[seventytwo]

It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.

I’m a huge fan of the lenses feature. Specifically for technical searches… I can filter for forums only or PDFs only or academic stuff only.

[pierat]

> It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.

Yet.

Google did the same originally. Super clean, just delivered whatever was searched for; no more, no less.

When Kagi gets a taste of how much money is available for tracking and profiling users. and theyll start small. And since you have to be logged in to do searches, everything is already pre-tracked. Then its only a matter of recording and selling (on the sly) to data brokers.

I used not to be this jaded. But its watching the same thing again and again is why I wait for it this time around. All good things do indeed come to an end.

[freediver]

Kagi founder here. You have my assurance this will not happen. Life is too short and I am not spending 10 years of my life building yet another ad-based search engine.

[selcuka]

I trust you will not, but what about after you exit?

Anyway, you or someone else will probably start a new search engine, and we will start again. It's best to enjoy it until that happens.

[pierat]

I believe the founder, freediver.

In the case of Radio Shack, they too made a promise never to sell or give the data to other entities. The CEO even fought for that in bankruptcy court.

The judge deemed that the user data was worth a significant sum, and the judge screwed everyone over for the debtors.

Once you capture the data, it's a toxic but valuable asset. And there's always someone willing to go to any end and use it, regardless the promises. And it may full well be someone who has power over you, and you'd never know until it's too late.

(I've done my share of medical and sensitive queries. The really sensitive ones go through I2P or Tor in a VM. I'm not willing to give that knowledge to anyone.)

[freediver]

> Once you capture the data, it's a toxic but valuable asset.

That is the thing, Kagi does not capture the data. Not only we do not need it, but it would just be a liability for us, with no benefit.

Please refer to our privacy policy for more details: https://kagi.com/privacy

[hellojesus]

Subscribing specifically because of this policy.

[selcuka]

> I believe the founder, freediver.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I believe them, too. My point was if they ever sell the company, the buyer might change the privacy statement and start collecting/selling information from that point on. I didn't mean the new owners would necessarily have access to the data collected previously.

[mewse]

Since you're bringing up "capturing the data", it's worth pointing at Kagi's privacy policy, the very first point of which is this:

> * Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.

https://kagi.com/privacy

Additionally the search page itself displays this notice:

> Your searches are always private. We do not see them and they are not associated with your account

The "captured" user data you seem to be concerned about doesn't appear to actually exist in this case; the data is quite explicitly not being captured.

[claytongulick]

My biggest question - and the one that will drive me to subscribe right now is how "harmful" "misinformation" and "malinformation" is treated today, and how it will be in the future.

I Do Not Want anything or anyone deciding what is good for me, what I should be seeing, or making it difficult for me to find things I'm searching for, regardless of the content.

A search engine should be like the phone company - providing a pipe to content and allowing me to decide what I want to see / block.

If I want to search for Nazi propaganda because I want to understand why people believe the things they do - I don't want the safety rails. I want the most raw, worst of it. I'm an adult with critical thinking skills, I don't need to be directed to the "safe" content.

Or covid vaccines.

Or anything.

If kagi has guarantees around this, your paying user base will be +1 tonight.

[NotSuspicious]

Yandex is pretty great for that. It's trash. Everything it spits out is trash. But sometimes you're looking for trash. If you're looking for some old offensive meme or whatever you can pretty easily find it in Yandex Image Search, for example.

[jsndidneske]

Actually Yandex is much like google with blacklisting i have found.

[nvm0n2]

I'm also curious about this, but if the claim that it's mostly a proxy for Google with some way to rerank results is true, then it wouldn't solve that problem.

[carlosjobim]

Try a search for Alex Jones on Kagi, I think that's a pretty good benchmark.

[lostlogin]

Surely results will always be weighted? How should it decide what to show you?

[no_wizard]

How do you feel about the name?

“Kagi it” feels clunky to me. “Google it” while I’ve heard many instances of people using the phrase even when Google isn’t involved has a ring to it that’s easy to say and tools out well.

Have you given thought to whet the Kagi equivalent would be?

[ldx1024]

I think if Kagi was the established leader and Google was the challenger you would be saying the opposite.

[helboi4]

No it's the actual word. "google it" allows for a liaison between the two words because "google" technically ends with an l sound (a consanant) and "it" begins with with a vowel - "googlit". It's also a soft sorta rolling consanant, which helps. In the case of "kagi it", "kagi" ends in an I and "it" begins in an I. That means you have to make a hard stop between the two words and pronounce clearly to differentiate between one I and the other otherwise you lose the words entirely. The two words fail to flow into each other in any way, making them feel less like a pair. Phrases that are easy and satisfying to say in the sense that they are actually just easy to get your mouth around are more likely to catch on. This is definitely something they should consider more carefully.

One could also argue that google is a pretty nice word for the English language since it evokes words like "look", "oggle", "oodles", implying looking through a lot of stuff and having a playful tone. Sounds silly but when someone says words sound like they mean something, it is a real phenomenon due to the way we interpret various sounds. In most languages, B sounds sound like big and round things and K sounds sound like sharp things. There have been studies on this. You can then get more specific in the subconscious patterns people recognise when you narrow it down to a certain language. This is why I say, Google is a great word for its function in the English language.

[plextoria]

What happened to simply using the verb “search”? Or phrases like “look it up”? It shouldn’t really matter (typical conversation) which search engine a person is using.

[lostlogin]

I say ‘cellotape’ for any old tape, I say ‘cellophane’ for whatever is in the drawer. I say ‘biro’ for pens and say ‘twink’ for that white stuff.

I don’t think it really matters as long as meaning is there.

Though ‘Google’ is starting to mean ‘ad infested trash’, so maybe the word will lose favour.

[paradox460]

Kagit

[Matcham]

Cage it. As in enclosing the answer, and capturing the essence of it.

[matt-attack]

Do you retain search logs?

[eitland]

They are very clear that they do not.

[dgb23]

All good things do come to an end. There’s no argument here.

But I think we’re in a different situation when people are willing to pay monthly for search.

There is also exactly 0 risk involved here for a consumer. If this product stops being worth your time and money, just stop using it?

It’s not comparable to say, buying a service or product that you build on top of. No lock-in in that sense.

[askvictor]

Not just that, but it's not really on the radar of SEO. If they get big, SEO will probably lead to the same enshitification as happened to Google.

[freediver]

I don't think it can. What would the financial motive be? With Google it is more ads with Adsense on their crappy SEO site. With Kagi, we actively downrank such sites out of existance.

[carlosjobim]

SEO also has the purpose to rank your website high so that you can sell your products. A huge part of the internet has nothing to do with ads, but businesses selling their products and services

[whs]

I think if they want to sell to me and ads&trackers harm their SEO, it'd at least make the internet a little bit more private.

That or it'll be a cat and mouse chase like cname cloaking/proxying rendering those harder to statically detect.

[Gustomaximus]

True for you, but there are billions of people out there and your attitude is a tiny minority for what they would lose elsewhere.

[dazc]

Boss of wonderful search site seems to be unaware?

[eitland]

Unlike Google who has incentives to promote the spam Kagi has incentives to fight the spam.

Also Kagi lets me blacklist domains myself if I want stricter rules than Kagi already provide.

[askvictor]

The financial motive is to get people looking at your website so you can sell things. SEO has always been an arms race, and I don't see how it can not be that. Occasionally there's a paradigm shift that causes one side to get massively ahead (e.g. the original Pagerank). But eventually things settle back down.