Today we are announcing a new privacy feature coming to Kagi Search. Privacy Pass is an authentication protocol first introduced by Davidson and recently standardized by the IETF as RFCs. At the same time, we are announcing the immediate availability of Kagi’s Tor onion service.
In general terms, Privacy Pass allows “Clients” (generally users) to authenticate to “Servers” (like Kagi) in such a way that while the Server can verify that the connecting Client has the right to access its services, it cannot determine which of its rightful Clients is actually connecting. This is particularly useful in the context of a privacy-respecting paid search engine, where the Server wants to ensure that the Client can access the services, and the Client seeks strong guarantees that, for example, the searches are not associated with them.
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Kagi keeps getting better and better.
And it’s already the best search engine I’ve used in a while!
+1
Kagi user chiming in here. Have been incredibly happy with the service in terms of search quality and overall usefulness since subscribing. Feels like Google in the early, early days (I was there) before they lost their soul. Their changelog page is instructive; – https://kagi.com/changelog
Kagi has been criticized for removing their list of partners - originally, they admitted to partnering with Yandex, but they recently hid that partnership after receiving backlash. I’m not sure if the changelog will reflect that information, but I am curious to check now.
Let us know what you find, if anything please.
I’m definitely interested in this service, but I’ve seen some suspicion surrounding it.Frustratingly, doing a search on that Changelog page for sources is mostly full of stuff not relevant to my search.
I did find a different post on Lemmy that talks about it, though. This post is incredibly thorough, and does an excellent job of undoing Kagi’s attempt to memory-hole the information about which sources they use.
This makes it all the more frustrating that Vlad refuses to re-add them, instead asking to know why we would care. Here’s a link to that conversation, which is on a platform controlled by Vlad, which appears to be resistant to archiving services that attempt to fetch those particular comments. Also for posterity:
slamor
Oct 27, 2024
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htmlThere is really no proper information about search sources. We need to know what resources are used and at what rate.
Please make a more detailed and clear edit.
Vlad
Oct 29, 2024
[@]slamor Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need.slamor
Nov 2, 2024
[@]Vlad why not?Searching through kagi.com for “Yandex” yields a lot of dead links. The one living link is the Changelog, which says they added Yandex to their image search, back in December 2024… But that’s hardly a revelation. The changelog doesn’t go back very far either, AFAIK
As for the other links: Google says these links used to contain it the word, but I don’t know why. Maybe this one was for raised sites, maybe it was for lowered sites, which would at least give a little insight into whether users loved or hated the domain…
url: https://europe-west2.kagi.com/stats?sd=asc&st=percentage
text: yandex.com. zlibrary.to. androidcentral.com. answer-all.com. baijiahao.baidu.com. cbc.ca. developer.apple.com. eightify.app. github.getafreenode.com. gitmemory …Another result seems to suggest Yandex Images served up a photo of Steve Jobs in a demo search, but that is no longer the case. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
url: https://kagi.com/images?q=steve+jobs
text: 564 x 318 yandex.ru. 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder. 696 x 418 cioviews.com. 75 …Very interesting.
You you for your efforts. Do you mind if I create a post in BestOfLemmy to share your findings and bring this to the attention of others? I feel this needs to be discussed.
Or do you have a more fitting place?If you think this is worthy of sharing, please, feel free to share it! Just mention me so I can take a look :)
I think so and hope others do too. ^^ I hope I didn’t butcher this. If you think something should change or some added context is needed, let me know or correct the record there if youd like of course. Here it is: https://lemmy.world/post/25584230
Originally they listed Yandex along with naming other major search engines, then later changed the language to say simply “major search engines”.
What’s the issue if API calls are anonymous?
https://github.com/kagisearch/kagi-docs/commit/6baff1c066db9b3d804653ea19bc9d1c076a710b
How verifiable is this? My hobby is researching both the lives of billionaires and, unrelated, precision guided munitions.
The browser extensions which implement the protocol are open source. Not sure how much you can verify from that as I’m not skilled enough.
Well in theory that’s all you need to verify nothing is sent to the server. Then you can only trust them for not using your IP or behavior to find out who you are.
Yeah, I’ve been intrigued by Kagi, but would never use a search engine logged in.
Well it sounds like this is the thing for you! Haha
Sweet. Time to enable this right away. Been using privacy pass for a while now, and quite like it. Same can be said for kagi
I installed it, but I’m probably just going to use it periodically. I really appreciate the website prioritization feature of Kagi … so it’s unfortunate that isn’t compatible.
I was annoyed that I read the blog post and installed the extension, only to find that caveat right on the blog post footer. Feels like it should have been bolded right at the top.
This finally gave me the push to switch to Orion browser after putting it off for a long time
Nice! Maybe I’ll finally give Kagi a shot.
