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.
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
What non-american search engine do you use?
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
deleted by creator
And then you write your own (wrong) answers below it in a different hand writing and pen. And call it SEO.
Qwant. It’s French.
It uses Bing in the backend though.
Was gonna say that.
Search engine? I started rawdoging urls a while ago.
The internet is increasingly more useless, the sites i really need are bookmarked anyway.
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.
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)
Better than qwant in my opinion.
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.
No one mentioned open source alternatives, so I’d add: https://docs.searxng.org/
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 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.
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
deleted by creator
We learned a lot of lessons from the first one. Here’s hoping we don’t make the same mistakes.
deleted by creator
It’s had it for at least months but even if its years old it’s still a cool feature and deserves attention
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).
deleted by creator
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
deleted by creator
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.
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).
It’s had that for a while now. It was the main reason I’d pipe up to recommend Kagi, but now there’s also their search anonymizer and tor endpoint.
I use the Kagi forum toggle so. much.
If someone is interested about Kagi vs Google (made by Kagi): https://mastodon.social/@kagihq/113971972586118949
The mandatory signing in to perform any search is a deal breaker. Privacy first
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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?
deleted by creator
Read my comment again, because I neither accused you of anything nor reduced your argument. I’m not the original poster you replied to
deleted by creator
When did I say that? Point out one single line that even remotely implies this. Flagrant strawman. What else would you call it?
Perhaps, I dunno, a misunderstanding?? Why do you assume everyone is out to get you? Why do you interpret everything as hostility?
How do you intend to pay for a search engine without signing in to it and having it track your search history?
They have a system for detaching your account info from searches now
That’s nice indeed! Thanks for sharing.
It’s had this for quite some time
Cool, but I will still prefer to use duckduckgo and type Lemmy in the end of my query.
Oooooooh. Kagi added this lens! Since you can add custom lenses, I thought I added this (and forgot) to my own account. Cool!
Why can’t it just be automatic?
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.
Kagi lets you prioritize/demote/block per-domain but that’s a separate feature
Is Kagi big? If they are, does this mean we’ll see an influx of users from this?
Not really. I was quite surprised when they recently celebrated 40k users.
