cll7793

Your comment belongs higher. When given the opportunity to make money by social media advertising sometimes in the thousands or millions, companies, share holders, and conflict of interest groups take it. Cablemod's burning adapters, cryptocurrency scams, payed positive youtube reviews are some great examples. In general there is no honor system and its best to assume anything that can be abused will.

Also manipulating votes is incredibly effective towards swaying public opinion due to the bandwagon effect. Spend a days worth of effort making fake accounts and downvoting any opinion you see as undesirable and most people will follow suit. This is especially bad in echo chambers like on twitter, reddit, etc.

I wish a broader audience could be aware of this. The best I can do is try to spread the word.

Sources:

• The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc
• Cablemod Recall: https://old.reddit.com/r/cablemod/comments/18o7bnv/planned_voluntary_safety_recall_of_cablemod/
• FTX Scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX
• Bandwagon Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
• Echo Chamber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

Same! And lemmy has provided the highest quality answers on the internet in my opinion.

Self hosting is smart! Usually good things always come to an end, at least if they are not open sourced.

Due to how important search is, it is not a stable solution to place the trust of the technology, your data privacy, and fair pricing to a corporation. Kagi so far seems great don't get me wrong! But enshitification from monetary incentives almost always occur. Open source search is the only stable long term solution.

The Patriot Act and Snowden's leaks have shown companies will go against their privacy policy to appease governments. Search engines especially are targeted by five eyes with the PRISM program where copies of all your data, linked to your payment, are sent to Five Eyes and stored. Gag orders and legal threats prevent disclosure, as has been done with prior tech companies who have tried to push back against this.

Be wary of trusting corporations with your data as monetization is a powerful incentive.

Valve is great! Private and non-profit organizations give me some hope for a better internet one day.

Regarding Kagi, there are other potential concerns with privacy, data leaks and price gouging as well. The Patriot Act and Snowden's leaks have shown that companies will lie in their privacy policy to appeal to authorities even if they claim they are not storing information. All your health related searches, sensitive personal details, private life, etc is also always linked to your payment method waiting for a potential data leak if they are lying. (Or a copy is just sent to five eyes)

All that is to say, be wary of trusting your privacy to companies. Monetization is a powerful motivator!

I'm worried eventually even Kagi will get enshittified. It has been a common trend that almost always occurs. Open source is the only way to ensure stability. Conflict of interest is what leads to companies either overcharging, or even accepting to get bought out.

Don't get me wrong, Kagi seems to be a great company thus far! But for something as important as search it would be best to have an open source solution.

Hmm, I did notice a sudden severe drop in quality recently. Perhaps they are A/B testing something.

Conflict of interest is the best explanation. The goal of search engine companies is not to provide information as efficiently as possible but rather something else entirely.

A lack of competition is another factor as well with the monopolization of Google, Microsoft, etc. There may exist better search engines, but the average joe, and even some of us, have trouble finding them. The quality search engines don't get a chance to expand and or are bought out like with Altavista (Regarded as the best search engines from the golden age). For example, crowdview.ai is the best search engine (outside of kagi from what I've heard) but I'm unsure if they will be able to stay afloat for a long enough time to get a chance to expand and take shots at Google.

The enshitification has been a gradual process. Think of it as slowly boiling a frog. I've observed the quality of search slowly degrading over the past 2 decades. Just recently, it has gotten to such a severe point that searching has been useless.

Thanks! Never given brave a try before

Altavista was ahead of their time. The modern internet desperately needs a technical search engine.