I use Kagi because the truth is all other corporate alternatives at this point are unusable swill.
That said, I do not like the company and disagree with their choices in many aspects.
For one, while they don’t force you to use AI features, there isn’t a way to explicitly turn them off for your account, there always the opportunity to rack up token costs if you accidently hit one of the AI buttons.
They still don’t run their own index, instead complacent to just pay the other search providers. Additionally, if you’re trying to escape Google… Kagi runs on Google Cloud Services.
There’s more complaints, and I’m sure others will chime in, but that’s my take.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Just had a conversation about this. I’ll copypasta what I said there.
d-shoot.net/kagi.html
tl;dr: they’re all in on AI (their own model, FastGPT, which is terrible), they make some very questionable business decisions with limited funds, and have a poor understanding of what Personally Identifiable Information (PII) actually is.
I could compromise on some of these things, but if I’m going to pay for their service as a Google alternative, I need to compromise less than I do with Google already.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Also DDG is a perfectly viable option.
SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Appreciate you linking in your blog post. I’ve been on the fence about Kagi and you bring up a lot of good points informed by sources I’m unlikely to delve into.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
To put you back on the fence, it had the best algorithm when I tested it some time ago. It showed me things I wanted by default. Google always needs some massaging and ddg needs a !g
padge@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Thanks for sharing this, very informative read. I might have to go through that Cohost article when I have a spare hour haha
isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Thank you, very interesting post. I’ve interacted with Vlad before, he’s very unhinged. I’m just using Kagi for a good time, not a long time.
I’m ready to jump off at the first whiff of them using my data for something funny, but I do really really like the idea of having a search engine that works this good and doesn’t show me ads or sell my data, I’m allergic to both. Searxng results were complete garbage on all instances I’ve tried.