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Has anyone used Kagi Search (search engine)? (kagi.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
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Basically the title.

I'm interested in any opportunity to inprove the way I navigate the internet. What I've been for a few years now is DDG, which works fine. Not great, not amazing, just fine. And that's ok considering how they opperate.

I just heard about kagi and was really cosidering it. Makes sense as a business model (pay so we don't have to sell you data), seems privacy respecting, and claims to strive for best search results in the market. Some test searches from the trial seem promising.

If you've used it for any amount of time, what has your experience been with it? What plan are you using? What are you mostly searching for?

Even you haven't used it, any thoughts / opinions are welcome.

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[–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I briefly compare Mojeek to Brave here: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/add-mojeek/12101/2

Pros for Brave Search:

  • (Kind of) uses its own index for general results! Their indexing strategy is somewhat odd, but this is miles better than most of the other "search engines" listed here: https://www.searchenginemap.com
  • Optionally premium. Users can pay to remove ads, improving the user experience. A monetization strategy that aligns with searcher's interests.

Cons for Brave Search:

  • Image search is heavily based on Bing, as far as I know. You'll have to correct me on this one.
  • Javascript required for certain primary parts of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), like Image and Video results.
  • Adding onto that, their SERPs are a lot heavier than Kagi and Mojeek, but nowhere near as bad as Duckduckgo.

Mojeek aligns far more with what I want out of a search engine. They are completely independent; they don't even use the servers of big companies like AWS or Google Cloud! They use a local datacenter instead. I think it's cool that their image search is specially designed for finding freely usable images (Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed), rather than relying on Bing Images. They also have a focus on the "smaller web" and independent creators—see their most recent blog post, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/06/search-content-from-substacks-independent-writers.html

Their staff are clearly very passionate about what they do and very knowledgeable. I trust them a lot, through personal conversations I've had with them. I just don't have that same trust for Brave Search, as well as my usability problems with it.

Lastly, I've learned a lot of interesting stuff from Mojeek about search. Their blog is very interesting, even if you don't use their search engine. I really liked this one, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-threatens-diversity-and-hyperlinks.html

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah I might try out Mojeek. I use brave for my searches and do !s [query] to get startpage results for my images

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    If you're using a desktop browser, I recommend adding search engines directly to the browser. In Firefox, this is easy because all you need to do is click the URL bar and hit "Add [Search Engine]". And then you can add keywords to them which allows you to search them directly.

    So, when I search for something on Wikipedia, rather than using a bang to go through Brave or Kagi, I just do @w query, because @w is my shortcut for Wikipedia in Firefox.

    It's especially useful for someone like me who uses a lot of different search engines, but it's also faster and takes out the middle-man. If you're using a non-iPhone non-Firefox mobile browser though, this isn't really something you can do (yet).

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