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.
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.