Not open source -> I'm not going to use it
It's also a for-profit company based in the USA if I'm not mistaken.
That rules out any kind of privacy and chances are they will start the enshittification process at some point, just like every other company offering a subscription service.
IIRC, they said something like “we intend to open source it, but because of licensing and other IP concerns, we need to be careful how we structure the codebase, so we’re waiting until active development levels off”.
I see. I'll reconsider when that happens.
No thanks. I don't need a closed source browser from an USA company, promising about privacy. I don't trust them.
The pro-consumer pitch is typical of these startup.
I don't even see the point of paying for their search engine, which honestly feels to me just a viral market stunt on social media to make people believe it's that much different from the dozens free alternatives we already have.
~~Check my post history~~, ~~I've~~ someone else has done research to discover Kagi just uses ~~Bing~~ Yandex as its indexer:
they use Yandex as one of their search indexes.. They've also removed all mentions of this fact from their help pages. They also use brave index. You can't choose to not use them and in general they havent been very transparent about the whole thing
There is no way a fucking startup can catch up to Google that has been indexing the internet for the past 30 years. Microsoft had to purchase the indexer from Yahoo for billions of dollars just to catch up.
I thought I remember a blog post by them explaining how it's impossible to catch up with Google results due to the control they have and money involved, so they have their own indexing service that also pulls from others that they pay for access to (other than Google).
I may be wrong but that's how I've understood Kagi's results as I've used it for the last 2 years...
Edit: Found the article
Yeah I feel like they have always been open about their results pulling from a range of other search engines.
That blog post is promising, and a little hilarious. "A search index is human knowledge, it belongs to everyone, that's why ours is proprietary".
Kagi has always been upfront about using other search providers' indexes.
Per Kagi's current documentation (source), their search results
include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide
That particular page dates back to at least Oct. 2022. It was also mentioned in their FAQ back when they were still in closed beta
SearXNG does the same exact thing for free. What are the idiots paying for Kagi getting with their subscriptions?
It looks like you get what you pay for with SearXNG.
While SearXNG claims to aggregate results from "more than 70 search services", the "Engines" tab show that most instances only support a small number of engines, and many of these are degraded. That matches my experience of trying SearXNG, where I entered a few queries on a service that randomly picks an instance: Half of those queries failed due to the instance having been rate-limited by the search providers and the other half gave inconsistent and often poor responses. I'm not sure what engine(s) those instances used.
I guess I could self-host, and configure and maintain just the engines I want access to, but the time required to do so would very quickly exceed the amount of hours I have to work to pay for a Kagi subscription, so it doesn't make much sense economically.
However, one area where I think SearXNG does have a distinct advantage is privacy, provided that you self-host and only use engines that do not require an API key to access. But that's a tall ask for most people
Ecosia and Qwant have invested lots of money and they still only slowly on board the use of their own engine (staan).
A small player has no chance to be anywhere nearly as good.
Kagi has released a new beta of Orion for Linux, a WebKitGTK-based port of its popular browser for macOS and IOS.
Is it popular though? I've never even heard of it. Of course that doesn't mean it can't be popular but I'd say I'm usually fairly up to date on the whole browser situation
probably about as popular as their search engine that you pay for. Either you absolutely love it or you absolutely hate it.
I briefly used both their search engine and Orion on another OS. I wasn't impressed with either and could never justify the monthly cost.
The only reason I used it was when I was on iOS, where every browser is based on WebKit anyways (mandated by big Apple), so all the browsers were basically Safari in the backend, the only difference was that Orion had support for both Chrome and Firefox extensions which is pretty neat. I only had uBlock Origin installed, but that was better than all the alternatives (which have no extension support on iOS)
On Linux, the browser ecosystem is a bit more competitive with Firefox and Chromium based options, so there is no reason to install a closed-source WebKit browser!
Thankfully, I'm now on Android where browsers are more competitive as well, and I can use a Firefox-based browser that supports extensions too (more so than Orion since it is properly supported, so I am able to install more extensions)!
I Orion, started using it from the last big browser uproar a few years ago when everyone was leaving chrome again and when users left Reddit for here. Since Mac is my daily computer and Orion and some of their fans were pitching that it’s more secure that Firefox and Brave, don’t know much about it today. Their key points are, you can use Firefox and chrome extensions- faster browser- VPN tunneling to search engines and that it’s the only browser than safari that can communicate to the OS/computer to use Apple features that only Safari can do that no one else can. Also they built in ad blocker is nice when streaming anime.
I'm a kagi user and never heard of it, wouldn't try either.
Kagi is amazing but yeah, not sure what benefit this browser adds. Will see.
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