this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Asklemmy
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My first choice is actually Kagi these days. I pay for my search provider to have some peace of mind that my search provider isn't selling me.
I got it not too long ago, and I love it. The results are good, and the features are what i wish all search engines had. Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
In the meantime, everyone should check out their Small Web intiative. Gives you a random blog or small website. There's some really good articles I would have never read otherwise.
It’s like stumbleupon!
I loved stumbled upon! it's got repetitive after a while, but I found a bunch of stuff I never otherwise would have
I have also discovered very interesting blogs or site that I have then added to my RSS feed. They also offer a lens to only look within the small web, which they index themselves I think.
Judging by their ethos so far, I don't think that's a goal. I'd almost say it's a non-goal.
I hope you're right, but there's plenty of well meaning projects and people that saw a large amount of money being offered and blinked.
I used to pay for kagi, but their CEO have some opinions that I absolutely hate about how to handle some issues, and this was a deal breaker for me. Nowadays I'm using searxng
What opinions can I ask? first time I've heard this
They announced a few months ago that they would partner with Brave to surface Brave search results too. The CEO of Brave is known to be homophobic. People got mad, and Kagi’s response was that they are too small to be picky, and have to focus on search quality.
And theres the issue someone opened on their page suggesting to include a special card on suicide related searches telling people how to find help, and the CEO dismissed saying it can be just someone curious making the search and he don't want to "set a precedent" on showing things the user is not actively searching
I... think I agree with that though.
I'm not saying there isn't a grey area between being socially conscious or full blow libertarian, but I do think that a search engine operates much better when it is unrestricted by societal qualms.
Look how stunted ChatGPT becomes with each new rendition, or how SDXL is far more restrictive in what it can express compared to its earlier SD1.5 models.
And also, like, their partnership with one of the most immoral companies on this planet drive most of the search results quality from the very beginning (Google). You didn't sign up for a morally perfect search engine.
When people made such a huge fuss about the CEO of some minor index that Kagi also happens to use beside like 10 others being a douche, all I could do is shake my head.
does kagi spit out location-relevant information? that's something I've really missed on startpage, I like being able to just google "chinese food" and have the restaurants near me spit back out, and if a privacy-centered search engine can return a result comparable to something like google there that'd make me real happy
Nope. For that I use the bang shortcut feature to send it to Google.
One nice thing about that, is that you can use
gas a bang, instead of!g. It’s a little thing but easier to type on mobile.They use approximate network location for such requests, yes.
"chinese food" didn't trigger it for me which is understandable since it's a generic term, not a request to show chinese food restaurants near you but "chinese food near me" does show restaurants in my approximate vicinity as expected aswell as localised search results for tripadvisor.
In their privacy policy they claim that that's explicitly the only time they use data that could be considered sensitive in a search request.
There is a map search mode that does surface location aware results, after explicitly getting your permission to get your location.
Kagi does not request location permission; it uses network location (IP geo lookup).
So this is confusing. I did not know about the maps mode (thanks @[email protected]!). If you show the map and then press the “target” symbol to get your location, Kagi will prompt to enable geolocation.
When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away. But if I select Maps first, then it shows my local area and I can search on the map.
Oh, yes indeed. Map mode would request accurate geolocation.
Yeah, that's an unfortunate reality of IP geolocation, it's not very accurate to begin with and can be extremely inaccurate in some cases too.
Does Google (without a login) have the same issue with your public IP?
Perhaps when a location query is detected Kagi could show a little button to use accurate geolocation instead. They seem to be pretty on top of little UX issues like these, so I wouldn't be surprised if they implemented a solution like that if you opened a feedback thread.