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.
Lmao fuck off with your ad
Kagi lied about its privacy claims and I can pull up the thread about the user who exposed it & the CEO got into this ridiculous evasion over it but I’ll let you do it for me. KAGI SUCKS 💥
Do you have the link? I’d be interested to read about it.
Thank you for the reminder. The name was tickling my brain but I couldn’t remember. The CEO acted like a major creeper. Must have gone to the Musk School of Bidness Mismanagement.
By “entering the Fediverse”, do you mean that they created an account on mastodon.online?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
The number of searches i get for the $5 should roll over to the next month if i dont use them all. No way i will be able to convince anyone to switch to this when they will run out of searches every month
That’s a valid criticism.
On the other side: Pay for a year at once and get 3600 searches/year. The rollover also doesn’t happen, but the effect is drastically reduced. Also get a discount overall.
I’m not saying that kagi is perfect, but fuck google sideways. Eat the rich. Pay for the product or you are the product.
I use and prefer Kagi myself but what does this have to do with this community?
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.
But SearxNG doesn’t have the nice features like bangs, redirects, changing the priority of domains, custom CSS, lenses, etc.
Kagi has clearly stated that the AI features will always be optional and the engine is designed to be useful without them.
