I’ve been using this search engine and I have to say I’m absolutely in love with it.
Search results are great, Google level even. Can’t tell you how happy I am after trying multiple privacy oriented engines and always feeling underwhelmed with them.
Have you tried it? What are your thoughts on it?
It’s ridiculously expensive. It’s not private if you have to link your searches to a paid account and none of those payment providers are private. They don’t seem to have open sourced any of their key functionality, meaning you have to trust them to not be collecting your activity data.
I spent a long time getting rid of software and using services that I either no longer trusted or was unable to make an informed choice due to their lack of open source code and I’m not going to take a retrograde step now. And that’s without the issue with their choice (a continued choice I believe) to use Brave results, a company I’m personally not prepared to support.
Current Kagi user paying for it privately. They offer top ups to your account with crypto. I do xmr -> btc to top up my account. Also signed up with an alias email.
If they don’t cache your search history to your identity, which they claim they don’t, then I’m not sure why that’s a problem.
Because claiming they don’t is not the same as being able to verify they don’t by making their code open source.
You can never verify what’s really running on their servers, even if they privided source code.
Deciding to trust a provider - any provider - isn’t just any one thing. So, the most basic step to me is all the relevant code being open source. The next step is getting their infrastructure audited. The step after that is seeing what happens if they get court ordered to provide data.
They do none of that and I’m just too cynical to accept ‘trust me bro’ as a convincing sales tactic.
They had a security audit, they have a canary on their website, they have a privacy policy which is legally binding, and they have a business incentive.
If you so much suspect that they do collect searches and associate them with accounts (something which they claim they don’t do), you can make a report to the relevant data protection authority, which then can audit them.
As someone else also commented, you can use an alias email and pay in crypto if you really wish to not associate your account with your searches. Just be advised that between IP addresses and browser fingerprinting it might always be possible to associate your searches together (even if not to you as an individual with name and surname), and this is something that big CDNs like cloudflare or imperva also provide for you. So you still rely in most cases on what the company says and what their business model is to determine whether you trust them or not.
So far kagi has both a good policy (great policy actually) and a business model that doesn’t suggest any interest for them to illegally collect data to sell them.
I don’t suspect or accuse them of anything. Quite the reverse - what I’m saying is that without things like open source code, privacy audits etc, we’re being asked to take their word for it all. They might well be the most privacy respecting company ever and they equally might not be. If you’re happy to take their word for it, that’s entirely your call. I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, I’m just answering OP’s question with my own opinion.
And I am saying that there are tools to increase this trust.
I also want to stress that you have no tools really to verify. Open source code is useless, audits are also partially useless. I have done audits myself (as the tech contact for the audited party) and the reality is that they are extremely easy to game and anyway are just point in time snapshots. There is nothing that impedes the company tomorrow to deploy a change that invalidates what was audited. The biggest tools we have are legal protection (I mean, most companies that collect all kind of data disclose that they do nowadays) and economic incentive. Kagi seems to provide good reason to trust them from both these angles.
Obviously, if that’s not enough for you, fair enough, but if you are considering a company to be intentionally malicious or deceptive, then even the guarantees you suggest do not guarantee anything, so at this point I really wonder if or how you trust anybody, starting from your ISP, your DNS provider, your browser etc.
That’s a security audit, looking at its vulnerability to attack.
Bit too expensive
I stumbled onto some comments about Kagi angling to become an AI-first search engine that actually brags about putting you in a filter bubble. From Kagi’s manifesto:
In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data, knowing its incentives align with yours.
One YouTube video suggests a grim future: “Everybody has a feed uniquely tailored to them. Nobody talks about their favorite YouTubers anymore, because everybody watches different content farms. All the real creators quit a long time ago.”
Food for thought. I don’t like the idea of these filter bubbles.
ETA: I didn’t realize it at the time but they also promise data collection for
- Political echo chambers: “But there will also be search companions with different abilities… You could customize an AI to be conservative or liberal”
- Corporate brand loyalty: “Ask it for a good coffee maker, and it’ll recommend choices within your budget from your favorite brands”
If you’re looking for an open source search engine that’s building its own data set, one exists (and it’s totally open source and free).
If you’re looking for something that collates other engines’ contents, SearXNG is also open source and free.
Kagi isn’t really unique in any way here; their most unique quality appears to be linking your searches to an account, requesting money, and promising not to sell your data at a later date.
… Okay, I just tried Stract, and its results are… Mostly not helpful.
My understanding is that Kagi makes an effort to tell you how they anonymize your search so they can’t tie it back to your account afterwards, whereas Searx is more dependent solely on the goodwill of whoever is hosting the instance. Both are good faith dependent in the end, but one has a profit motive for keeping that faith.
Edit: I hope Stract gets there and takes off one day, but today doesn’t seem to be that day for me.
The privacy policy is also a legally binding document, not just a promise that the company does. If they are found violating it, the GDPR fines are going to hurt and they would lose the customer base in a blink. Their privacy policy right now is exemplary, I am one of those who read policies before using a product and kagi’s is literally the best I have seen: clear, detailed, specific and most importantly, good from the privacy perspective.
There’s some tradeoff here, keep garbage out and relevant results in. Definitely want to stay connected with others and share knowledge (such as websites that provide quality info)
I’m not a fan of them doing business with Brave and how they handled criticism from the community.
For context: They edited their anwser and said the old one was bad. https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave
IMO the previous link provides better context, as it provides a look into what the leadership said within that thread before trying to clean up their optics, as well as showing other examples of what the company was up to.
The original behavior, and the censorship on Kagi-run discussion platforms is quite telling.
ETA: somebody catalogued the CEO’s damage control across the thread last month. Some of the observations were really interesting.
I’ve had better results than on Google in many cases. Also leaves DDG and other privacy relevant alternatives in the dust.
But, unless you are a power user it’s hard to justify the cost. Very pricey.
I use the family plan with my wife. So we end up at $7 per month per user. Which IMO is ok. Given how important search is for our every day internet usage, I can accept this price.
I rarely have to jump to the second page of the search results to get what I want, so I am really happy with Kagi.
The starter tier is only $5/month for 300 searches, which is more than enough for your average user.
I can get not wanting to pay for search, but I wouldn’t call $5 “very pricey”. In fact, I’d be so bold as to call it reasonable.
Maybe I am not average but I blow past 300 pretty easily. I also think you may underestimating how much people search on their phones.
Same here. I tried on the starter plan but had to upgrade. According to my account I have made 802 searches since January 4th. So 17.4 searches a day on average. This means that for a 31 day month I am looking at 620 searches.
I am also a heavy user of bookmarks and browser history. So I don’t rely on search to open specific sites (like searching for “facebook” which is one of Google’s most popular queries). So someone who is in the habit of using search for direct navigation is probably going to be a good chunk higher.
That being said I work on the computer and do a fair number of searches for my job. So I can believe that a light user is pretty comfortable at 300 searches a month. But moderate searches or people who use the search engine for navigation will need the unlimited plan.
I just checked and performed more than 300 search queries in the past 4 days.
I just checked my history and performed 611 searches this week on this device alone. 300 is not even close to enough for a week. $5 is way too expensive for that.
I have 2000 searches in the past 7 days… 300 searches a month seems so miniscule
Personally I love it. Being able to boost results from some sites while depriotizing or even banning others has been real helpful. Not having unrelated “sponsored” content cluttering up the results is certainly nice as well. The results themselves feel like Google from ten years ago, relevant and on point.
It’s not open source, at least to my knowledge.
No it is not. They are “increasingly open source”, whatever that truly means.
It means absolutely nothing
It means that they are open sourcing an increasing number of components? In the very same page they are linked: browser extensions, libraries they use for their AI features.
That’s the problem, though, given the cost of indexing it. I’m not sure there’s a single open source search engine that doesn’t rely on some sort of proprietary software. My philosophy is that if the product is free, you likely are the product.? We would almost need a donation-based search engine to get around that, which would likely would not be sustainable.
I don’t need my search history linked to my payment data for future enshittification. At least Google (and DDG or whatever) is guessing and I can make that harder with a proper browser.
What would i be searching for that’s so difficult to find that I would pay for Kagi? Especially when there are multiple options for good free search engines.
From the looks of their own promotional material, the opportunity to build your own tailor-made filter bubble…
Search experience tailored to you and your needs.
We encourage you to evaluate and change results.
That’s not so much a filter bubble as it is noise reduction. No, I don’t want to have Pinterest results in my search engine. No, I don’t have an Instagram or Twitter account and therefore can’t see the content there anyway. I am developer, so I want to raise the relevance of GitHub in my results.
You’re correct. I saw a small red flag and missed the big one. Kagi Corp says it ultimately wants to filter out search results that don’t match:
- Your favorite corporate brands
- Your political beliefs
- Your religious biases
In this future, instead of everyone sharing the same Siri, we will own our truly own Mike or Julia, or maybe Donald - the AI. And when you ask your own AI a question like “does God exist?” it will answer it relying on biases you preconfigured. When you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it will do so knowing what kind of food you like to eat. The same will happen when you ask it to recommend a good coffee maker - it will know the brands you like, your likely budget and the kind of coffee you usually drink.
Kagi has three separate pages that lay out this ideology that promotes data collection and segregation from others first, and privacy last.
I appreciate your rose tinted glasses, but when you wear them, red flags just look like flags.
You skipped political filter bubbles, which can be manipulative indeed. And in their aptly named manifesto, Kagi Corp promises just that:
You could customize an AI to be conservative or liberal, sweet or sassy!
In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized… AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data, knowing its incentives align with yours.
Isn’t that thoughtful of them? A bubble where you are alone, a bubble they want to build.
You will pay the company,
you will give up your data,
and you will be happy.You forget the part where they mentioned a different business model that allows to dump the ad-driven one, aligning the interest of the user and the vendor. In other words, a model in which the company gets the money from the user so that it can build a product for them, rather than getting money from others (advertisers, etc.) so that the user is someone who simply has to be milked for data or sold shit. This frame, in my opinion, changes quite significantly the otherwise dystopian nature of such (future) vision. The objectives in fact are very important in this discussion. Facebook, twitter etc. need people to spend time on their platform to give value to their customers (the advertisers). Creating bubbles, fomenting incendiary content, etc. are all functional to that objective. If the business model was different, the same might not happen.
In any case, the current features that exist (and that are not the speculations on the future in the manifesto) allow the users to customize the rankings as they want, without AI or kagi doing it for us. If I don’t want to see fox news when I search for something, I make the conscious choice and downrank it. If I want to see guardian and apnews, I uprank them. The current features empower users to curate their own results, which is very different from an opaque, black-box product doing it for us for specific reasons like might be the case of Facebook.
Ultimately, someone will make a decision about how to rank results in a page. Some algorithm needs to be used. What’s a better alternative, compared to me providing strong inputs to such algorithm, that does not raise red flags?
If Kagi Corp’s goal is to create a user profile on you, then whether they’re using your data to serve you ads or not is irrelevant.
This is the Privacy community, not the “You will give them your data and be happy” community
In reality I did not read anywhere that they intend to create a profile on you. What I read is some fuzzy idea about a future in which AIs could be customised to the individual level. So far, Kagi’s attitude has been to offer features to do such customisations, rather than doing them on behalf of users, so I don’t see why you are reading that and jumping to the conclusion that they want to build a profile on you, rather than giving you the tools to create that profile. It’s still “data” given to them, but it’s a voluntary action which is much different from data collection in the negative sense we all mean it.
It’s still data given to them, no scare quotes needed. And if that data includes your political alignment, like they say in their manifesto, a data breach would be catastrophic. Far worse has been done with far less. (And even if there isn’t one, using their manifesto to promise a dystopia where you are nestled in a political echo chamber sounds like a nightmare).
And even corporate brand loyalty is mentioned in their manifesto.
When DuckDuckGo complained about Google’s filter bubble, even Google had the good sense to downplay it. Kagi seems giddy about it.
I find DDG not great at finding what I need, where Kagi returns less results but they are more relevant.
There’s also AI features that can be integrated with the search results which helps.
It is a privacy nightmare as they have your payment information on file.
Kagi only stores the information about the client that you explicitly provide by using your account, as laid out in our interface. This includes:
Your email to facilitate account access and support contact (ex: password reset) Your account settings (ex: theme, search region, selected language)
And nothing else.
I’m so glad that all companies always follow there privacy policy.
Seriously though even if they don’t track you an adversary could compromise them
They don’t, but a company built on that premise (private search) that does otherwise would be playing with fire. It caters to users that specifically look for that. I would quit in an instant if that would be the case, for example.
Seriously though even if they don’t track you an adversary could compromise them
This is true about pretty much anything. Unless you host and write the code yourself, this is a risk. It is a risk with searXNG (malicious instance, malicious PR/code change that gets approved etc.), with email providers, with DNS providers, etc.
What solution you propose to this, that can actually scale?
I am currently subscribed and it is definitely a step up from other engines I have tried. The main feature is just that it seems to somewhat cut back the general blogspam and SEO fluff. It isn’t perfect but whenever I do compare it to Google, Brave or Duck Duck Go it seems to be ahead, or in rare cases similar.
The ability to lower/block sites is also quite nice. I also have a few raised sites, but that is really a minor improvement compared to blocking crap like Quora and Pintrest.
That being said the small plan is a pretty small number of searches so I need to pay for the unlimited plan which is quite expensive. I currently think it is worth it but it is definitely borderline value, not a slam-dunk decision.
I also have concerns about them focusing on things I don’t care about. Lots of AI features and a browser. I don’t want any of that, just focus on search, there is still lots of room for improvement, even if they are currently leading the pack.
Not saying you’re wrong, want to share my perspective: I agree with the AI, the quick answer saves me a ton of time by adding source links where I always click on to verify the answer (quicker than going through search results when I don’t know the terminology).
As to the browser - not really sure why they’re pushing for their own, isn’t FF good enough?
Yeah, the AI I am lukewarm on. I’m fine having them experiment, and it does seem that they are using it tastefully. It is something that I can see improving the experience in the future even if I feel it has little to no benefit to me now.
But yes, the browser just seems like a distraction.
I created an account a few months ago but I’ve barely used it. DDG provides pretty much everything I search for. This might be because I don’t typically do very “esoteric” searches, but for now I don’t see the need for a paid service. Most of the times, tweaking the query so that it looks for a specific source is good enough.
I’d love if DDG had a system to remove entire domains entirely from the results, though.
I’m currently a Kagi user. When I first used it I thought it was an excellent alternative to Google, and well worth the price. However ever since they integrated Brave results, I’ve noticed a significant decline in the quality of results. The only reason I’m still subscribed is because I haven’t found a suitable alternative.
Yandex
I just started paying the unlimited plan. I like the search results and the URL replacement setting. I can redirect YouTube videos to piped and Reddit to the old one so my VPN doesn’t get blocked. The lenses are also top notch.
I was introduced to it by an IRL friend of mine very early on and was very sceptical. I then tried it many months later and what actually convinced me most are its “advanced” features. They’re features that should obviously be in any search engine but since there’s been practically 0 innovation in this space in the past decade or so, this is very refreshing.
The results being on par with Google at the worst also helps.
Pretty much everything about it is really great. The only thing that’s not great is that you’re required to identify yourself with every search. I’m not aware of any alternative for a paid search engine though. They claim to not log or otherwise abuse your PII and it’s believable but there’s still a risk.
I guess the price is also kinda high but it’s justified AFAICT.Btw: !kagi@lemmy.ml.
