Welcome to Kagi, the paid search engine full of surprises, which today opened an account in the Fediverse!

@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.

mastodon.social/@kagihq/113074…

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[-] viking@infosec.pub 110 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] sanpo@sopuli.xyz 134 points 2 months ago

Also, fun fact: Kagi owner believes only criminals want privacy and GDPR doesn't apply to them, because they said so!

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

[-] alexisonzen@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

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.)

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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024

67 points (67.4% liked)