this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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DeGoogle Yourself
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their CEO also moderates the discussion on Kagi's Discord. he's been removing criticism by queer folks, while - the last time I've checked before I've left their group - keeping replies like "stop shoving LGBTQ down our throats".
https://nyan.lol/@zicklepop/111716138453426218
edit: also their response regarding a request to add a "don't do it" widget to suicide searches basically boils down to "but if we make a moral choice now, we'll have to do more moral choices in the future!", which is... suboptimal. https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probably-have-a-dont-do-that-widget-like-google/
Was thinking about biting the bullet and getting Kagi, but this is sign enough not to let alone the OP.
Same here. Looks like I'll be staying with DDG for a while yet.
Ah fuck, I've been using Kagi but of course their CEO is a reich-wing asshat.
Anybody know of any other options? I'm not going back to Google.
Ive been having pretty good time with searxng
Are you self-hosting or using a public instance?
It's much better is you use a public instance as your results will be harder to be tracked: https://searx.space/ choice your favorite one here
DuckDuckGo is honestly a reliable one
I wish this were true
I've heard some random grumblings about them, maybe related to their funding model? Can't remember any specifics about this though.
What I liked about Kagi is that it's a subscription service, so you know up front that they likely won't be incentivized to sell your data or fuck up your results to survive
Wow, this topic in the edit is bad, and I wasn't aware of it. Just canceled my subscription. Now I have until 14/01 to choose an alternative.
https://searx.space/ works pretty well.
For me, it is doing a good job, and it's pretty fast. I think in the past was slower and with many issues, but it improved a lot. I never tried Kagi and I don't think it's rational to "login" and identify myself to be able to get results, even if it's working better, everyone should be able to get good results without needing to pay.
Until this stuff is funded with public money, it's not really doable for such a compute and storage intense task.
I am perfectly OK with paying for good software, until then. I also agree with the principle of aligning interests of users and the search provider by having the users pay. Other models (ads, sponsoring) creates incentive to favour those who pay. The other reasonable model is donation, that can work potentially, but it has its problems.
But https://searx.space/ is like Lemmy, you can donate to those instances to help them to keep it on. It is not really a search engine, so the power usage isn't that big, it uses other search engines to get the results, the difference is that the search engines like Google, DDG, Bing and etc don't know who did those requests. The quality isn't bad neither, but I can't really say the difference as I never tried Kagi. 🤔
In fact it's not comparable, because this is a metasearch engine. Kagi has quite many unique features and besides that it's great in surfacing small websites (for which it mostly uses its own crawler) and downranking pages full of tracking. They are just different and the Kagi model is the most reasonable, in my opinion, for what it does (search engine).
Counterpoint. Kagi is run by a fascist which was the point of this comment chain
I saw no evidence of that.
Looking at the "evidence" discussed, I saw three points:
there was clear intention to discuss, and it has always been done in a respectful way.
If this is anybody's definition of fascism, then I personally consider that person's opinion on fascism completely irrelevant. Now, since my mother tongue has the unfortunate responsibility for having coined the term "fascism", I think I have at least an idea of what it means. It means -in a wider sense- discrimination, suppression of minorities and violence as a mean to shut down opposition. I see no such thing in this context, and if you do, I think it's time you provide some evidence for this claim, because just name-calling random people fascist on the internet doesn't help anybody, and it doesn't help in particular due to the fact that waters down the term and reduces its meaning.
God damn it.
I am a paying subscriber to Kagi because the search results are excellent and there are no ads, so of course you show me a thread on “we should maybe add a small message to suicidal users telling them there is help for them” which then reads like a truth-social propaganda thread, filled to the brim with “helping people is a slippery slope!!!! muh freedoms!!” arguments.
This is something I really don't get.
But let's assume that all the previous points are invalid, and - for a greater good - it's worth displaying a message when someone is looking at suicide-related topics. What about "how to kill someone", " how to rape", "how to [...]" with the hundreds of things that are universally considered wrong? And even worse, what about the thousands of things that are not universally considered wrong, but that some group thinks are wrong? "How to change sex", " how to blow up a pipeline", etc.?
This I think was their point in that conversation, and I agree with. The moment you try to interpret what the user wants to do with the info they ask you, and you decide to assume responsibility to change the user's mind, there are hundreds or thousands of instances in which users or groups of users will demand you take a position for what they believe is right. Instead I think a search engine should stop at providing information relevant to your query and not assume what you want to do with it. It's not its place to correct people's behavior or educate people. The public education system should do that, the healthcare system should ensure people have the right support. A search engine is (or better, should be) basically like a librarian, or a library index, you ask what you want and they point you in that direction. They don't try to guess why you are looking for books about torture or environmental activism.
This at least is my perspective.
Well, I was giving him a few days to backpedal but it seems like he's not going to do that. There goes my subscription, back to ddg I guess. Since they are supposed to be 100% subscription funded (they still are, right?), this is one of the few companies where that hopefully might actually have a noticeable effect if enough people care about it.
Meh, good for them tbh. I find these messages to be incredibly patronizing and somehow I doubt you can find a single person who will say "google posting the suicide number has made me reconsider killing myself"
Reading about the suicide thing: I might try kagi again this year. This is the exact type of software I want. It should only perform its intended function (returning relevant results to any query) and not try to influence me into following someone else's moralisations.
As a Kagi subscriber, I've been very happy with their transparency in general. The feedback site is open to the public and Vlad and other staff members regularly engage in conversation about possible future features, limitations, and even business decisions in the Discord. It's been refreshing.
...which makes the response to this issue all the more frustrating and disappointing.
I think Vlad's comments in the original feedback thread were fair enough, but then later, in the Discord, I saw a lot of "let's move this to a private chat". They even changed their General channel to "slow mode" to prevent live conversations as this topic became hot. Now I see they were also deleting threads?! Ugh. That's not transparent at all. Not what I expected based on my previous experience with Kagi.
The suicide thing, to me, sounds completely reasonable. I am also extemely skeptical that thing has any effect at all (in Google, for example).
By the way, this whole debacle is honestly very silly in my opinion. Do we really expect them to start being fully clean and moral, and to not give any money to any party which does immoral things? Then why pay Google for their API, why use AWS/GCP, or let's go even further, any entity in US (or Russia, or China, or most of EU,etc.) pays taxes and funds a military-industrial complex which is responsible for far worse than opposing same sex marriage. But we really draw the line at using Brave API?
Things need to be put in context. Is it better that a new search engine will exist, that protects privacy, that just provides search and actively opposes tracking on the internet, that can provide people with a plural set of information? The answer for me is yes, and these unrealistic expectations are very shortsighted in this perspective. I am very happy that Kagi pays google API for search, even if I hate Google and almost everything it stands for and I refuse to use any of their products. The benefits outweight the damages in the wider battle.