[EasyMark]

That's your choice, but not all of us want to wear our politics on our search engine. I don't support what the Brave founder did, but there are probably 100+ people there that don't think that way and are just working and living their lives, and since Brave doesn't have any stance one way or another, it's just another company with a service to me. So is Kagi

[Zetobal]

I don't fucking care about politics and I am tired of it being brought up when I am explicitly talking about the quality of search. So please stop injecting your "Just take the L because of my political agenda attitude" and talk about the product. The whole discussion got so political on their discord and forum that you can't even talk about the degraded quality before some left or right wing nut comes around going "AKSCHUALLY".

I do care about the search results and they got worse and are not deterministic anymore since they started using brave. Maybe it's omething else they changed in the code but I expect to at least see the first results of a previous search on the page when I search for it again a few days later. Especially when it was a helpful result. It's useless for me now.

[ahkurtz]

I started subscribing in like October and haven't been searching much since the new year cause I've been really busy. I think I have also noticed this quality degradation, and also the results taking much longer. I'm not gonna say it's useless but I understand. So I can dislike it for that reason with you.

As far as politics... for a lot of people not relying on a single particular global megacorp (who tend to extend the soft-power of a given state or economic bloc) for access to information is a semi-political choice. There is very much an inescapable concern of "who chooses what I get to see and what are their incentives" that can't really be reduced to "I don't care about politics". It cannot be separated from politics, which is why people have such strong feelings about it. I'm not sure that's what people really mean though, I think they talk past each other a lot on this topic. No disrespect meant to you and I appreciate your comments.

I really like the idea that they'd hedge and not give any single index overwhelming leverage over what Kagi users are fed, and conveniently for me (who does care a bit about the who of the thing) if they stick to that approach it should provide more diversity of contemporaneous political messaging... so it can also please the (I think somewhat tedious) "no politics" crowd at the same time. So that seems good?

Tradeoffs maybe, and give them some more time to figure it out, incorporate more indices?

[caddy]

Agreed, the quality has slipped somewhat but I do believe the choice was in part due to the way cheaper offering by Brave, as after the change (or with it), they brought back $10/mo unlimited. Looking at brave's pricing, they do it based on reqs/sec + limit/month and it's way cheaper ($5/mo sub = 20mil searches, $0.00000025 a search if maxing it out) - This is based on the data for AI plan which is $5/mo rather than $3/mo as Kagi does run some AI stuff atop the results [1].

I feel I've seen more AI Spam recently although when I do I've just ended up downvoting the site immediately, and that has generally fixed the issues as there seems to be a few repeat offenders. That could totally be up to the Kagi postprocessing being tweaked though.

[1] https://brave.com/search/api/

[jsnell]

I'm pretty sure you're misreading the pricing by multiple orders of magnitude. It is $5/1K queries ($5 CPM), not $5/20M queries.

[caddy]

Oh my, I did think the pricing was a little out of whack. Thanks for the correction.