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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Technology
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I'm still steering clear from Kagi after how they handled criticism after they started including Brave's index
That whole situation was such an overblown idiotic mess. Kagi has always used indices from companies that do far more unethical things than committing the extreme crime of having a CEO who has stupid opinions on human rights.
I 100% agree with Vlad's response to this whole thing and anyone who thinks otherwise should question what exactly it is they're criticising.
I don't like Brave (super shady IMHO) and certainly not their CEO but I didn't sign up for a 100% ethically correct search engine, I signed up for a search engine with innovative features and good search results. The only viable alternatives are to use 100% not ethically correct search indices with meh (Google) to bad (Bing, DDG) search results. If you're going to tell me how Google and M$ are somehow ethical, I'm going to have to laugh at you.
The whole argument amounts to whining about the status quo and bashing the one company that tries anything to change it. The only way to get away from the Google monopoly is alternative indices. Yes those alternatives may not be much more ethical than friggin Google. So what.
You can't really engage as a consumer without enabling shitty practices on some level, and that's particularly true of electronics.
The phone you're using to access Beehaw? Assembled by child labor or wage slaves somewhere in Asia. Even if you assembled it yourself, the parts were manufactured unethically.
It's not just Amazon or Nestle. You might as well criticize someone for breathing because unethical consumption, on some level, is inevitable, particularly so if you live in a capitalist country.
I use Brave because its ad block feature works better than the others I've tried, plain and simple.
But, by all means, people can still be as holier than thou as they like.
which is one of the reasons why I own a Fairphone.
and sure, you can't avoid all bad choices, but everyone draws a line somewhere. and when a techbro makes a techbroy post about how eVErYThiNg iS pOLiTiCiZeD ThESe dAyS and how that's supposedly stopping innovation, because people like me don't want him to work with a guy with a history of opposing our rights, then I stop having confidence in him and cancel my subscription because I don't want to support him financially anymore.
Don't get me wrong. I do the best I can to be ethical in my choices, but it's just a pet peeve of mine to see people behaving in a holier-than-thou when it's simply impossible to achieve what they're pretending to achieve.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but what search do you use that relies on a more ethical index? I don't use SearXNG, but as far as I can tell, even something like that relies on other indices, like Google, Bing, and Brave (which seems to be configurable). Are you suggesting you use a different index that comes from a more ethical company, or do you just not like Vlad's response?
I don't, I use a mixture of Startpage and DDG, but I'm always for a lookout for other options and also don't sign up for a subscription to throw my money at them every month.
To add, from what I understand at least, Kagi does build its own index for accessing smaller sites. To some extent, results are also served by a custom index, meaning some percentage of results do not come from [your disliked companies] and instead come directly from Kagi. It doesn't seem like a significant percentage of results come from that index, but it supposedly is still >0%.
Personally I mostly use Kagi for the ability to put Reddit on the bottom of the results, MDN to the top, and otherwise prioritize sites in ways that I want but which I know are purely based on my own opinions. It works well for my usecase, and I don't have to scroll through a bunch of sponsored links before finding my search results. Also, the recent integration with Wolfram|Alpha has been convenient with a couple of searches, like one where I needed the prime factors of some numbers.
I genuinely won't even use Brave indexes on my SearXNG instance; I have the engines disabled. My search quality has not suffered; as most of my results end up being DDG or Yahoo anyways; and Brave was only ever duplicating results from other engines anyways.
Just curious, do you buy things from Amazon?
I'm not trying at all to disagree with the idea of being ethical in how you send your dollars, but I'm curious how much is prioritized actual harm to suffering people in the real world when you do this.
no I don't. and to answer your next whatabout question, I don't buy from brands owned by Nestle, either.
Good work doing what you can!
Dodging shitty companies is difficult.
Got it, makes sense.
And ha, yeah sorry if it was overly snarky, I just see some people where "oh my GAWD you said the wrong thing in your press release" is their only barometer of ethical behavior and was just wanting to poke at you if that was the case. 🙂