I apologize if this is old news, but I just noticed it. It looks like Kagi has added Fediverse Forums as a default Web search option.
Kagi is shaping up to be really cool with this and the Orion browser supporting firefox/chrome extensions on ios.
I think when I tried them out a while back they also had a usenet search? Can anyone clarify on this?
They do.
Imagine if someone added that feature to SearX/SearXNG
Just came across https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html . Seems like there are more good reasons to avoid it besides it also using Yandex as an index.
Thanks for the link, I’ll def be more critical about it in the future.
I’ll still use it (for now) because as a no-nonsense customizable search engine its by far the best I’ve tried.
They’re definitely stretching themselves too thin, but as long as I get better and more relevant, cleaner, no advertising search results for my knowledge work and research. With my privacy in tact.
Then I’m continuing to pay them for a product I find to be superior than the alternatives.
Eh, doesn’t discouraged me from using em. For me is them or Google. As those are the only two useable engines for my type of surfing.
heres to the painfully slow and gradual rebirth of the internet.
We learned a lot of lessons from the first one. Here’s hoping we don’t make the same mistakes.
That’s nice indeed! Thanks for sharing.
The mandatory signing in to perform any search is a deal breaker. Privacy first
They have a system for detaching your account info from searches now
It’s because you have to pay for the search engine. They dont serve ads
Feel like you’re jumping the gun a bit with this opinion. Kagi is one of the best options if you prioritize privacy. Have a closer look at their policies.
Policies can change, they’re for profit, and I’ve heard leadership may be right wing/trumpy but I can’t find clear evidence of it so I want count that against them at this point.
Either way subscriptions are you giving away your identity essentially. They have you, your name, your credit card, your address, your associated searches, there is a lot to consider here more than just “look at what they say.” You are choosing to give them clear identification of you and your searches. That requires a lot of trust.
TL;DR: A lot of for profit companies say a lot of things. I am not anti-Kagi but you’re being very reductionist and ignoring valid concerns.
Edit: I am not against Kagi or spending money on quality services.
And if it changes, I will leave and stop paying. They are a user centric model. They thrive because of paying users.
This is what their Privacy Pass extension is for. Once it verifies you as an user, it doles out a bunch of generic “arcade tokens”, which don’t have any identifying information. You lose Kagi’s personalization features while using them, but your searches aren’t tied to any account beyond just “Kagi”, so you and everybody else using the privacy extension are the same person.
At least, as I understand it.
Yeah someone else told me about that, looks like it was only rolled out a few weeks ago so in my defense it’s pretty new information lol Looks legit though! Absolutely has me reconsidering that concern now.
Hoping to be constructive: how do you think search engines should operate? Or maybe how would you like one you consider “good” to operate?
Also wondering how you see something like Privacy Pass that Kagi announced recently: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
This is particularly useful in the context of a privacy-respecting paid search engine, where the Server wants to ensure that the Client can access the services, and the Client seeks strong guarantees that, for example, the searches are not associated with them.
I did not know about privacy pass - that’s a fantastic step. I need to better understand the protocol they’re using but if they truly cannot link my usage to my account and the account strictly exists for (functionally anonymous) payment then I honestly have no notes. That could be enough to assuage most of my concerns.
This is the kind of conversation, healthy, back and forth, and conceding instead of doubling down as we learn more that I wish was more common on the internet these days.
Bravo, really.
Theu don’t verify emails and the CEO has even suggested we can use a random string. Also, you can pay with Bitcoin. No forced KYC anywhere along the way.
So you won’t pay for a subscription to use a search engine. Do you prefer the model that other search engines use where they take the content of your searches and use it to advertise to you?
I didn’t say anything remotely like you’re accusing me of in your comment. I’m saying making an account is no small thing because you were trivializing it. At no point did I even mention spending money (because that doesn’t bother me. I am happy to spend money on quality things/services).
I introduced nuance to your extremely reduced take and you’re trying to do it again with strawmen directed at me.
The above are valid concerns. That’s all I’ve said. Anything else beyond that is your construction.
Edit: let me ask you this - do you have accounts on porn sites?
Read my comment again, because I neither accused you of anything nor reduced your argument. I’m not the original poster you replied to
So you won’t pay for a subscription to use a search engine.
When did I say that? Point out one single line that even remotely implies this. Flagrant strawman. What else would you call it?
Do you prefer the model that other search engines use where they take the content of your searches and use it to advertise to you?
It’s a leading question and you know it. You should’ve asked “how do you think search engines should operate?” You’re implying I am content with how Google operates, which I am not.
I’ll even concede the second may have actually been unintentionally accusatory in its implication, but you literally started the comment saying I won’t pay for this service. It’s right there in front of you, you wrote it.
Maybe read your own comment again before being condescending?
Cool. Wish more search engines would do that.
But, as far as Kagi goes, it’s a paid service and it’s an American company. So I won’t be using them.
Not using Kagi because its an American company is valid. But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product. There is still a transaction with a free product.
Kagi is not free because they respect your privacy and don’t sell your data.
I’d happily pay for search, but Kagi is way too expensive.
10 searches a day, for $5/month? (US)
Like, that is way too much.
I can receive thousands and send thousands of emails per day for that price. Is search really that much more expensive?
Have the same issue with them. I recently churned from Kagi after being a paying Pro customer. 10,-/month is simply too much. I’m paying for email (1,-/month) and web hosting (1,-/month) and web search should be in that price range to make it an attractive offer for people.
I wrote to Kagi saying as much when I churned (also criticizing that most of their changelog messages are about LLM updates for “Ultimate” customers), but they responded saying that they believe in their offer and that the trajectory of new users signing up gives them confidence.
I am, however, not willing to shell out Streaming Service level pricing (services that stream hundreds of GB to me every month) for some web searches.
As much as it pains me due to Brave being involved in the whole crypto scam business and their CEO apparently being another a**hole tech fascist, I am using Brave Search for now. Its results were not inferior when I compared them to Kagi and I don’t need 95% of all the extra fluff that Kagi offers.
As soon as there’s an offer for private search results with their own index that is not censored nor ad-driven, that company (maybe Kagi!) will have my money. But it needs to be commodity-priced like mail or hosting.
$10/m is unlimited searches though…
And yeah, searches are actually quite expensive. There’s a LOT of infrastructure that goes into making something unique with your own search engine that isn’t just a wrapper over Google.
The actual compute cost per search, in 2024, was $0.0125. Kagi states they want to keep Costa below $0.015 per search, but their search partners are a major expense.
That ofc ignores all the supporting infra, devs, support…etc that goes into making it all possible.
The business model just doesn’t make sense then (using search partners).
Because $60, let alone $120 US, a year is far more than most people would be willing to pay.
Dunno what to say, it’s just more than most people can justify paying for the service.
I’m gonna stick with DuckDuckGo and the newly free mullvad cached search
Maybe. They use several other indexes as their backend so they have to pay microsoft for every search
I have donated €1500 to opensource software projects and paid a whopping €7 for software. These (privacy respecting) projects got my money because they weren’t transaction based. Capitalism is not the only way.
I don’t use them or never read their privacy policy so i don’t know. But it’s not because it’s a paid service that company won’t use your data to sell it for more profit. That’s EXTRA profit for them, so why the hell not. And them being based in the US means I already can’t trust them with their poor privacy laws.
Sure, but they don’t (their privacy policy is exemplary). They have a whole shpiel about their business model. Just few weeks back they released a feature that makes it technically impossible for them to see who did searches, so no trust is needed anymore. They implemented a very novel protocol, quite cool.
I have doubts considering they are an american company, but I want to see them succeed. Plus, they are remote, so at least a good chunk of the income taxes from salaries are going outside the US.
It’s a shame because there are good American businesses that are affected by this. There are companies that I respect. But it is what it is.
Yeah, I agree. In general I will personally try to evaluate if the good that comes from a company succeeding outweighs the fact it’s a US company. I won’t use a dogmatic approach, but I will definitely be careful to choose even more carefully than before.
There are plenty of paid products that do not respect your privacy and sell your data.
And there’s free products that do respect your privacy and don’t make you the product. They are community products.
For instance I offer my bandwidth and storage to thousands of strangers to share torrents and they do the same to me. No secondhand transactions happening.
But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product.
That’s definitely one model for operating a public service, but its far from the only one.
What non-american search engine do you use?
https://metager.org/ is run by a German non-profit. Since late last year it’s pay to use because their advertising partner (Yahoo) cancelled their contract without warning. But it’s cheaper than Kagi. Also the non-profit is part of the project that’s building the European OpenWebIndex ( https://ows.eu/ ) that’s releasing this year.
As a former Kagi user (quit all my US company subscriptions recently in order to support EU) I’ve now used Startpage for a month and it has been great so far.
I write questions on bathroom stalls and then check back in on them every few days.
Why are you using Grindr Classic for search?
For the personalized results, ofc
Man, this is so random and hilarious. I genuinely laughed so hard.
That was you?
Well then, in answer to your last question scrawled in the Kansas City Walmart bathroom, yes, you should definitely get that checked out by a medical professional.
And then you write your own (wrong) answers below it in a different hand writing and pen. And call it SEO.
Not working, the only response I get is penis
That’s internet for you.
I ask friends who are more intelligent than me
And if they don’t know I assume it is forbidden knowledge that would drive me mad to know
(I am only half joking)
Qwant. It’s French.
It uses Bing in the backend though.
Yes, but not fully. They have their own index as well. They have also recently started a partnership with Ecosia to focus more on that effort.
And Qwant is really great! Have been using og for a couple of years, and have no need to fall back to Google, DDG etc.
Was gonna say that.
Better than qwant in my opinion.
Still uses Google as an index so you’re just giving them money indirectly.
Alternative?
They’re all based on others indexes to be honest so there isn’t really one.
DuckDuckGo is Bing, Startpage is Google, Kagi is seemingly a mishmash of a bunch of search engines (including the Russian owned Yandex) Brave is independent but owned and run by assholes so that isn’t much better.
Personally I like Kagi enough and it’s independent enough for me to pay for it.
That’s the problem, really. They all have pros and cons.
Kagi is American, so they are out for me. So is DuckDuckGo.
I don’t care if startpage uses the Google index, since Google isn’t profiting from my data or from ads.
Their servers are in the EU, and the balance between privacy and usable results is good enough.
I see it like using a third-party front end for YouTube. All of the benefits with none of the risks or private data theft.
Search engine? I started rawdoging urls a while ago.
The internet is increasingly more useless, the sites i really need are bookmarked anyway.
And I like swiss cheese on my ham sandwiches. Oh, sorry, I thought we were just saying non sequitors.
In all seriousness, that is not an answer to the question. Yes, some (often older) people will always use a search engine to find the same website they browse all the time. But search engines are also incredibly valuable for finding new things or verifying claims. I have a bookmark for the Warframe wiki but that doesn’t help me when I want to research different monitor energy efficiencies or find a repair guide for my toaster oven.
And while people CAN collect a set of (searchable) websites for different topics they are interested in… that is how we got into (one of) our current mess(es). How many people just use reddit for everything and thus make themselves vulnerable to corporate shittery and misinformation campaigns.
That’s three paragraphs of “I took this serious.”
Oh- oh!
That’s, uh… A sentence!
Did i win?
You got the rawdog, mate! Congo rats.
I started rawdoging urls a while ago.
Works best when you’ve got a web ring or other friendly community of contributors to reference against one another.
But those are few and fair between in the modern day.
Instead of bookmarks I use the “share to Standard Notes” option. It names the note after the link, saves the link, allows you to write a summary or tags, and makes it all searchable so it is findable later rather than disappearing like a needle in a haystack.
Does anyone use yacy?
I tried, years ago, I think their federated approach to building a database and crawling are cool - but at least the last time I checked, the actual search algorithm was just too bad. It often gave me completely irrelevant results and seemed very susceptible to spam sites gaming Search Engine Optimisation.
Yeah I had it crawl a site I knew was mostly unique. Left for a day and searched, nothing. I had to give it the entire url for it to pop up with anything…
Search is actually something that is kinda hard to get right. I just dont like having so many sites that are just small holes into google/microsoft/etc…search engines. I was hoping there was something out there that works.
I’ve used Yacy for years. It’s very customizeable and gives good results, and I like that I can curate, to some degree, what it finds. Biggest drawback is that I don’t always feel like starting up a server to do a search.
Writing them off as an American company is totally valid, but I’m happy to pay for a quality service because it keeps ads out and lets me vote with my money. It’s really not much to cling to psychologically, but it helps. When I and others completely degoogle our lives it moves no needles at GoogHQ, but paying subscriber metrics are a KPI discussed in every board room in the world.
Lile they say, perfection is the enemy of privacy! Kagi has been the best as an engine out of all I’ve tried. If a better competitors comes up, I’ll give em my money.
I’m not a fan of Kagi’s founder, so I generally don’t use it.
Any specific reasons? I’m a very happy Kagi user and the founder is active on their discord and seems like a really nice guy.
There was this debacle, at least
Hmm yeah I was aware of that but personally didn’t see it as a reason not to like Kagi… Lori came across as quite drama seeking without solid arguments imho. Thanks for the response!
Don’t trust him based on his prior comments
Such as?
It’s had it for at least months but even if its years old it’s still a cool feature and deserves attention
It’s had this for quite some time
Been using this for a month or so its nice
Does it work on lemmy content too?
Edit: thanks all!
Yeah big time
Yes it does! :)
ive been finding lemmy content on duckduckgo and other engines for a while now. dont intend to try kagi tho so cant answer your question.
Surprisingly I’ve had zero Lemmy results in my searches.
Probably because my searches aren’t “Tell me why Linux is so cool”. Lol.
Probably because my searches aren’t “Tell me why Linux is so cool”. Lol.
sucks to suck i guess :) But yeah the stuff i was searching for was vaguely software related.
I’ve been using Kagi for the last year+.
Personally, I wish they’d tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.
Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they’re limited by their existing index providers, I wish they’d run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.
In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.
TW: Self harm
Also not a huge fan of the company and a lot of it’s ardent customers, who heavily protested a suicide prevention popup if you used it to searched for how to kill yourself.
Have you tried the small web lens? They run their own index specifically to help surface the content you mention is hard to find by default.
Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn’t extremely broad, unfortunately.
Kagi has multiple indexes of their own
And the AI stuff is all opt on from what I can tell. I’ve never gotten any AI thing except when I asked for it
They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can’t.
Running a scraper doesn’t need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.
Running an index is quite a massive endeavor at the scale of Google. They’re a small team.
I think it makes sense considering there’s a competitive market of indexes already. They make small ones to cover some niches and use existing ones for the rest.
Keep in mind they also add their own reranking and stuff on top of Bing Google whatever
If they were a small or free service I wouldn’t have much issue, but they do charge, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they at least attempt to scrape the wider web.
Building their own database seems the prudent thing long-term, I don’t doubt they could shore up coverage over Bing. They don’t have to replace the other indexes wholesale, just supplement it.
Why would they do what Google etc. do, but much worse? It makes sense that they do scrape what google etc. most likely miss (and that’s what their index is about). Even a company with Microsoft resources tried and failed to scrape the web as a whole (failed in the sense results are worse).
I use the Kagi forum toggle so. much.
I’ve been using Kagi for about a month now, and I think I’m gonna stick with it. Paying with dollars instead of data/attention feels more healthy for everyone involved.
(Fully realizing, of course, that there’s nothing stopping them from doing both, and that’s why we need better laws. Voting with your wallet will never be a complete solution… but it is something I can do right now.)
Since they implemented privacy pass, there is now something stopping them from doing both. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Obviously with it you trade the need to trust them for your own personalization (as they can’t know it was you searching).
Funny how the tech space is hyped up about privacy pass when Kagi implemented it, but got outraged when Cloudflare worked with Apple to try to use it as a CAPTCHA alternative.
I don’t know the details, so maybe there is a reason, but I am not part of the “outraged” crowd. I think kagi use case is neat and innovative, bot protection is meh
Oh, that wasn’t a dig at you! I just find it entertaining how the same technology with the same risks and impact on the future web are treated completely differently based on what company puts their name on the blog post.
FWIW both use cases seem good to me, Kagi’s for using the privacy enhancing properties and Cloudflare’s for decreasing the need for their CAPTCHA/bot blocking software to be cranked up to the level it’s at now. For now only Safari and Kagi’s addons are using the tech (Cloudflare turned off their experiment) so there’s no reason to be bothered at the moment anyway.
A very reassuring technology to have!
But my worry was more about them changing their business model once they get big enough.
I think their customer base is basically 90% made of people that - like me - would quit in a second.
Good thing is that there is no vendor lock, it would be a shame, but changing search engine is quite simple.
I have been on it for about a year and I have no complaints.
Why can’t it just be automatic?
Kagi lets you prioritize/demote/block per-domain but that’s a separate feature
Kagi lenses “focus” the search. So normal web search definitely can contain fediverse results, but with the lens switched on, you ONLY get fediverse results.
Thanks. This is good to know.
