I don't think a blog named "iOSLife" belongs here. Apple is one of the worst offenders in terms of privacy violations.
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I think the article appears biased because searxng appears to offer the same functionality as Kagi, in spite of being free, yet Kagi is shown to be the best in class for some reason? Also it doesn't touch on the critique that kagi having a login potentially aggregates all of your searches into one account that is stored by one company.
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Kagi's privacy policy claims that “Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.”
SearXNG is tricky because the privacy policy comes from whatever instance you are using.
Anecdotally, I have had better results from Kagi than SearXNG. The SearXNG instance I have been testing out keeps getting rate limited and mostly shows results from Qwant and Bing.
I don't really have a bias as I am testing out all of these options and trying to find the one that works best for my family.
Kagi can claim whatever they want in their privacy policy. Where's the code of their servers? Because I see none. How do we know they aren't keeping logs that could be easily correlated (by themselves or a third party who access their servers)?
Even if we had the code, I would still be skeptical, we can't be sure what code are they exactly running on the server side and having an account linked to every search is just awful.
SearXNG is anonymous while offering the very same features, if not better.
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You aren't wrong about not knowing if SearXNG instances are running a modified version of SearXNG that tries to log you.
Fortunately, we don't need to trust those instances. They do not require you to login, so there's not an unique identifier (like an account) to associate your searches with other than your IP address which you can hide with a VPN, or even better, using a .onion instance (something that Kagi does not have at all AFAIK).
For using Kagi, no matter if you switch your IP address every time, if you delete cookies after closing your browser or if you buy a new laptop for every search query, you're uniquely identified because you need to log into your account.
And for that account, you have to use a payment method. Sure, you can try and pay with a Monero to Bitcoin exchanger and do not give any personal information (and if we're being realistic, we know most Kagi clients aren't doing this). Even if you paid anonymously, you can only achieve pseudonymity because you're associated with your account.
With SearXNG, I could use a different .onion instance for each query and be completely anonymous (that's completely overkill, but it illustrates my point well).
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No. Kagi's fault is needing an account, a unique identifier which all searches could be correlated to.
SearXNG could leak your IP if your VPN provider was keeping logs? Definitely. And so does Kagi. Tor could be attacked by a three letter agency and compromise your .onion connection to SearXNG? Definitely. And it would be easier to de-anonimyze you when connecting to Kagi, which doesn't have an onion domain. Do you need to give SearXNG your email and/or payment information? Not at all. But Kagi requires it. Can you look like two completely different users when doing two queries to SearXNG? Easy. Not possible with Kagi. Do we have the server's code? We do for SearXNG instances. We don't have Kagi's.
I think it's pretty clear the privacy compromise here.
That’s a good point that I hadn’t considered. I do like the idea of SearXNG, but didn’t have great results when testing it. Maybe I should give it another shot on another instance.
This is clearly biased. Your points against SearXNG are weak. And you purposefully ignore the huge privacy implications of needing an account to do searches.
I don't think this is written by a bot, but I'd say it's either a camouflaged ad or a rather biased article.
Edit: To be clear. I do not care that a certain company has a good privacy policy. I want verifiable facts, not unverifiable claims. Their backend is proprietary, while SearXNG is free software. There's only one entity behind that company, which could be (or turn) malicious at any moment. Meanwhile, SearXNG is hosted by multiple individuals and organizations, you could even use a different instance each time, so it's impossible to corelate your search queries.
So yeah, this is a rather biased article towards a certain company.
Thanks for your feedback. My goal was just to look through the privacy policies with this, but you bring up a good point that that might not be a good experiment and could less to false assumptions. I do wonder if Kagi has had any this party analysis to back up their claims since it is not OSS.
I appreciate that you included sections of the relevant privacy policies. I like your approach.
Please run what you write through spell check. You misspelled: extremely, business, advertisers, educated, and default. The word October could be capitalized, but as part of a hypothetical search query, it could be lower case on purpose.
Lastly, Qwant is struck through in your last sentence. It's unclear if you chose that formatting because you don't recommend it (as stated earlier) or for some other reason.
Keep writing! We need more of this!
Oh yikes. Those are egregious spelling errors hahaha. Thank you for reading and the feedback!
Yes, I struckthrough Qwant since they are sending your IP to Microsoft with every search. :)
FYI that site is on the cbuijs list of malicious domains
ETA : improving(.) Duckduckgo (.) Com
You're saying ioslife.dev is on a list? I did a quick search on Kagi and didn't find anything. Could you share more info about what you're talking about? Thanks!
The list is called 'cbuijs Malicious Domains' according to my firewall logs.
You might want to ask them to take you off the list.
Do you have a screenshot you could share with me? I am searching “ioslife” on the GitHub page and not getting any results.
This is from RethinkDNS
Thank you! Is that setup via uBlock?
That's RethinkDNS, their cloud based, but it looks the same for their on device.
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People aren't allowed to post their own stuff now? That's been the norm since forever.
When does "forever" start?
Before the internet even existed. You are aware that forums have existed before anyone made an account on Lemmy, right?
The etiquette of other forums don't define the etiquette here. You're aware that the entire internet doesn't exist in a monoculture, right?
If nobody was allowed to post their own stuff, then things like official comic accounts wouldn't exist. Or official accounts in general.
We wouldn't want official accounts of any corporation in this community.
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Who do you ask permission from and how? Message the mods? Post a poll?
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Oh. Sure. I truthfully was just looking for some feedback on my findings and didn't see any rules against posting articles written by self.
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No worries. I appreciate you letting it stay up.
