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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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.)
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.
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We learned a lot of lessons from the first one. Here’s hoping we don’t make the same mistakes.
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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.
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’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.
Nothing wrong with using brave but what about duckduckgo? For me personally its the best all rounder
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
Not working, the only response I get is penis
That’s internet for you.
No one mentioned open source alternatives, so I’d add: https://docs.searxng.org/
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.
I used it a Little before it became to pay use and I was honestly impressed by search results (I was used to ddg, ecosia and qwant atp and mainly use ddg)
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.
Also maybe unpopular opinion but there is nothing wrong with google receiving Money for their services per se. It is just all the other disgusting business practices that google is justifiably hated
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.
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?
