1y ago

Kagi search engine

kagi.com Kagi Search - A Premium Search Engine

Kagi is an ad-free, premium search engine for people who value their time, attention and privacy. With results optimized to serve you and not the advertisers, Kagi is lightning fast and offers advanced features for customizing your search experience.

Recently discovered a search engine thanks another social network (Pjuu). Appears as a premium search engine that take cares privacy. Anyone knows it? I'm trying the free version

Privacy Guides @lemmy.one

Has anyone used Kagi Search (search engine)?

kagi.com

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Mmh, looks like you need an account to use this search engine. Always not a good sign in terms of privacy but I might be wrong here. I'm currently using Presearch. It's decentralized (like Lemmy) and anonymizes your search queries. Most of it is Open Source but they announced to make everything Open Source in the future.
- I'm immediately turned off of PreSearch by the Crypto association.
  
  Why? You can completely ignore that. Just use the search engine and ignore the rest. I'm really happy with the search results.
  
  Well, because I tend to find crypto full of scams, and I think search engine that both blasts crypto in your face and is apparently based on it is likely to be built on a shaky foundation. I think decentralized search is likely to be slower, and very slow if based on waiting for crypto processing to happen.
  To me, this is like walking up to a car wash that's proudly saying "run by Madoff". It doesn't matter how good the car wash itself is, I am concerned about it's long term viability and judgement vs getting funding from almost any other source.
  Distributed is also very likely less private because you have to send the data to multiple places, or you have the issue of waiting for consistency across front ends. If it doesn't have multiple servers, then it's the backend that has to be distributed right?
  Look, it might be a fine search, but if you doubt Kagi for needing an account, I would doubt this for the crypto association.
  
  It's fine but I wouldn't judge if I had never tested it for a while. But whether you wanna give that search engine a chance or not is completely up to you ofc. :)
  If you wanna know how it respects its user's privacy you need to do some research as it's a little complex. I don't see where you get scammed just by using the search engine. It's like you're saying you got scammed by a car seller once so you'll never make any other attempt to buy a car ever again.
  In the meantime I got to understand why Kagi needs an account: It's their business model. You have to pay to make searches that exceed the free 100 searches. So of course you need an account.
  
  It's more that I got scammed once buying a car at the side of the road not realizeing it was fly by night, so now I won't buy cars except from established dealers. Idk I saw the part where they said buy some new crypto coin, and then the bit where it works because someone is buying this coin so they can pay some people running the search. YMMV, I just pass on anything that talks about crypto at this point.
- I'll look for presearch
- That is because of their business model, you are the customer.
  You don’t HAVE to use a real email either. vlad even says so. But it’s needed to collect payment. Otherwise they don’t track you searches, or even see them. The fees are for their operations and development.
  
  I'm not really understanding what you wanna tell me with "you are the customer". They display ads at the top of your search results and that's how they make money. Considering that, yes, you are the customer. But they don't track you and your search queries are anonymized so they respect your privacy. With an adblocker you don't even see the ads. You can make an account to earn PRE (the crypto currency they use) with your search queries. But you don't need to do that. You could even run your own node server(s) and earn even more because you're helping the search engine by being a part of the infrastructure. But you can ignore all that and just use the search engine.
  Anyway I'm really satisfied with the search results. Didn't even feel the need to switch to another search engine since I've started using it a few months ago.
  
  They display ads at the top of your search results and that’s how they make money.
  Kagi does not do that. In fact their search results give you statistics on links/returns about things like trackers etc. there aren’t ads in Kaji returns.
  
  How exactly am I the customer if they don't track me? Do they display ads? How do they cover the costs for this search engine?
  
  You are paying them for the service and the costs to make a custom search engine. The only thing they keep track of is the number of times you queried the service. They don’t track queries or even see them. You don’t have a search history and can’t see previous searches because it’s not tracked
  There are no ads. They aren’t just proxying your search like DuckDuckGo.
  
  I see! Thanks for the clarification. I just checked their prices. Looks like you get X searches for a specific price. Not appealing to me but I bet many people are fine with that. I rather prefer a little bit of ads at the top of my search results (which I could block with an adblocker anytime) but that is just my personal preference.
  
  Correct. You can go lower and pay per search as well. And set a warning and hard stop limit.
  I do a LOT of searching for work. So the 1000/month is plenty and use it on all devices.
  They have features others don’t as well. Such as blocking certain domains from returning results. For example I filter out answers.Microsoft.com because that’s their question boards and it’s rare that anything useful is said there etc.
  They also support custom bangs similar to ddg.
  I find that I get better results for my job and faster with Kagi. So it’s worth the cost for me.

30 comments