this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
199 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37696 readers
315 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Also it's automatically not private when it requires a login. They know exactly what user is searching what, and basically breaks search in incognito mode. Also people love more accounts to manage.
"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
If you really want to pay while not having to login, self-host a searx instance and you'll be logging your own data. You'll have complete control, it's significantly cheaper, and it's far more private without having to even login.
This is exactly what "you're the product" means. Google is selling your presence on their platform to advertisers - you are the product they're selling.
My comment says search engines. I specifically said that because I was not including Google. I know you specifically mentioned Google because other privacy search engines prove what you say as false. By that logic literally everything with consumers is a product, that's such a vague statement.
You are also DuckDuckGo's, StartPage's and Qwant's products. They sell your space on screen for ads. Now, they haven't enshittificatied to nearly the same degree as Google and full enshittification happening is of course not a given but making the user a product is basically step #1 to enshittification.
With Kagi, the product is the search engine service. You pay money and in return you get search results, lenses, bangs and all those neat little features. You are not being sold to 3rd parties. (At least not right now but I honestly don't see that happening any time soon.)
I'll just use AdBlock and get best of both worlds. You also have no idea what kagi is doing with your data, it's inherently eventually unprivate since it relies on a login. There is nothing wrong with ads, and they keep the service free and able to use it anonymously. The search results on free search engines are also the product here, since they only get paid from using them for results. All products require a userbase so that doesn't even make sense.
We in fact do have an idea what they do and don't do:
https://kagi.com/privacy
These terms are legally binding. If they did log searches despite these terms, that could end their business.
Not anonymous != unprivate.
Even if it was, I don't think it's different for all of the other search engines. For example: I do not believe for one second that Google can't identify you without being logged into your account; even with all the blocklisting your typical ad-blocker does.
Go try and fool https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/ if you want to go try how little even things like incognito mode help against identification on the web and this is all just relatively simple client-side analysis without behaviour tracking.
I disagree that there is nothing wrong with modern propaganda but that's a topic for another discussion.
No. That's the thing, they're not. Search results only serve to attract users. They only need to be good enough to be acceptable to users; everything beyond that is a waste of time and money from a business perspective.
They receive exactly $0 from you as a user. There is no sale contract between you. Therefore, you are not their customer, you are the product they sell to their actual customers.
No ads disguised as search results. Actually, no ads at all. Great search results. Lenses.
Also, there is a solution for incognito mode. And ad supported, in practice means tracked by advertisers, and hence you are the product.
DDG proves literally all of that false. Also just use AdBlock with it. Elaborate on it working in private browsing without needing to login.
DDG is just a wrapper around Bing and substantially worse than Google, smaller index and less up to date. Not needing a login doesn't really guarantee you anything either, as they still can identify you by IP or device finger print if they want to. You basically have to trust their marketing that they don't do that.
What makes Kagi interesting is that it's actually right up there with Google in terms of results, while surpassing it in terms of features. Would I pay $10/month for Kagi? Nope. It's good, but not magic. It's still just regular Internet search and you'll find most of what it finds with other search engines as well, especially when you hop between multiple. But if you want a better search engine and have the money, Kagi does feel like an upgrade, which the other alternatives just don't.
DDG has ads in the search result. Laginis honestly a great service. You can easily filter results and it removes BS SEO spam..
Providing the service is not free, especially something like search that uses a LOT of storage and compute power to index websites. That's very expensive to do. There's two options as to how to pay for it:
The latter is what people mean when they say "you're the product". The advertisers are the customers.
Two totally different things.
Searx is a search engine aggregation service. It is not a search engine itself, and you still need the backend search engines to make it useful. Searx could use Kagi though.
Kagi doesn't index, it's Google results as a proxy. That's literally what Searx does, and it's free. The issues you said with needing to pay for search is solved with Searx even if you claim it doesn't, it does. Also other search engines like DDG does a crawler + bing results is funded by ads, they're profitable. The mental gymnastics to pay for a shitty service makes no sense to me, but you do you if you want to support this terrible practice. Not to mention the numerous other issues I listed that you ignored.
Lol that makes no sense, and it probably violates Kagi's ToS. You're running a self hosted proxy through a service that's just a proxy for Google results. Just set Searx to search Google for the exact same thing.
"If you aren't paying for something, you are the product" sounds nice, but isn't true. Advertisment can exist and you can still not the product.
Instead it somehow makes more sense to pay for a privacy invasive search engine that requires a login, requires cookies, and doesn't work in private search.
This says they index
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
They just proxy searches and then sort them lol. Definitely caching thrown in there too, as if that even changes anything. You're paying $10/mo for that when DDG does the same thing for free.
It says right there they have their own index, that they are pulling from Google et Al and also their own. Whether it's worth $10, I dunno. But it sounds like more than just an aggregator
@abaci @mojo 100% worth it for me.
I switched from Google to #DDG to #Kagi. Even if the results were exactly the same, Kagi is FAST. The whole experience is very snappy.
Beyond that:
- All your DDG bangs work, and you can add custom bangs
- They have some neat AI summarization features.
- You can manually boost/penalize/block domains
- Lenses focus your search on particular kinds of sites
Comments like these really make this feel like this is astroturfing. It makes no sense to shill for a product this hard, let alone a really privacy invasive one that is worse the free alternatives.
what search engines are actually good these days?
because that's the problem, they aren't
search results have gone down a sharp hill lately
I don't think Kagi is the answer, but there is a problem - a big one
I think you might need to take a break and cool off. You're all over this thread getting way too heated for a discussion about a search engine. Please keep in mind Beehaw's guiding principal and Be Nice.
There is also zero guarantee that they are logging. Both are equally true.
That's still using the general DDG userbase as a product. Just because the ads aren't personalized, doesn't mean you're not a product for ad placement.
Wikipedia is run by a non-profit organization. If something offered by a business is free, then you are the product.
They aren't, that is why.
I'll chime in and say that I spent a day in a half looking up a weird Python library issue on DDG and Google and had no luck without searching the exact error message and looking at like 7 different results.
To test Kagi I searched using the vague search term I initially started my round of hunting on the other engines. The stack overflow page with the answer was the first result. I know it's not a perfect test, but in my few days with it, I've had FAR more luck finding things in any topic compared to other search engines.