With all the talk about privacy, people seem to be forgetting that censorship is also a major problem for today's internet.
With all the talk about privacy, people seem to be forgetting that censorship is also a major problem for today's internet.
Many "alternative" search engines are better for privacy, but they are still vulnerable to censorship, because they rely on g**gle and m*crosoft's indices for their search results. This isn't a deep-hidden secret either, many of them disclose what search index they use on the "about" page, for example:
- https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
- https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/5138782571796-Why-isn-t-a-particular-site-appearing-in-the-results
- https://www.ecosia.org/privacy
There are still search engines that (claim to) maintain their own index. Most surprisingly, br*ve:
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I use Kagi, and while it does use google index, it also uses many other indexes and its own index. I wonder how this impacts censorship.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
Edit : Not much detail here but they do comment on it here :
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-quality.html
Avoiding Censorship and Bias
We do our best to avoid censorship and bias. Some results from traditional sources will reflect biases, but they’ll be balanced by results from other sources. Also, we have built product features to help with bias reduction. For example, our "World News" Lens includes articles from respectable media outlets across the globe.
One of the signals that does influence our ranking is the presence of ads or trackers. We penalize bloated sites regardless of their agendas.
I like the idea, but I can't justify $10 a month. Downvote me or whatever, but I'm broke and need to cut as many subscriptions as possible.
That’s fair.
You could argue that it’s worth the money to get better results and avoid Google, but with so many companies trying to take $10 a month you have to draw the line somewhere.
No, I'm with you. $120 a year is too steep for searching for me. I like what they are trying to do but I don't think the average person will spend that much.
Why downvote? That's a fair point. There is a free tier with a few free searches per year (2000 or something). You could sign up and use this budget whenever your search engine of choice fails you.
The free tier is 100 searches one time only.
Really? Dangit, I'm misremembering stuff then it seems. Sorry.
Your partly right, when I just started using Kagi it was a certain number of free searches per month.
make it $1 per month and i'm game, i'm not paying more for a search engine than i do for email holy shit
Yea, I just think I either pay for something like Kagi, or I am subject to something like Google. I'm not sure there is a third way that pays for the servers and talent needed to deliver search results, but my imagination might just be limited.
I swear to God you people must work for Kagi.
Lol, I know how you feel. Not long ago there was suddenly a bunch of chatter about it on Lemmy and I was thinking the same thing, that it had to be marketing. But I'm a curious sort and I was so sick of bad google results so I tried it.
Now that I have used Kagi I'm convinced it was organic chatter. I really do like it, I think it's better, and if they offered money for posts I'd take that money because I'm paying $10 a month for a search engine, lol.
I thought this was a possibility at first, then I used it. The lad time is basically instant, the results are always good and it has a bunch of features with AI etc.
Or people just like it? This isn't hard to understand and has always been a thing. When people find something they really like they will tell other people about it.
That’s possible, but when every comment mentioning it has a 1000 word count, it screams advertisement to me.
As sure as flies on shit! Any time search engines are mentioned there will be people in the comments writing about Kagi.
How does it compare to DuckDuckGo?
With Kagi I get what I want and sort through way less to no junk. With their lenses I can push reliable sources up and other sources down. I really like it.
Yeah. I hope that they provide a way to exclude Brave from the search engines (not optimistic considering the libertarian tech bro tantrum the lead dev threw but...).
But I think the advantage is really the personalized results over anything else. Sometimes you get some REAL fucked up SEO-heavy results. So you just block that site. And then everything works.
It DOES make me more than a bit concerned over how much data they have on me (especially as you need to use an access token to use it in an incognito window... where you are searching for the sketchiest shit) but... google already has that so...
They claim that no information on searches is a saved to an individual for now.
Companies claim a lot of things. Let's see how the first legal issue plays out
I will say part of the reason I find them more trustworthy is that their business model hinges on some sort of ounce of privacy. Google's hinges on exactly the opposite.
I strongly encourage reading up on the various VPNs and the like that charge people while still monitoring and tracking everything they do.
Ok that sounds neat thx
Paid startpage, basically?
Similar yes. Kagi has more features and no ads (because paid) but yes, it's a similar idea.
That and kagi does its own indexing unlike startpage, as well as its own page and data analysis for enriched queries and research.
IMHO they add enough of their own value that you're not going to get elsewhere that it's worth paying for.