If someone doesn’t mind their privacy they would just use Google Search + Gmail. This guy is delusional
I don’t know if you think I’m advocating against piracy or something but I’m not. I’m just saying Kagi is the same thing so might as well keep the $10/month.
lol I’m not sure who’s side to take here. I tried kagi and I can’t personally justify the cost. The free trial is hard to use because I perform a ton of searches in a day and I keep thinking “I should save free trial searches for a good use case”.
Also, not hard to believe a company would stick the privacy sticker all over their product and turn around and make money off my personal data.
But those “harassment” emails from the Kagi Owner/CEO to me read like a business person with a passion not understanding where these accusations come from. After reading part of that chain, I came out with the feeling that “Lori” just wanted to write some click baity stuff and didn’t really care to dig any deeper. Yes, AI products by a company right now implies they will use your data to train or sell a dataset to some other company. But I don’t see any damming evidence here, just assumptions.
If Kagi is serious about their privacy mission then they should release a clear ToS and a legally binding statement that they will not use our data or meta data for anything.
I came out with the feeling that “Lori” just wanted to write some click baity stuff and didn’t really care to dig any deeper.
Same. And then she attacked him for that too. It’s a worse look than whatever the Kagi CEO is doing.
Click baity stuff? The dude wrote an opinion piece that was only seen by like fifteen people and only meant to be directly linked to folks they engaged with so they wouldn’t have to repeat their reasons for no longer using kagi but then the CEO obsessed over them and Streisand effected it.
I expected to roll my eyes at this article but it’s actually quite compelling and well written. The Kagi website’s lack of nuanced privacy discussion already turned me off, and now I’m just going to pretend the service doesn’t exist.
My 100-search trial expired this week and I was literally planning on subscribing later tonight. This has made me think twice.
But it takes me back to why I tried Kagi in the first place: What else can I use that respects privacy?
I don’t think any of them do completely. DuckDuckGo uses Bing, so is Microsoft; Google is… well, Google; Brave is apparently really shady; I’ve never thought much of the results from Bing directly. Startpage seemed ok but apparently uses Google.
What else?
I also like something to be integrated into the browser. As a Mac user, I can’t add new search engines to Safari (and have actually switched to Orion, but may now switch to Firefox or back to Safari).
I use Startpage and am happy with it. Yes it uses Google, but Google can’t track you as they can only see that the search came from the Startpage server. You also don’t get any of the AI summary or sponsored link bullshit. Beyond that, you could try SearXNG which can aggregate results from many engines.
Yeah I had SearXNG running via a Docker container and it was pretty good. I didn’t like having to use a domain name and expose it over the internet though, because Docker is running on my NAS. I guess I could give it another try using Cloudflare tunnels so I don’t have to open anything up.
Or else go back to Startpage.
You’re not going to have much luck finding a search engine with good results that doesn’t depend on google or bing. Kagi is no different. Using a searx instance is probably best if you’re looking for something without official agreements with bing or google. Edit: Here is a list of independent search indexes I just discovered in another thread https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/
I read the article, and nothing in there seems to be a valid criticism of Kagi as a search engine. It’s all about the founder not understood GDPR, or how Kagi wasted money on free t-shirts, or the writers personal opinion on AI.
This is largely an opinion piece. It has merit as such, but please don’t take this article as factual journalism.
I think the author makes that clear early and repeatedly and it isn’t ever framed as anything else than a walk through their thought process. I’m surprised you even felt this comment necessary. The article anchors heavily on privacy as a focus, and if you don’t care about that so much then all you have to worry about is a company that spends a couple hundred k of their startup money on t-shirts.
So…even if their search is perfect, and you don’t care that they really just want to charge you for search while they use you to train their AI, it is a paid service, so criticism of their ability to manage money is valid as an overall product review too though.
I agree with you. I just felt it necessary to inform those that read comments and not the article itself. Especially because (here’s my opinion) I feel that if you don’t pay for a product, then you ARE the product. Even if Kagi isn’t perfect, the payment model should be supported to foster this kind of internet.
I feel that if you don’t pay for a product, then you ARE the product. Even if Kagi isn’t perfect, the payment model should be supported to foster this kind of internet.
I agree with you, and I would just balance your statement out a bit and say that while the payment model should be supported, we should be wary of weak business models or predatory marketing that open up the door to just a different flavor of enshittification.
