don’t find myself going back the Google every now and then. I’d say the results are actually a lot better than what Google offers. Being able to rank websites higher or lower (or even pin them or block them entirely) is great, and as it’s saved to your account, it’s basically synced across devices.
It’s $10/month for unlimited searches. I tried their limited $5 plan first, but found myself thinking “do I really need to search this?” way too often to try and stay under the 200 (back then I think, now it’s 300) search limit.
Their privacy model is mostly based on you trusting them that they don’t keep your search history for longer or any other purposes than stated (if turned on), but their business model is clearly based on subscriptions, so it should be fine unless they get greedy.
You can not enable the “feature” to keep search history. The slider stays disabled when you try.
True, it’s even disabled by default. But you still have to trust them that they really don’t store your history.
