I apologize if this is old news, but I just noticed it. It looks like Kagi has added Fediverse Forums as a default Web search option.

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[–] 173 points 2 years ago (61 children)

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.

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  • [–] [S] 58 points 2 years ago (36 children)

    What non-american search engine do you use?

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  • [–] 254 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    I write questions on bathroom stalls and then check back in on them every few days.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (4 children)
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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    https://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 ( https://ows.eu/ ) that's releasing this year.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    I used it a Little before it became pay to use and I was honestly impressed by search results (I was used to ddg, ecosia and qwant atp and mainly use ddg)

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Search engine? I started rawdoging urls a while ago.

    The internet is increasingly more useless, the sites i really need are bookmarked anyway.

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)
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  • [–] 46 points 2 years ago (15 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, I agree. In general I will personally try to evaluate if the good that comes from a company succeeding outweighs the fact it's a US company. I won't use a dogmatic approach, but I will definitely be careful to choose even more carefully than before.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

    $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.

    The actual compute cost per search, in 2024, was $0.0125. Kagi states they want to keep Costa below $0.015 per search, but their search partners are a major expense.

    That ofc ignores all the supporting infra, devs, support....etc that goes into making it all possible.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years 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 and storage to thousands of strangers to share torrents and they do the same to me. No secondhand transactions happening.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    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 psychologically, 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.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    I'm not a fan of Kagi's founder, so I generally don't use it.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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