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.
heres to the painfully slow and gradual rebirth of the internet.
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
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And then you write your own (wrong) answers below it in a different hand writing and pen. And call it SEO.
Not working, the only response I get is penis
That’s internet for you.
That was you?
Well then, in answer to your last question scrawled in the Kansas City Walmart bathroom, yes, you should definitely get that checked out by a medical professional.
Qwant. It’s French.
It uses Bing in the backend though.
Yes, but not fully. They have their own index as well. They have also recently started a partnership with Ecosia to focus more on that effort.
And Qwant is really great! Have been using og for a couple of years, and have no need to fall back to Google, DDG etc.
Was gonna say that.
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)
Search engine? I started rawdoging urls a while ago.
The internet is increasingly more useless, the sites i really need are bookmarked anyway.
And I like swiss cheese on my ham sandwiches. Oh, sorry, I thought we were just saying non sequitors.
In all seriousness, that is not an answer to the question. Yes, some (often older) people will always use a search engine to find the same website they browse all the time. But search engines are also incredibly valuable for finding new things or verifying claims. I have a bookmark for the Warframe wiki but that doesn’t help me when I want to research different monitor energy efficiencies or find a repair guide for my toaster oven.
And while people CAN collect a set of (searchable) websites for different topics they are interested in… that is how we got into (one of) our current mess(es). How many people just use reddit for everything and thus make themselves vulnerable to corporate shittery and misinformation campaigns.
That’s three paragraphs of “I took this serious.”
Oh- oh!
That’s, uh… A sentence!
Did i win?
You got the rawdog, mate! Congo rats.
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.
Better than qwant in my opinion.
Still uses Google as an index so you’re just giving them money indirectly.
Alternative?
They’re all based on others indexes to be honest so there isn’t really one.
DuckDuckGo is Bing, Startpage is Google, Kagi is seemingly a mishmash of a bunch of search engines (including the Russian owned Yandex) Brave is independent but owned and run by assholes so that isn’t much better.
Personally I like Kagi enough and it’s independent enough for me to pay for it.
That’s the problem, really. They all have pros and cons.
Kagi is American, so they are out for me. So is DuckDuckGo.
I don’t care if startpage uses the Google index, since Google isn’t profiting from my data or from ads.
Their servers are in the EU, and the balance between privacy and usable results is good enough.
I see it like using a third-party front end for YouTube. All of the benefits with none of the risks or private data theft.
Does anyone use yacy?
I tried, years ago, I think their federated approach to building a database and crawling are cool - but at least the last time I checked, the actual search algorithm was just too bad. It often gave me completely irrelevant results and seemed very susceptible to spam sites gaming Search Engine Optimisation.
Yeah I had it crawl a site I knew was mostly unique. Left for a day and searched, nothing. I had to give it the entire url for it to pop up with anything…
Search is actually something that is kinda hard to get right. I just dont like having so many sites that are just small holes into google/microsoft/etc…search engines. I was hoping there was something out there that works.
I’ve used Yacy for years. It’s very customizeable and gives good results, and I like that I can curate, to some degree, what it finds. Biggest drawback is that I don’t always feel like starting up a server to do a search.
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’d happily pay for search, but Kagi is way too expensive.
10 searches a day, for $5/month? (US)
Like, that is way too much.
I can receive thousands and send thousands of emails per day for that price. Is search really that much more expensive?
$10/m is unlimited searches though…
And yeah, searches are actually quite expensive. There’s a LOT of infrastructure that goes into making something unique with your own search engine that isn’t just a wrapper over Google.
The actual compute cost per search, in 2024, was $0.0125. Kagi states they want to keep Costa below $0.015 per search, but their search partners are a major expense.
That ofc ignores all the supporting infra, devs, support…etc that goes into making it all possible.
The business model just doesn’t make sense then (using search partners).
Because $60, let alone $120 US, a year is far more than most people would be willing to pay.
Dunno what to say, it’s just more than most people can justify paying for the service.
I’m gonna stick with DuckDuckGo and the newly free mullvad cached search
Maybe. They use several other indexes as their backend so they have to pay microsoft for every search
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
Such as?
Kagi is shaping up to be really cool with this and the Orion browser supporting firefox/chrome extensions on ios.
It’s had it for at least months but even if its years old it’s still a cool feature and deserves attention
Just came across https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html . Seems like there are more good reasons to avoid it besides it also using Yandex as an index.
They’re definitely stretching themselves too thin, but as long as I get better and more relevant, cleaner, no advertising search results for my knowledge work and research. With my privacy in tact.
Then I’m continuing to pay them for a product I find to be superior than the alternatives.
Eh, doesn’t discouraged me from using em. For me is them or Google. As those are the only two useable engines for my type of surfing.
I think when I tried them out a while back they also had a usenet search? Can anyone clarify on this?
They do.
Imagine if someone added that feature to SearX/SearXNG
Been using this for a month or so its nice
Does it work on lemmy content too?
Edit: thanks all!
Yeah big time
Yes it does! :)
ive been finding lemmy content on duckduckgo and other engines for a while now. dont intend to try kagi tho so cant answer your question.
Surprisingly I’ve had zero Lemmy results in my searches.
Probably because my searches aren’t “Tell me why Linux is so cool”. Lol.
Probably because my searches aren’t “Tell me why Linux is so cool”. Lol.
sucks to suck i guess :) But yeah the stuff i was searching for was vaguely software related.
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).
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.)
I have been on it for about a year and I have no complaints.
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).
Funny how the tech space is hyped up about privacy pass when Kagi implemented it, but got outraged when Cloudflare worked with Apple to try to use it as a CAPTCHA alternative.
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
Oh, that wasn’t a dig at you! I just find it entertaining how the same technology with the same risks and impact on the future web are treated completely differently based on what company puts their name on the blog post.
FWIW both use cases seem good to me, Kagi’s for using the privacy enhancing properties and Cloudflare’s for decreasing the need for their CAPTCHA/bot blocking software to be cranked up to the level it’s at now. For now only Safari and Kagi’s addons are using the tech (Cloudflare turned off their experiment) so there’s no reason to be bothered at the moment anyway.
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.
That’s nice indeed! Thanks for sharing.
I use the Kagi forum toggle so. much.
It’s had this for quite some time
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.
Obligatory mention that Kagi also use the Russian search index Yandex. This aids the Russian economy and the Russian war effort.
Edit: I recommend reading my in depth explanation here https://lemmy.world/comment/15520236
Every single time with red comes up there’s always this FUD. You, specifically, don’t miss any opportunity to make mention of this. Across Lemmy, which is rather suspicious. Helping the Russian war effort? That’s a pretty big leap here.
Why?
Imagine a search engine aggregator aggregating search engine results from multiple sources for aggregation. The more indexes they support the better the results are going to be for everyone, I don’t see this as a problem for data aggregation.
Why should data aggregation give any sort of shits about geopolitics?
Regardless, the topic of this post, fediverse search, is part of their own search engine anyways afaik
I have been sick a lot lately, so have had a lot of time on my hands. I don’t have a search for Kagi or something. I wanted to use Kagi though, so I was disappointed when I realized that they want to continue this practice.
What are you implying with it being suspicious? In what way?
If Kagi pays a Russian company for a service, that company pays taxes to the Russian government.
Russia spends 32% of its budget on the Russian military. So for every dollar they get in taxes, one third is spent on the Russian military.
With a corporate tax rate of 20% that means 6.4% of Yandex profits go to the military. Since Kagi is mainly a paid service, I don’t want my money to go to the Russian military, and I guess a lot of other people don’t want this either.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hikes-national-defence-spending-by-23-2025-2024-09-30/
The Russian people are not to blame, and I am sure a lot of great people work at Yandex and at different companies in Russia. That said, Russia chose to attack a peaceful democratic country, they are currently sanctioned by a lot of western countries in hopes that it will pressure their economy enough to force them to stop the war.
There isn’t much we can do to stop the conflict besides hurting them economically and supporting Ukraine. If we continue to use Russian products and services then that does not work. Unfortunately this affects everyone in Russia.
Thank you
I’m grateful someone mentioned it. Paying Yandex is a deal breaker for me. As much as Yandex may want to be independent, they cannot be because of the country they’re based in. With the way things are going, the same may be true of Google and Kagi itself somewhere within the next four years.
Kagi defends itself by saying it’s “only used 2% of the time” which would make a better argument that turning off the feature to distance themselves from Russia has little impact than a defence for working with them. There’s also the “but we’ve always done it like this” defence and something about “providing the best results” but neither are great arguments.
But yandex is useful for those who search in Russian. The low utilization probably comes from a mostly US/EU customer base, but when it is used, it is useful. I would disagree with disabling it. The best would be letting people decide what back ends to use, but that requires a whole rewrite of the search logic on their side, so it’s not happening any time soon…
BTW in EU we still use a lot of gas and oil from Russia, so it’s quite difficult to avoid giving them money (especially because we don’t know where energy came from for every product we buy).
Doing continuing business with Yandex at all is bad enough for me. I’m having enough trouble cutting off Russia-supporting products and services already, I’m not taking on new ones if I can avoid it.
Kagi is a great concept for a search engine, but looking at the forum posts by their CEO, their priorities clearly won’t ever align with mine. I hope they get similar competition as Google crumbles further and further, because their business model is how search engines should be making money.
Fair enough, I am also not attached to kagi, mostly I want companies with good business models to succeed in tech. I want to see ad-revenue based companies (and all the connected industry) to crumble. A man can dream…
Source?
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Best I can find links a sweedish page on the topic
https://fedia.io/m/privacy@lemmy.ml/t/1334785
It’s kind of odd I can’t find more sources which does make me a bit skeptical
and they use Brave, too.
When does anti Russian gov aggression just become racism? Does using Google aid the war in Palestine?
I see your point, but I think there is a meaningful difference.
Russia started a war with a peaceful nation. It is in no way, shape or form a provoked war.
There are a couple of ways you can react to hurt the agressor. With the goal of making them stop hurting the innocent. Military action is one, economic is another.
Most European countries have decided to hurt them economically. As a European I agree with this, and fully support it. I try my best not to support the Russian economy. If Russia as a country changes in the future, my view will probably change as well. This is a war that Putin started.
That said, I believe the support from the US to Israel was wrong. The US has been supporting genocide. One could argue that supporting the US economy supports these sorts of actions as well. However, the scale is important and how much involvement is important.
If you had mentioned an Israeli company, I would agree 100%. The difference is that the US have not been spending 1/4 to 1/3 of their entire fiscal budget fighting a peaceful democratic nation as the agressor.
Anyways, at this point I am kinda mad at the US for being a unreliable partner and going to trade war with Europe and bailing in their responsibilities when it comes to the war in Ukraine and creating uncertajnty within NATO, threatening nations etc, anyways. So not spending a lot of money on US goods and services at the moment either no.
Technically you could extend that reasoning to plenty of EU countries that also send aid to Israel (e.g., Germany, where Hetzner is located, or tuta, etc.).
At some point one has to make compromises, and everyone can place the line where they wish. Considering 1000 searches per month, the price is going to be between $0.20 and $3.84 (synchronous). So let’s say $2, which is probably an order of magnitude more than the real cost. Of that 2$, the margin is maybe 1$? That 1$ becomes profit for some Kazakh company, which ultimately means $0.2 in taxes. If this was in Russia, that would be $0.018 to the federal government, but let’s say that it doesn’t matter. Of that, 40% goes in weapons, making it $0.08/month. In 1 year, that’s $0.96.
Now, as I said I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an overestimation of 10x or more, it also assumes that absolutely nothing goes to Kazakh government, which is fully used to bypass sanctions, and a 50% margin for the company. It also assumes 1000 searches (the average was around 300 if I recall correctly) and that yandex is used for each one of them.
Every cent count, absolutely, but it’s objectively such a tiny amount that a one-time donation to UA army or some humanitarian relief org will offset you for like 15 years.
I totally agree that it is a miniscule amount. I try to prioritize more effective actions for other causes I care about, but personally am uncomfortable with any compromises with Russia at the moment. Luckily it’s basically close to zero products and services that are Russian, so it’s easy to avoid. So everytime I come across something Russian, I just avoid it. Kagi is one of the really rare times.
There’s also non-economic reasons to avoid a Russian index considering their reputation with misinformation campaigns. Even a slight nudge in the direction of Russian positive propaganda is damaging. But this was not my initial argument.
There is also the information gathering aspect, knowing what people search for (even if anonymous) is valuable.
At least in Europe that’s still quite impossible, who knows what their gas and oil is used to produce. Which means you might buy some european product and also give them money. Anyway, everyone has their lines and I respect that.
I think most people are unaffected from the actual data, unless they search in russian, which is useful for me as a Russian language learner for example. I mostly search grammar stuff.
