Welcome to Kagi, the paid search engine full of surprises, which today opened an account in the Fediverse! (poliverso.org)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by cybersecurity@poliverso.org to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Welcome to Kagi, the paid search engine full of surprises, which today opened an account in the Fediverse!

@fediverse

@kagihq is the very interesting project for a paid search engine, without tracers and with an accuracy in identifying results such as to exclude all Google spam.

Those who believe that #Kagi's costs are too high, should reflect on a small detail: if Google lets all those searches be done "for free", who pays those costs? The answer might seem simple: "advertisers".

Yet this would be an incomplete answer: like saying that rain is caused by clouds!

In reality, those costs are paid by users, by being milked and letting Google extract their "value", a bit like in the human farm in Matrix...

We first heard about Kagi on the @lealternative website (unfortunately, since then the prices have increased a lot, raising many doubts about the sustainability of the project) and recently Cory Doctorow also talked about it on @pluralistic

In any case, we are really happy that a service like Kagi's, effective and respectful of users' privacy, has landed here in the #Fediverse.

mastodon.social/@kagihq/113074…

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[-] cabbage@piefed.social 35 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I subscribed to the lower tier for a while, but I kept running out of searches early on every month, and the price of the higher tier is just not excusable. So I found myself adding the !ddg bang most of the time to avoid spending my Kagi quota.

And as good as Kagi is, it's still primarily a meta search engine, organizing results from the dominant actors. So it's not like the price is justified by them having to crawl the entire web themselves. Their own crawler, Teclis, is currently small web only and can probably best be described as an interesting project.

Instead of making search cheaper or more affordable, they spend subscription money on creating AI services and various other non-search distractions. Maybe that's good for some people, but I don't want that shit. I just want a good search engine at a justifiable price. And for that, sadly, Kagi fell short.

[-] aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com 35 points 2 months ago

Lmao fuck off with your ad

[-] AsudoxDev@programming.dev 33 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I pay 5 euros for a VPS at Hetzner and self host my own SearXNG metasearch engine without compromising my privacy. Unlike Kagi, I can search without limits and without the AI stuff that even Kagi has started getting into.

[-] sircac@lemmy.world 31 points 2 months ago

[-] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 2 months ago

Aaah, now I get it. You guys made an account to post on. I saw the headline and I was busting my head how in the world a search engine would federate within the fediverse...

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 29 points 2 months ago

Mastodon posts tend to get funky when they federate, because Mastodon has this (annoying) norm of starting posts with mentions. So OP mentioned the community on the first line, which became the first part of the title - @fediverse. Second, it mentions Kagi as a tag instead of name, which gives the @kagihq. And then comes the first sentence as the rest of the title.

It's a great example of Lemmy/Mastodon interoperability working, but not being quite there yet.

[-] infeeeee@lemm.ee 15 points 2 months ago

But it's a Friendica post, not from Mastodon. You can't write such a long posts on mastodon

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 11 points 2 months ago

Depends how the instance is set up. But yeah, it's the norm many places in the Fediverse, not just Mastodon - I should have double checked! :)

[-] cybersecurity@poliverso.org 6 points 2 months ago

@cabbage

Mastodon posts tend to get funky when they federate, because Mastodon has this (annoying) norm of starting posts with mentions. So OP mentioned the community on the first line, which became the first part of the title - @fediverse. Second, it mentions Kagi as a tag instead of name, which gives the @kagihq. And then comes the first sentence as the rest of the title.

I'm not writing from Mastodon, but from Friendica

It's a great example of Lemmy/Mastodon interoperability working, but not being quite there yet.

The mentions problem seems to be only for PieFed, but it doesn't happen with Lemmy

I think it should be reported as an issue to PieFed developers

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 5 points 2 months ago

It seems you're right - the title field from Friendica doesn't federate well to PieFed. So I probably misinterpreted the confusion about the title. :)

@rimu@piefed.social

[-] cybersecurity@poliverso.org 4 points 2 months ago

@RootBeerGuy in fact the title could be misunderstood... 😐

[-] rglullis@communick.news 23 points 2 months ago

By "entering the Fediverse", do you mean that they created an account on mastodon.online?

[-] cybersecurity@poliverso.org 7 points 2 months ago

@rglullis yes, exactly. To avoid misunderstandings, I changed the title (I hope he updates Lemmy too)

[-] rglullis@communick.news 14 points 2 months ago

Well, this is certainly a lot less exciting than what I first thought.

[-] beefbot 22 points 2 months ago

Kagi lied about its privacy claims and I can pull up the thread about the user who exposed it & the CEO got into this ridiculous evasion over it but I’ll let you do it for me. KAGI SUCKS 💥

[-] harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 2 months ago

Thank you for the reminder. The name was tickling my brain but I couldn't remember. The CEO acted like a major creeper. Must have gone to the Musk School of Bidness Mismanagement.

[-] xnx@slrpnk.net 11 points 2 months ago

The number of searches i get for the $5 should roll over to the next month if i dont use them all. No way i will be able to convince anyone to switch to this when they will run out of searches every month

[-] UNY0N@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

That's a valid criticism.

On the other side: Pay for a year at once and get 3600 searches/year. The rollover also doesn't happen, but the effect is drastically reduced. Also get a discount overall.

I'm not saying that kagi is perfect, but fuck google sideways. Eat the rich. Pay for the product or you are the product.