I do and I like the results? Like, I get how we have to be cautious with closed-source private services. This just reads to me as clickbait to put down on people that use kagi lol. Also searxng isn't really private either as you can't be sure what your instance is actually running, and self-hosting just links everything to your IP as other people mentioned...

I don’t quite understand how this is an issue.

I mean personally I’m happy with anonymised ads from DDG in return for anonymised Bing searches (+their own guffins) but I think it’s fair enough, if you really want to see no ads, that some turn to Kagi.

Basically, you're surprised that people will pay money for someone else to host and run a service for them instead of hosting it themselves?

I tried SearXNG but the UI/UX was so shitty that I'd honestly rather pay for Kagi. Lots of people love it because it's open source and are willing to 100% look past all UI/UX problems, which is a very common problem with open source in general.

Also, the actual quality of the results was garbage compared to Kagi.

Now you're not going to believe this, ladies and gentlemen, there was a time - not too longer ago in fact - where people called these metacrawlers, and they were beloved. People would say "Dogpile" yes, that might help, because - bare with me again - search was shit. But, comparing lot of different shit sources would generally give you ok information, and generally reveal at least a lot of different sources which could help find and gather information.

Now I'm not calling Kagi reputable in anyway, but if metacrawling helped with the situation before, maybe we should try it again.

It's not fair to call Kagi just meta search engine. As you mentioned they do have their own index, it's just that they are complementary. They even show you how much of the results are unique results from their index. They're very open about it.

there is a better open source meta search engines which actually respect your privacy and need your donations more than Kagi shareholders.

Privacy I can definitely agree on but the actual search result is not better. I think it's safe to say that if you're paying for Kagi, you know what Searxng is and can spin up one if you want. I've done it myself and it was clearly not better.

And if you think about it, if you self host Searxng, that means all the search query + your IP goes to search providers which kinda kills the point, unless you use VPN or Tor, both of which have their drawbacks.

If you use hosted instance, you have to trust them. Being an opensource project doesn't mean a lot when you can't go through the source code that is actually running.

At some point you have to trust someone. I happened to trust Kagi to some extent.

People in the tech community who care about their privacy need to understand that if a product is not open source it should NOT be trusted. Transparency is a necessary factor in guaranteeing privacy, otherwise we cannot see and prove if a person or company's claim to privacy is true.

SearXNG's result quality and blocking functions are much worse than Kagi's in my experience.

edit: Downvoting personal experiences. Lemmy going strong again. ;-)

Well, yeah. It's pretty much the same as SearXNG. Except paid, closed source and needs an account to function. The results are better though, I'll give you that.

...and the pricing is absurd. I'd like to disable all the AI bullshit and get a discount.

If it was self hostable, I'd always recommend it over SearXNG. Let's say that it's a better but closed source and paid SearXNG alternative.

Kagi has good search results and they are presented well. It also has some useful features like forbidding certain sites and prioritizing others. I like that by paying I'm the customer and not the product. And their "small web" initiative is commendable.

That said, I've been a customer for nine months on an annual subscription, and I will not be renewing. The first reason is that I find them just too expensive for what they do. The second is that, even being that expensive, they're not breaking even. That undermines my trust in their future as a search engine and makes me less interested in paying a little extra for a good cause.

If they're indexing multiple sources and then making a custom experience for the user - based on multiple sources and user input. Then that to me, sounds like a valid service to to allowed to sell? I struggle to see the issue here?

\not a kagi user.

People basically pay them to search Yandex and Brave for them.

Kagi doesn’t hide that they use API calls to multiple sources for each search, they are fairly upfront about honestly. The benefits of use Jagi IME are the results are great, the site is fast and gets out of the way, it’s fairly affordable for what it provides, and the goals of the company is in line with mine (namely to find a thing I’m searching for). They are well funded enough to give me confidence that I’m not going to have to configure yet another search engine, and the integrate into pretty much all my access points easily as a default search engine.

I have seen no reason to think they abuse their position to impact my privacy, and bring closed source does not automatically make them evil. You included no alternatives that are open source, and the ones I explored were either difficult to get setup, required me to run something on my own infrastructure, or didn’t provide the integrations or results I expect. Kagi does.

Kagi isn’t perfect, and there are a ton of suggestions on their feature tracker that users rightly want implemented (including open sourcing more of their code-base). But as a paid search engine that makes me not the product, it does that job well.

What are they starting to do that is shady and why do you think don’t respect privacy? (I couldn’t see anything on the document you mentioned)

Self hosted SearXNG. Period.

I think this is a fairly benign move with a valid explanation that has been taken out of context in order to be more inflamitory