Comment on You're Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds
LWD@lemm.ee 10 months agoI did not say that very few people participated, which is anyway also true with respect to 19k users.
Fair enough. However, I think the quality of the criticism is more interesting than the quantity of people engaging in it.
let alone the fact that that’s the result you find when you look for “kagi and brave”, which means if you are learning about this topic, you will go read that thread and get familiar with these facts.
Which is true, but I’ve gotten at least one person replying to my comments saying that they were not aware of what Kagi was doing with Brave, and as a result wants to now avoid Kagi. Again, people aren’t going to dig that deep.
They’re definitely not going to read this far into our conversation, which is also why I ended up skipping chunks of stuff you said without commenting on it, because otherwise this conversation is going to become infinitely long and one of us is going to accuse the other of being Hitler.
I think that Google is way worse than brave.
And you present a good argument, that in total, Google causes more harm than Brave. But my problem with Brave, in addition to pandering towards the worst kind of people (not politically, of course, but the crypto bros), is that it causes far more harm for its scale than Google.
Car accidents kill more people in the United States than shark attacks, but I bet you would spend more time on a sidewalk than in a shark cage, given the option.
Which, I think, answers the thing you were most interested in.
They have a mission to “humanize the web”, and they tend to stress that they want to improve “internet” as a whole. How does this relate to hiding being a for-profit company/pretending to be nonprofit?
Because cringe corporate speak always looks to me like a disingenuous way of trying to differentiate your company from a different company. Kagi isn’t the only corporation that doesn’t do this (Proton does it worse) but they were the only one that was relevant.
And when people who had previously bought into Kagi’s “humanize” corpospeak only to see Kagi start shuttling money to a man known for his attempt to de-humanize minorities, and watching Kagi justify the decision by how it might at best save them a couple bucks down the line, I’m not surprised they would speak up.
Sure, Kagi Corp is making promise after promise. For now. You cite their good track record, but with their Brave Corp partnership, they have now initiated a bad track record.
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 10 months ago
I will cut it short because I think we understood each other. I get your point of view, and I think it boils down to relative vs absolute harm. I think that consolidating the already established monopoly is worse, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, you seem to reach the conclusion of third parties (which is similar to what I also reached, meaning Kagi wouldn’t exist). The problem with that imho is that it doesn’t move the needle. It does not present an alternative way to provide internet services for companies. I am not sold yet on free labor and donations as the basis for the internet. I think there are a few cases that work (lichess being my favourite), but ultimately I don’t think it scales or applies to everything. Besides, that also works until the big dogs allow it to work, and if they do, they are probably still earning on it (the moment Google wants to shut down searx, it locks the scraping and goodbye).
I do like Kagi’s features, I do like their own scrapers results (personal/small websites, which I find much more useful compared to corpo blogs about tech stuff). I do like the concept of lens where I decide where to search easily, same for upranking/downranking websites in a custom way. I wouldn’t consider this event part of a bad track, I think this is still a reasonable business strategy, although I will hold them accountable in the future (as they grow, they should do more in-house).