Preferably one that doesn’t censor search results. Like DuckDuckGo, apparently
Disclaimer: Kagi user here.
Searches are not pay-per-use anymore. But you still have to be logged in to search. The premise is, that they don’t store your searches. It is not their business model. You are the paying customer, not the ad firms. This is, ultimately, not verifiable. It comes down to some sort of trust. And I do trust in them. The developers are actually great guys, there is a discord where they answer immediately, and a discourse forum where you can submit bugs/features, etc.
They take a strong stance on freedom. They refused to implement a suicide prevention message, as they felt, that it wasbnot the job of the search engine to patronize the user.
There is such a thing as a ‘session link’. You can get it from you account. With this, I don’t think cookies are necesary. But the link expires so you have to do it probably every few days anew.
The thing is: I want to aupport them. They have cool features (up/downranking websites, GPT-4 access over their proxy, etc.) Is it better than self-hosting: no. But I don’t wanna self-host. And search is something that costs. So any service that does not live off donations or some sort of payment, is suspicious.
I hope I explained some of my reasons. Please debunk me and make me cancel my subscription there if I am in the wrong. Im not a shill and actually interested in your concerns :)
It’s probably a leading contender for one of the “best for privacy”, especially with their business model and even a warrant canary on their legal page. Their Privacy Policy also does a lot to explain things.
It is a slightly different claim to being a privacy first or privacy focused search engine. Privacy is more of a close 2nd priority then a 1st and foremost priority. The difference is small but real. For example, Kagi is incorporated in the USA and has to comply with USA laws. Not a country known for its outstanding track record.
GPT-4 is for Ultimate users ($25/month). The “weaker” models like GPT-3.5 will be rolled out for Pro users($10/month) in the next few weeks.
PS: FastGPT+ Summarizer exist as well, but this was not what I was talking about. Those are both somewhat limited AI tools, the GPT thing is the full blown access
This has so many red flags to it.
Logged in search with them knowing your payment info is significantly more privacy invasive then logged out Google search.
Their business model is “trust me bro”. Which if you take marketing at face value then Google must be taking your privacy seriously, right?
They supposedly take a stance on freedom and transparency… Yet they use Discord lol.
The refusal of a suicide prevention mention is just straight up fucked up. It doesn’t change results, and that extra small message that costs them nothing and could save a life. There’s literally no downside and only upsides.
You can pay via Crypto/bank transfer and probably with cash soon.
The Discord thing is a valid point.
I don’t agree on the trust part with you. EVERY SOFTWARE we use boils down to trust. Because let’s be honest, we all don’t read the source code. (most of the time)
And finally there are downsides to such messages: Where do they stop? If someone searches for how to suicide, they should be getting relevant information for their query. Overall, I thought that if you find all the aforementioned things bad, you might like this one. From a liberal perspective, this is great.
I agree that Kagi isn’t great from a privacy perspective. But in regards to clearing cookies, they do have a session link feature that uses a token to avoid the need to sign in all the time.
I’m an actual person who pays $5 a month for kagi and have recommended it to people. I’ve never heard of them selling user data to data brokers and a quick search isn’t finding anything about it, can you point me to some evidence?
As much as I disagree on paying 10$/m for a search engine, I will disagree with your take on their data sharing.
In their privacy policy https://kagi.com/privacy , they state that they collect logs :
- Kagi server identification, configuration, and performance (CPU, RAM, etc.)
- Identifiers that tell us what code paths were taken
- Time measurements of individual steps of request fulfillment
- Summaries of requests made to third parties
Absent from our logs are any identifying information about your client
Tho I’m not sure how they could fulfill these purposes :
- Prevent abuse of our product from bad actors (DDOS, etc.)
- Detecting abuse of our platform
With only logs on how the serice îs used anonymously.
They do send the logs to Sentry for analysis. But without any search query, from what they say.
