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
They also offer their own browser: https://browser.kagi.com/
I’ve been using it for a while, and I think as @ProfessorYakkington said, it depends on what you’re using it for. I use it for work, and have work pay for it. In this case, I don’t need absolute privacy, I need a contractual data guarantee, and their public TOS is (more than) sufficient for what I need for basic search.
It’s hard to imagine a functional business relationship in most realms where the company you’re doing business with has 0 knowledge of who you are, especially on the Internet. To provide search results kind of requires “knowing”, at least for a second, what you’re searching for. I think Kagi has a more private model for tailoring the results than traditional search. Instead of hidden filter bubbles, Kagi has transparent “lenses” you can choose to apply or not. The most useful one to me is the “forums” one, which refocuses on actual forums for results, like technet, askubuntu etc…
Not having to fight off ads, and having a pretty obvious method for them to make money(i.e. you pay them for service) is all to the good IMHO. The results seem to be on par with StartPage, with one difference. The forums lens is better at finding “real answers” for tech questions than StartPage which often finds the same “SPAM” results Google does. This is unsurprising as StartPage is anonymized Google. This may or may not be a good thing. If you’re OK with ads or ad-blocking(you should be) - why pay for Kagi when you can use StartPage for free? The main reasons are to support a different search model, to get the lenses -especially forum focused, and for their GPT like results with citations.
I tried it but I found the results to be not as good as Google. I was trying to search for “phone loses connection” and one of the results was about losing weight. Google doesn’t do that so I thought that was really weird.
Interesting. I search almost for a living. I find results on Kagi to be better. That said my searches are almost always more detailed.
For example I would never type in such a generic search. I would almost always start with the make/model of the phone, type of connection (ie: wifi, Bluetooth, LTE) and go from there at the absolute least.
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.
Been using it for a little over a year, I think. No complaints about the service itself, though its founder, Vlad, is of the opinion that moderation of search results is simultaneously a bad thing that should not be done, and a benefit to users, depending on context. Typical libertarian-brain in that sense.
