I want to start by inviting everyone who are looking into this post to check the git commit linked before reading and after that read their current page, it will make more sense.
I think most people don’t understand the fact that Kagi is meta-search engine which literally collect the results of other search engines and display it and add very small amount of results from their index(tecilis).
They are starting to act shady this year(check the attached git commit to see their changes to their documentation page).
People basically pay them to search Yandex and Brave for them.
Before anyone say but privacy, they are closed source and there is a better open source meta search engines which actually respect your privacy and need your donations more than Kagi shareholders.
Open source alternative:
People in the tech community who care about their privacy need to understand that if a product is not open source it should NOT be trusted. Transparency is a necessary factor in guaranteeing privacy, otherwise we cannot see and prove if a person or company’s claim to privacy is true.
But be careful, being open source does not inherently make it trustworthy. It could be doing something nefarious that just hasn’t been caught yet.
Indeed.
However, proprietary code cannot be trusted to be trustworthy. FOSS can it’s just not guaranteed.
It’s not impossible to analyze and test compiled binaries.
While not theoretically impossible it’s impractical and unheard of for multiple trusted independent audit companies to be commissioned on an extremely regular basis.
Trustable proprietary software is like nuclear fusion as an energy source. Theoretically possible, but we sure as shit don’t have it.