Comment on You're Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 11 months agoThat’s not an engine, it’s a metaengine. The results are still tied to the engines used, which means if they are trash, you get trash. Kagi uses a mix of google/yandex/brave etc. and then elaborates them as well, in addition to have their own scraper for things like the small web (which is great to surface personal blogs).
They are not comparable. Also, kagi’s privacy policy is exemplar and the account can be paid in crypto now (if you don’t want to use CC).
Besides, there is no such thing as free hosting, similarly to Lemmy, it’s just someone paying.
LWD@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Really strange nitpick to bring up as a first point. If Kagi is a meta-engine, then SearX is too. Maybe you simply haven’t tried it, because it cites multiple sources per search.
And Brave has ties back to using Google data:
Brave’s search is optimized against Google search results. Ever since its Cliqz ancestry, documented on the Cliqz blog, it optimizes its ranking algorithm to match Google ranking as closely as possible. Brave’s search discovery project uses clicks on Google’s results in the Brave browser to discover new sites. In other words, it’s not sufficiently different from Google to really diversify the search results.
People who host Lemmy and SearchX instances are doing it charitably. And SearX does not pay any big company back, AFAICT.
Kagi is a for-profit corporation that postures as not being one, even talking about “fundraisers” and “humanizing the web.”
Big difference.
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 11 months ago
Kagi is an engine, searx is a meta-engine. That’s what I meant. Which means kagi does not simply collate results from multiple source (like searx does), but implements its own logic. This means that - for example - it deranks website with many trackers, or can implement various features on top of the results. So it’s not a nitpick, it’s a substantial difference between an engine (kagi) and a metaengine (searx), which is essentially a proxy + aggregation of other engines.
It’s a known fact that brave optimizes result based on google data, and the kagi guys themselves in fact added that - with it being cheaper than google API - it could be a vector to eventually reduce cost for google API without impacting results.
That said, AFAIK kagi does not pose as a nonprofit, I think they make extremely clear that running searches (scraping, paying API, etc.) cost money and that they need to be profitable. Their stance is that by using a subscription model, their business interests align with user’s interests of providing good searches, rather than results that benefit advertisers, which is completely reasonable. This is literally written in their “why pay for searches” article that is presented when they show the pricing.
Of course it is a big difference, and you can argue for pros and cons of both options. I personally think the internet should not be based either on megacorp nor on free labor. Would I prefer kagi being a co-op? Sure. But it’s not like relying solely on free labor is free from any moral implication either (sure, you can donate, and I do to Lemmy for example, but only a minority does).
LWD@lemm.ee 11 months ago
This is more of a distraction than a distinction.
Kagi’s results mostly come from others. Its community is criticizing it for the results coming from others.
A criticism that, I note, you don’t seem to touch. If you must respond to anything, I would love to hear your response to their corporate decision to fund a shady company run by a shady man.
… Known by who? It’s definitely not common knowledge.
Which is a pretty good demonstration that Kagi as a corporation is seeking profit first and foremost.
Then you only nitpick the label I gave my examples, not the “we’re all in it together” emotional appeals aping the language of a non-profit. For example,
“We exist to make the internet a healthier, happier place for everyone”
Which I found on the business’ page you mentioned, is written more like they are a cutesy nonprofit than anything.
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 11 months ago
No, this is a big distinction. If you don’t care about it or you don’t appreciate the differences, there are plenty of resources online where these are explained. For once, an engine can parse the query and search based on its own logic. A metasearch will always just use your query and get results from the sources.
First of all, the criticism is from a tiny fraction of the community, and it is about which others the results are coming from, looking at it from a very narrow angle. It is not about the fact that the results are coming from others, but only from the fact that they are coming also from Brave.
My opinion is fairly simple: I believe the damages of funding bad companies is less than the benefits of having a good one, with a good product which can have a substantially good impact on the infosphere, thrive. I believe that Google is a way worse company compared to what Brave will ever be, for example. However, I understand that if Kagi stopped taking results from anything which is not minor scrapers and its own scraper, Kagi wouldn’t exist (or at least, it would be a completely unusable product). If Brave integration can mean less money to Google in the medium term, it is a net-positive change from where I stand. And I am saying this as a de-googled taliban who stopped using any of their services for years. Considering that they integrate Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, I would say that Brave is actually the less-worse of the major ones.
Known by whoever read the very conversation on kagifeedback. The company even answered to this particular point:
That’s extremely surprising for a company which is not profitable and did not even get VC funding. Also, the company has a good track of caring about its users. When they brought costs down, not long ago, they modified the plans and expanded the amount of searches (bringing the middle tear to unlimited searches), passing down the savings to the users. This was effectively reverting a change they implemented half a year earlier -> blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10.
Marketing move? I don’t know, but what I know is that they did something many other companies would never do.
So, I am quoting the fact that the company is extremely transparent about its business strategy, it doesn’t hide the fact that needs to earn money, it is transparent about its costs (incl. per search). You are applying your own bias and interpretation on sentences which in no way lead to intend that they are a non-profit (“utilizing the language of” is not “pretending to be”).
I mean, if you want to believe that they are trying to act like a non-profit, I can’t change your mind. There are direct quote of the CEO talking about profitability, e.g.,
There are entire forum threads where they discuss subscription models and profitability. It’s overwhelmingly clear that they are a for-profit company, which just decided to use a different business model with the idea of serving internet users (their customers), and therefore “humanize” the web. Now, you can filter out the corporate marketing BS, if you wish, but I see absolutely no ground to support that they are acting in bad faith trying to present themselves as a non-profit.
The main point is that profit is not bad by default. A co-op generating profit is absolutely great, for example. The point is how that profit is generated, and how it is distributed. If the model is based on a fair and transparent relationship with customers, which does not involve squeezing them so that the execs can buy their 3rd yacht, I don’t have a problem with that. If it’s not based on destroying users’ privacy to serve businesses (advertisers), I don’t have a problem with that. I will say more, in a capitalist world, this is the most we can hope for and if all companies would act like this, we would be way better than we are today.