DeGoogle Yourself

Was thinking about biting the bullet and getting Kagi, but this is sign enough not to let alone the OP.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

No he's referring to a different issue unrelated to the thing where the CEO of Kagi is an active fascist.

There will be according to the Discord but they haven't changed their attitude.

There is no outrage, they supposedly lost 0.5% of the users which means they lost only this one person who us making all this noise.

And before Yandex, Google - which they use since the beginning, and which it makes also clear that using the services of a company is at the moment a necessary evil, and does not mean in any way endorsing the values (or lack thereof...) of that company.

But apparently some people are really tunnel visioning on some specific issues and looking at them from a short term perspective only.

Being political I would say that this is an unfortunate result of the lack of a strong collective movement in the left, which leads to people looking mostly at individual problems but not at collective problems, because these seem overwhelming and potentially destabilizing for the status quo.

It looks like the response was rewritten. It basically says they combine results from various public sources, and have recently added Brave via the public Brave API. It sounds like it's not a partnership, just adding redundancy by having another search result source.

Yes: Kagi Search Stats - Members

19079 (5th) down to 18955 (8th) is a loss of 0.65% of their subscribers, although it's going up again now.