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Comment by ezekg | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched to Kagi (https://kagi.com) and quite like it. I don't have any plans to go back to DDG.

I've been using Kagi for a while. I'm totally on board with springing $10/mo for good search.

The biggest thing that worries me about Kagi is that, in order to be using it and paying for it, I have to log in, across all my devices. I'm literally collaborating on the process of someone doing much, much finer-grained and definitive tracking than other search engines currently do.

While Kagi assure me they aren't putting all this information together... I am giving it to them, and that gives me pause.

> I've been using Kagi for a while. I'm totally on board with springing $10/mo for good search.

If privacy is the concern, why not just use a VPN and use Google? Doesn't this achieve the same end, but with a VPN you have far more usecases than just search?

I mean, if you really wanted to take things to the extreme you'd run TOR or use Tails, right? It's not the cost that makes me question this, I pay for a VPN after all, but what does Kagi do to justify itself beyond the 'it's better than google?'

I use a vpn but im logged into gmail and youtube so that kind of defeats the whole vpn thing. Chrome logs itself in if I login to gmail or youtube.

There are pretty obvious solutions, don't use chrome use opsec, but google has a lot of power to de-anonymise me and I just want to surf the net without big brother.

Read up on Kagi a bit. You can tailor your results to you. For example, I can rank-adjust any domain and those adjustments are applied to any future searches. I can even block specific domains (like those Stack Overflow clones and the SEO spam sites that plague Google results).

So, a curated Internet? I guess that seems reasonable, filters were always a thing with adblockers, I guess this allows for a all inclusive turn key experience.

You can simply pay $10/month/device to have separate accounts. Privacy is worth it!

I use Kagi as well (and sometimes Andi, but I'm still waiting for their non-Assistant Mode interface to switch as a daily driver) -- I find their quality of results basically equivalent to Google, but without the SEO cruft. In fact it's so uncannily good that I've often wondered if what Kagi is doing is in fact just passing you Google results with the spam removed!

Something about DDG/Bing always left me feeling a bit uncomfortable that something was missing from the results, and I have no objective data to back this up, just a general unease that the results weren't as comprehensive as I'd like, which I don't feel with Kagi and Andi.

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