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Fediverse @lemmy.world Jo Miran @lemmy.ml 2d ago

Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.

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.

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172 comments

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
  
  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.
  
  Mojeek
  
  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.
  
  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)
  
  https://metager.org/ is run by a German non-profit. Since late last year it's pay to use because their advertising partner (Yahoo) cancelled their contract without warning. But it's cheaper than Kagi. Also the non-profit is part of the project that's building the European OpenWebIndex ( https://ows.eu/ ) that's releasing this year.
  
  As a former Kagi user (quit all my US company subscriptions recently in order to support EU) I've now used Startpage for a month and it has been great so far.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com
  
  Startpage.com
  
  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 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.
  
  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?
  
  Have the same issue with them. I recently churned from Kagi after being a paying Pro customer. 10,-/month is simply too much. I'm paying for email (1,-/month) and web hosting (1,-/month) and web search should be in that price range to make it an attractive offer for people.
  
  I wrote to Kagi saying as much when I churned (also criticizing that most of their changelog messages are about LLM updates for "Ultimate" customers), but they responded saying that they believe in their offer and that the trajectory of new users signing up gives them confidence.
  
  I am, however, not willing to shell out Streaming Service level pricing (services that stream hundreds of GB to me every month) for some web searches.
  
  As much as it pains me due to Brave being involved in the whole crypto scam business and their CEO apparently being another a**hole tech fascist, I am using Brave Search for now. Its results were not inferior when I compared them to Kagi and I don't need 95% of all the extra fluff that Kagi offers.
  
  As soon as there's an offer for private search results with their own index that is not censored nor ad-driven, that company (maybe Kagi!) will have my money. But it needs to be commodity-priced like mail or hosting.
  
  $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
  
  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.
  
  Don't trust him based on his prior comments
  
  Such as?
  
  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!

172 comments