I apologize if this is old news, but I just noticed it. It looks like Kagi has added Fediverse Forums as a default Web search option.

  • Cyborganism@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Cool. Wish more search engines would do that.

    But, as far as Kagi goes, it’s a paid service and it’s an American company. So I won’t be using them.

    • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Writing them off as an American company is totally valid, but I’m happy to pay for a quality service because it keeps ads out and lets me vote with my money. It’s really not much to cling to psychologically, but it helps. When I and others completely degoogle our lives it moves no needles at GoogHQ, but paying subscriber metrics are a KPI discussed in every board room in the world.

      • clove@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Lile they say, perfection is the enemy of privacy! Kagi has been the best as an engine out of all I’ve tried. If a better competitors comes up, I’ll give em my money.

    • Wolfram@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Not using Kagi because its an American company is valid. But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product. There is still a transaction with a free product.

      Kagi is not free because they respect your privacy and don’t sell your data.

      • MisterFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        I’d happily pay for search, but Kagi is way too expensive.

        10 searches a day, for $5/month? (US)

        Like, that is way too much.

        I can receive thousands and send thousands of emails per day for that price. Is search really that much more expensive?

        • technopagan@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Have the same issue with them. I recently churned from Kagi after being a paying Pro customer. 10,-/month is simply too much. I’m paying for email (1,-/month) and web hosting (1,-/month) and web search should be in that price range to make it an attractive offer for people.

          I wrote to Kagi saying as much when I churned (also criticizing that most of their changelog messages are about LLM updates for “Ultimate” customers), but they responded saying that they believe in their offer and that the trajectory of new users signing up gives them confidence.

          I am, however, not willing to shell out Streaming Service level pricing (services that stream hundreds of GB to me every month) for some web searches.

          As much as it pains me due to Brave being involved in the whole crypto scam business and their CEO apparently being another a**hole tech fascist, I am using Brave Search for now. Its results were not inferior when I compared them to Kagi and I don’t need 95% of all the extra fluff that Kagi offers.

          As soon as there’s an offer for private search results with their own index that is not censored nor ad-driven, that company (maybe Kagi!) will have my money. But it needs to be commodity-priced like mail or hosting.

      • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        I have donated €1500 to opensource software projects and paid a whopping €7 for software. These (privacy respecting) projects got my money because they weren’t transaction based. Capitalism is not the only way.

            • _pete_@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              8 months ago

              They’re all based on others indexes to be honest so there isn’t really one.

              DuckDuckGo is Bing, Startpage is Google, Kagi is seemingly a mishmash of a bunch of search engines (including the Russian owned Yandex) Brave is independent but owned and run by assholes so that isn’t much better.

              Personally I like Kagi enough and it’s independent enough for me to pay for it.

              • Showroom7561@lemmy.caEnglish
                0·
                8 months ago

                That’s the problem, really. They all have pros and cons.

                Kagi is American, so they are out for me. So is DuckDuckGo.

                I don’t care if startpage uses the Google index, since Google isn’t profiting from my data or from ads.

                Their servers are in the EU, and the balance between privacy and usable results is good enough.

                I see it like using a third-party front end for YouTube. All of the benefits with none of the risks or private data theft.

      • denshi@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        https://metager.org/ is run by a German non-profit. Since late last year it’s pay to use because their advertising partner (Yahoo) cancelled their contract without warning. But it’s cheaper than Kagi. Also the non-profit is part of the project that’s building the European OpenWebIndex ( https://ows.eu/ ) that’s releasing this year.

        • Shrouded0603@feddit.orgEnglish
          0·
          3 days ago

          I used it a Little before it became to pay use and I was honestly impressed by search results (I was used to ddg, ecosia and qwant atp and mainly use ddg)