“Should we not be buying VW, BMW, Siemens and Bayer technology and products today because they participated in holocaust and directly collaborated with Hitler?” – CEO of Kagi when given feedback re: Brave partnership
their CEO also moderates the discussion on Kagi’s Discord. he’s been removing criticism by queer folks, while - the last time I’ve checked before I’ve left their group - keeping replies like “stop shoving LGBTQ down our throats”.
https://nyan.lol/@zicklepop/111716138453426218
edit: also their response regarding a request to add a “don’t do it” widget to suicide searches basically boils down to “but if we make a moral choice now, we’ll have to do more moral choices in the future!”, which is… suboptimal. https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probably-have-a-dont-do-that-widget-like-google/
Was thinking about biting the bullet and getting Kagi, but this is sign enough not to let alone the OP.
Same here. Looks like I’ll be staying with DDG for a while yet.
Ah fuck, I’ve been using Kagi but of course their CEO is a reich-wing asshat.
Anybody know of any other options? I’m not going back to Google.
Ive been having pretty good time with searxng
Are you self-hosting or using a public instance?
It’s much better is you use a public instance as your results will be harder to be tracked: https://searx.space/ choice your favorite one here
DuckDuckGo is honestly a reliable one
I wish this were true
I’ve heard some random grumblings about them, maybe related to their funding model? Can’t remember any specifics about this though.
What I liked about Kagi is that it’s a subscription service, so you know up front that they likely won’t be incentivized to sell your data or fuck up your results to survive
Wow, this topic in the edit is bad, and I wasn’t aware of it. Just canceled my subscription. Now I have until 14/01 to choose an alternative.
https://searx.space/ works pretty well.
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For me, it is doing a good job, and it’s pretty fast. I think in the past was slower and with many issues, but it improved a lot. I never tried Kagi and I don’t think it’s rational to “login” and identify myself to be able to get results, even if it’s working better, everyone should be able to get good results without needing to pay.
everyone should be able to get good results without needing to pay.
Until this stuff is funded with public money, it’s not really doable for such a compute and storage intense task.
I am perfectly OK with paying for good software, until then. I also agree with the principle of aligning interests of users and the search provider by having the users pay. Other models (ads, sponsoring) creates incentive to favour those who pay. The other reasonable model is donation, that can work potentially, but it has its problems.
But https://searx.space/ is like Lemmy, you can donate to those instances to help them to keep it on. It is not really a search engine, so the power usage isn’t that big, it uses other search engines to get the results, the difference is that the search engines like Google, DDG, Bing and etc don’t know who did those requests. The quality isn’t bad neither, but I can’t really say the difference as I never tried Kagi. 🤔
In fact it’s not comparable, because this is a metasearch engine. Kagi has quite many unique features and besides that it’s great in surfacing small websites (for which it mostly uses its own crawler) and downranking pages full of tracking. They are just different and the Kagi model is the most reasonable, in my opinion, for what it does (search engine).
God damn it.
I am a paying subscriber to Kagi because the search results are excellent and there are no ads, so of course you show me a thread on “we should maybe add a small message to suicidal users telling them there is help for them” which then reads like a truth-social propaganda thread, filled to the brim with “helping people is a slippery slope!!! muh freedoms!!” arguments.
This is something I really don’t get.
- it is unclear whether anybody in history has ever been helped by that kind of message.
- it is kind of a religious morality that suicide needs to be prevented and that if someone wants to do it, it’s because they are not in control. This doesn’t mean it’s wrong in absolute sense, but it’s very opinionated.
- realistically speaking, there is no need to “search” how to suicide.
- trying to conclude what you want to do, rather than what you want to know (I.e. search) is IMHO exactly against what kagi’s idea is. It’s a service that does only what it is asked for, and doesn’t try to “know” you, as a customer or user. No text editor prompts you to suicide hotlines by analyzing the text you are writing, and we would consider it extremely weird if it did. However, with search we get used to the tool trying to guess what we want to do because Google does know you, I think the beauty of Kagi is going in another direction.
But let’s assume that all the previous points are invalid, and - for a greater good - it’s worth displaying a message when someone is looking at suicide-related topics. What about “how to kill someone”, " how to rape", “how to […]” with the hundreds of things that are universally considered wrong? And even worse, what about the thousands of things that are not universally considered wrong, but that some group thinks are wrong? “How to change sex”, " how to blow up a pipeline", etc.?
This I think was their point in that conversation, and I agree with. The moment you try to interpret what the user wants to do with the info they ask you, and you decide to assume responsibility to change the user’s mind, there are hundreds or thousands of instances in which users or groups of users will demand you take a position for what they believe is right. Instead I think a search engine should stop at providing information relevant to your query and not assume what you want to do with it. It’s not its place to correct people’s behavior or educate people. The public education system should do that, the healthcare system should ensure people have the right support. A search engine is (or better, should be) basically like a librarian, or a library index, you ask what you want and they point you in that direction. They don’t try to guess why you are looking for books about torture or environmental activism.
This at least is my perspective.
Reading about the suicide thing: I might try kagi again this year. This is the exact type of software I want. It should only perform its intended function (returning relevant results to any query) and not try to influence me into following someone else’s moralisations.
Well, I was giving him a few days to backpedal but it seems like he’s not going to do that. There goes my subscription, back to ddg I guess. Since they are supposed to be 100% subscription funded (they still are, right?), this is one of the few companies where that hopefully might actually have a noticeable effect if enough people care about it.
edit: also their response regarding a request to add a “don’t do it” widget to suicide searches basically boils down to “but if we make a moral choice now, we’ll have to do more moral choices in the future!”, which is… suboptimal. https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probably-have-a-dont-do-that-widget-like-google/
Meh, good for them tbh. I find these messages to be incredibly patronizing and somehow I doubt you can find a single person who will say “google posting the suicide number has made me reconsider killing myself”
As a Kagi subscriber, I’ve been very happy with their transparency in general. The feedback site is open to the public and Vlad and other staff members regularly engage in conversation about possible future features, limitations, and even business decisions in the Discord. It’s been refreshing.
…which makes the response to this issue all the more frustrating and disappointing.
I think Vlad’s comments in the original feedback thread were fair enough, but then later, in the Discord, I saw a lot of “let’s move this to a private chat”. They even changed their General channel to “slow mode” to prevent live conversations as this topic became hot. Now I see they were also deleting threads?! Ugh. That’s not transparent at all. Not what I expected based on my previous experience with Kagi.
The suicide thing, to me, sounds completely reasonable. I am also extemely skeptical that thing has any effect at all (in Google, for example).
By the way, this whole debacle is honestly very silly in my opinion. Do we really expect them to start being fully clean and moral, and to not give any money to any party which does immoral things? Then why pay Google for their API, why use AWS/GCP, or let’s go even further, any entity in US (or Russia, or China, or most of EU,etc.) pays taxes and funds a military-industrial complex which is responsible for far worse than opposing same sex marriage. But we really draw the line at using Brave API?
Things need to be put in context. Is it better that a new search engine will exist, that protects privacy, that just provides search and actively opposes tracking on the internet, that can provide people with a plural set of information? The answer for me is yes, and these unrealistic expectations are very shortsighted in this perspective. I am very happy that Kagi pays google API for search, even if I hate Google and almost everything it stands for and I refuse to use any of their products. The benefits outweight the damages in the wider battle.
It sounds like they have rewritten their response.
Basically it looks like they get search results by combining results from other sources like Google and Yandex. Brave has a public API, so it’s not a “partnership”. It’s just adding another search source, like using Searx to combine a bunch of results into one result feed.
Is he saying that Brave ceo is comparable to Hitler… :)
Anyway, I’m staying with Kagi. People who search for perfect companies will search forever, and probably keep using Google while they do.
No he’s referring to a different issue unrelated to the thing where the CEO of Kagi is an active fascist.
Do you have any links for that? I’m not seeing anything that is illustrating that.
Edit: I’m not trying to antagonize. I legitimately don’t see the where he’s pointed out as a fascist. The linked post doesn’t hage anything that I can see.
I think he’s referring to one of the top comments on this post with two links, here’s one of them: https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probably-have-a-dont-do-that-widget-like-google/
Although I don’t exactly understand why they’re calling him a fascist. Seems to me you need to go to their discord to understand, not sure.
I am no fan of Brave, but is there a way we can configure our Kagi preferences to exclude results from Brave Search? I think SearXNG allows for that. Under SearXNG preferences, there’s an Engines tab, and under that, I can configure which search engines to enable and return results for my search. I haven’t found anything like that on Kagi yet, but if anyone knows of a way to do it, please share.
There will be according to the Discord but they haven’t changed their attitude.
Does your quote above actually appear anywhere on that page (or did it at some point) because I can’t find it?
It looks like the response was rewritten. It basically says they combine results from various public sources, and have recently added Brave via the public Brave API. It sounds like it’s not a partnership, just adding redundancy by having another search result source.
I honestly don’t get the idea of an outrage specifically right here and right now. I do understand why people may have issues with Kagi but only now? Kagi has also been using Yandex as its search backend for quite a while and I don’t think anyone gave a crap, considering all the things happening in the world. And now adding Brave is suddenly “I am not paying you anymore”? Am I missing something?
There is no outrage, they supposedly lost 0.5% of the users which means they lost only this one person who us making all this noise.
And before Yandex, Google - which they use since the beginning, and which it makes also clear that using the services of a company is at the moment a necessary evil, and does not mean in any way endorsing the values (or lack thereof…) of that company.
But apparently some people are really tunnel visioning on some specific issues and looking at them from a short term perspective only.
Being political I would say that this is an unfortunate result of the lack of a strong collective movement in the left, which leads to people looking mostly at individual problems but not at collective problems, because these seem overwhelming and potentially destabilizing for the status quo.
Where’s the statistic about losing 0.5% of the users? Is there a dashboard or something?
Yes: Kagi Search Stats - Members
19079 (5th) down to 18955 (8th) is a loss of 0.65% of their subscribers, although it’s going up again now.
They responded with some stuff (allowing users to opt out of Brave results/paying Brave) but it wasn’t enough and their attitude hasn’t changed. I want to leave but… nothing is as good enough. Keyboard navigable UI, better results, and easy custom bangs as well as the whole DDG bang library are amazing.
That person is really grasping at straws with the whole “the CEO is also a racist fascist” tangent by linking the Greatest Country website.
Scroll up. Another person posted evidence of him being a fascist
Evidence is a bit of a stretch.
Apologies to the ones downvoting, it is extremely a stretch. No evidence whatsoever was provided, not even for the watered down definition of fascist that I assume it is being used.
Wow what a social drama for a search tool . People are bored af
Nah, as a paying customer of Kagi and someone who cares about how I find information online, this is not about drama, it’s about making informed decisions. In my case, the informed decision to cancel my subscription.
Also for a few of us who were considering a Kagi subscription, an informed decision to stay with our current search providers instead
The thread also helped put to light that the CEO, is an actual fascist
