I’m not a fan of Kagi’s founder, so I generally don’t use it.
Comment on Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.
cyborganism@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Cool. Wish more search engines would do that.
But, as far as Kagi goes, it’s a paid service and it’s an American company. So I won’t be using them.
ericjmorey@discuss.online 1 year ago
targetx@programming.dev 1 year ago
Any specific reasons? I’m a very happy Kagi user and the founder is active on their discord and seems like a really nice guy.
MBM@lemmings.world 1 year ago
There was this debacle, at least
targetx@programming.dev 1 year ago
Hmm yeah I was aware of that but personally didn’t see it as a reason not to like Kagi… Lori came across as quite drama seeking without solid arguments imho. Thanks for the response!
ericjmorey@discuss.online 1 year ago
Don’t trust him based on his prior comments
_pete_@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Such as?
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Writing them off as an American company is totally valid, but I’m happy to pay for a quality service because it keeps ads out and lets me vote with my money. It’s really not much to cling to, psycologically but it helps. When I and others completely degoogle our lives it moves no needles at GoogHQ, but paying subscriber metrics are a KPI discussed in every board room in the world.
clove@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Lile they say, perfection is the enemy of privacy! Kagi has been the best as an engine out of all I’ve tried. If a better competitors comes up, I’ll give em my money.
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
What non-american search engine do you use?
lippiece@programming.dev 1 year ago
No one mentioned open source alternatives, so I’d add: docs.searxng.org
denshi@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
metager.org is run by a German non-profit. Since late last year it’s pay to use because their advertising partner (Yahoo) cancelled their contract without warning. But it’s cheaper than Kagi. Also the non-profit is part of the project that’s building the European OpenWebIndex ( ows.eu ) that’s releasing this year.
orochi02@feddit.org 5 months ago
I used it a Little before it became to pay use and I was honestly impressed by search results (I was used to ddg, ecosia and qwant atp and mainly use ddg)
SexDwarf@lemmy.world 1 year ago
As a former Kagi user (quit all my US company subscriptions recently in order to support EU) I’ve now used Startpage for a month and it has been great so far.
VinesNFluff@pawb.social 1 year ago
I ask friends who are more intelligent than me
And if they don’t know I assume it is forbidden knowledge that would drive me mad to know
(I am only half joking)
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Startpage.com
Better than qwant in my opinion.
_pete_@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Still uses Google as an index so you’re just giving them money indirectly.
clgoh@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Qwant. It’s French.
cyborganism@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Was gonna say that.
MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
It uses Bing in the backend though.
MoonlightFox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes, but not fully. They have their own index as well. They have also recently started a partnership with Ecosia to focus more on that effort.
rsolva@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And Qwant is really great! Have been using og for a couple of years, and have no need to fall back to Google, DDG etc.
ericjmorey@discuss.online 1 year ago
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Does anyone use yacy?
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I’ve used Yacy por years. It’s very customizeable and gives good results, and I like that I can curate, to some degree, what it finds. Biggest drawback is that I don’t always feel like starting up a server to do a search.
AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 1 year ago
I tried, years ago, I think their federated approach to building a database and crawling are cool - but at least the last time I checked, the actual search algorithm was just too bad. It often gave me completely irrelevant results and seemed very susceptible to spam sites gaming Search Engine Optimisation.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah I had it crawl a site I knew was mostly unique. Left for a day and searched, nothing. I had to give it the entire url for it to pop up with anything…
Search is actually something that is kinda hard to get right. I just dont like having so many sites that are just small holes into google/microsoft/etc…search engines. I was hoping there was something out there that works.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Search engine? I started rawdoging urls a while ago.
The internet is increasingly more useless, the sites i really need are bookmarked anyway.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I started rawdoging urls a while ago.
Works best when you’ve got a web ring or other friendly community of contributors to reference against one another.
But those are few and fair between in the modern day.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
And I like swiss cheese on my ham sandwiches. Oh, sorry, I thought we were just saying non sequitors.
In all seriousness, that is not an answer to the question. Yes, some (often older) people will always use a search engine to find the same website they browse all the time. But search engines are also incredibly valuable for finding new things or verifying claims. I have a bookmark for the Warframe wiki but that doesn’t help me when I want to research different monitor energy efficiencies or find a repair guide for my toaster oven.
And while people CAN collect a set of (searchable) websites for different topics they are interested in… that is how we got into (one of) our current mess(es). How many people just use reddit for everything and thus make themselves vulnerable to corporate shittery and misinformation campaigns.
saltesc@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s three paragraphs of “I took this serious.”
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
Instead of bookmarks I use the “share to Standard Notes” option. It names the note after the link, saves the link, allows you to write a summary or tags, and makes it all searchable so it is findable later rather than disappearing like a needle in a haystack.
queermunist@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
I write questions on bathroom stalls and then check back in on them every few days.
arotrios@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That was you?
Well then, in answer to your last question scrawled in the Kansas City Walmart bathroom, yes, you should definitely get that checked out by a medical professional.
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
Not working, the only response I get is penis
Klear@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s internet for you.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
And then you write your own (wrong) answers below it in a different hand writing and pen. And call it SEO.
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
Why are you using Grindr Classic for search?
Mac@mander.xyz 1 year ago
For the personalized results, ofc
penquin@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Man, this is so random and hilarious. I genuinely laughed so hard.
Wolfram@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not using Kagi because its an American company is valid. But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product. There is still a transaction with a free product.
Kagi is not free because they respect your privacy and don’t sell your data.
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’d happily pay for search, but Kagi is way too expensive.
10 searches a day, for $5/month? (US)
Like, that is way too much.
I can receive thousands and send thousands of emails per day for that price. Is search really that much more expensive?
technopagan@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Have the same issue with them. I recently churned from Kagi after being a paying Pro customer. 10,-/month is simply too much. I’m paying for email (1,-/month) and web hosting (1,-/month) and web search should be in that price range to make it an attractive offer for people.
I wrote to Kagi saying as much when I churned (also criticizing that most of their changelog messages are about LLM updates for “Ultimate” customers), but they responded saying that they believe in their offer and that the trajectory of new users signing up gives them confidence.
I am, however, not willing to shell out Streaming Service level pricing (services that stream hundreds of GB to me every month) for some web searches.
As much as it pains me due to Brave being involved in the whole crypto scam business and their CEO apparently being another a**hole tech fascist, I am using Brave Search for now. Its results were not inferior when I compared them to Kagi and I don’t need 95% of all the extra fluff that Kagi offers.
As soon as there’s an offer for private search results with their own index that is not censored nor ad-driven, that company (maybe Kagi!) will have my money. But it needs to be commodity-priced like mail or hosting.
orochi02@feddit.org 5 months ago
Nothing wrong with using brave but what about duckduckgo? For me personally its the best all rounder
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 year ago
$10/m is unlimited searches though…
And yeah, searches are actually quite expensive. There’s a LOT of infrastructure that goes into making something unique with your own search engine that isn’t just a wrapper over Google.
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The business model just doesn’t make sense then (using search partners).
Because $60, let alone $120 US, a year is far more than most people would be willing to pay.
Dunno what to say, it’s just more than most people can justify paying for the service.
I’m gonna stick with DuckDuckGo and the newly free mullvad cached search
shortrounddev@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Maybe. They use several other indexes as their backend so they have to pay microsoft for every search
cyborganism@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I don’t use them or never read their privacy policy so i don’t know. But it’s not because it’s a paid service that company won’t use your data to sell it for more profit. That’s EXTRA profit for them, so why the hell not. And them being based in the US means I already can’t trust them with their poor privacy laws.
sudneo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Sure, but they don’t (their privacy policy is exemplary). They have a whole shpiel about their business model. Just few weeks back they released a feature that makes it technically impossible for them to see who did searches, so no trust is needed anymore. They implemented a very novel protocol, quite cool.
I have doubts considering they are an american company, but I want to see them succeed. Plus, they are remote, so at least a good chunk of the income taxes from salaries are going outside the US.
cyborganism@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
It’s a shame because there are good American businesses that are affected by this. There are companies that I respect. But it is what it is.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
There are plenty of paid products that do not respect your privacy and sell your data.
And there’s free products that do respect your privacy and don’t make you the product. They are community products.
For instance I offer my bandwidth to thousands of strangers to share torrents and they do the same to me. No secondhand transactions happening.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s definitely one model for operating a public service, but its far from the only one.
x00z@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I have donated €1500 to opensource software projects and paid a whopping €7 for software. These (privacy respecting) projects got my money because they weren’t transaction based. Capitalism is not the only way.