this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Eventually, a subscription-based tier that removes all advertisements completely for those who prefer an entirely ad-free experience.

When I first heard about Kagi, I thought that paying for a search engine was crazy. Now that I've had a few months to think about it, I would absolutely pay for a search engine. It's literally the most useful type of service on the internet, and it'd be a great, user-oriented way of supporting Waterfox. (Plus, every other search engine is enshittifying so freaking fast nowadays.)

Waterfox Search worked well for me this morning. Results were what I was looking for, and were literally no different from DuckDuckGo, Google, or Bing. It does seem to be down right now, though. Hopefully that's because everyone was so eager to try it out. :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Kagi was appealing to me as well, especially the quality of their results. However the requirement for a user profile (allowing them to build a profile based on your searches) and their involvement with AI soured me.

Would possibly pay for a search engine if it could somehow avoid the above pitfalls.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Yeah, the CEO of Kagi being hyped about AI made me worried about its future as well. I think you can disable all of that, but I want a search engine that is being built by people whose goal is to help me find things that real people, and real people only, have written.

With a paid search engine, it's hard to see a way around the problem of needing an account, unfortunately. Maybe it could just be an API key? Mullvad VPN does something like that. You have no username or password, just a long ID that you need to keep secret. And they are disposable -- you can just stop using it and buy a different API key next month.