Preferably one that doesn’t censor search results. Like DuckDuckGo, apparently
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Disclaimer: Kagi user here.
Searches are not pay-per-use anymore. But you still have to be logged in to search. The premise is, that they don’t store your searches. It is not their business model. You are the paying customer, not the ad firms. This is, ultimately, not verifiable. It comes down to some sort of trust. And I do trust in them. The developers are actually great guys, there is a discord where they answer immediately, and a discourse forum where you can submit bugs/features, etc.
They take a strong stance on freedom. They refused to implement a suicide prevention message, as they felt, that it wasbnot the job of the search engine to patronize the user.
There is such a thing as a ‘session link’. You can get it from you account. With this, I don’t think cookies are necesary. But the link expires so you have to do it probably every few days anew.
The thing is: I want to aupport them. They have cool features (up/downranking websites, GPT-4 access over their proxy, etc.) Is it better than self-hosting: no. But I don’t wanna self-host. And search is something that costs. So any service that does not live off donations or some sort of payment, is suspicious.
I hope I explained some of my reasons. Please debunk me and make me cancel my subscription there if I am in the wrong. Im not a shill and actually interested in your concerns :)
Hrmmmm…not sure if the username checks out.
This has so many red flags to it.
Logged in search with them knowing your payment info is significantly more privacy invasive then logged out Google search.
Their business model is “trust me bro”. Which if you take marketing at face value then Google must be taking your privacy seriously, right?
They supposedly take a stance on freedom and transparency… Yet they use Discord lol.
The refusal of a suicide prevention mention is just straight up fucked up. It doesn’t change results, and that extra small message that costs them nothing and could save a life. There’s literally no downside and only upsides.
You can pay via Crypto/bank transfer and probably with cash soon.
The Discord thing is a valid point.
I don’t agree on the trust part with you. EVERY SOFTWARE we use boils down to trust. Because let’s be honest, we all don’t read the source code. (most of the time)
And finally there are downsides to such messages: Where do they stop? If someone searches for how to suicide, they should be getting relevant information for their query. Overall, I thought that if you find all the aforementioned things bad, you might like this one. From a liberal perspective, this is great.
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Do you have any sources backing your claims regarding Kagi?
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I’m an actual person who pays $5 a month for kagi and have recommended it to people. I’ve never heard of them selling user data to data brokers and a quick search isn’t finding anything about it, can you point me to some evidence?
Thanks for the context info. Saved me a search for it.
While I am not far right and don’t support Russia in this conflict, it’s still very wrong to censor anything political.
Censorship of any kind is bad because it sets a bad precedent. There’s a reason why the ACLU defended the KKK’s freedom of speech in 1978. If you can censor one, you can censor all.
No it’s not lol
DDG is perfectly fine
I bounce around a few public Sear instances, its working great for me
I’m fine with DuckDuckGoLite. If I really wanted to have granular control though, I’d spin up my own private searx instance.
Does DuckDuckGoLite display the same search results as DuckDuckGo? if so, I might aswell use regular DuckDuckGo
It does. I just prefer it to regular ddg.
I don’t know if these are the same but I quite like ddg html. I still don’t fully trust them because ‘murica but I haven’t heard of anything from them yet. I will probably switch to selfhosted librex sometime.
DDG HTML is quite similar to Lite, IIRC Lite does have some JS involved as opposed to HTML version, but I could be wrong.
DDG is Microsoft Bing under the hood, so yeah, not ideal. DDG also made some controversial changes when the Russia/Ukraine war started, but at least for me, I just didn’t see any lesser evils in the room that could still get me the results I needed.
I’ve tried Brave Search and it’s impressive what they’ve done, but their monetization model via Crypto is unlikely to pan out and I don’t see them lasting long unless they can find a way to monetize without crypto and ad revenue.
As far as searx is concerned, it just pulls in a bunch of other search engine results and I’m not sure if it just ends up supporting those engines at the end of the day. If anyone else knows more about whether these search platforms are still able to monetize off of searx results, please chime in.
I haven’t heard of librex, but will take a look. Thanks for the lead!
Kagi, but I hope it legit turns into a contest in a race to the top
I keep on hearing great things about them, but my broke ass doesn’t want to pay. 😅
I’m more in the experimental phase with it. We shall see although I fully empathize with any cynicism. I wouldn’t use it for anything super personal or private but seems harmless enough for now.
I’ve been using Whoogle lately but used Startpage for a while too
what do you think ddg censors?
Whoogle and SearXNG
Kagi. But I use Whoogle public instance and pretty happy with it 🙂
I might start using Whoogle too, since Kagi is paid :)
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Whats it like there right now?
Yes, in general, everything is not bad, hardware, for example, is all available. But paying for foreign services/donations is difficult. Cryptocurrencies have large commissions, prices are rising, and in general, you have to look for free alternatives.
Kagi is quite possibly the least privacy friendly search engine out there. I swear there’s astroturfing going on here, I don’t know why anyone would pay for this, they’re just falling for marketing.
Not to mention it just won’t work in private browsing and all your queries are tied to a specific account which also has your personal information from your payments.
DuckDuckGo does not censor, that is misinformation and FUD. It’s probably the best search engine currently for most things.
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Mojeek and Brave Also try Gibiru to see uncensored results (those which Google and Bing try to hide)
