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Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method? That it doesn't exploit you in every way possible is commendable, but stating that it "solves the privacy issues" is a long stretch.

> Aren't your Kagi searches tied to a payment method?

Kagi accepts Bitcoin [1]. They also “do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account” [2].

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html

They also “do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account”.

So you essentially have to make the same leap of faith as you would with a commercial VPN.

Yes, although if you think about it a bit:

With a VPN you're hoping there's no logs at all, and it's pretty easy for a VPN vendor - entirely by accident - to keep some logs around. And then a search warrant lands, they look around, find the logs, and the promise is broken. And it's entirely possible for that to happen by accident. So if I pay for a commercial VPN that claims they don't keep logs, I'm gambling on their honesty and competency.

With a search engine you're hoping they don't bias search results to favour advertisers, sell your search results to advertisers, etc. And that's not something you can really do by accident. If Kagi is being honest, then they're not accepting money to modify search results, nor are they logging my searches, or building up a profile of my searches, or modifying seearch results based on that profile, etc. Even if it turned out Kagi goofed and really were logging all my searches and tying them to my payment account (maybe, eg, for perfectly innnocent reasons, like solving a bug), that doesn't actually change their value proposition to me all. They're either super evil and lying about everything they're doing, or they're fine, even if it turns out they're cutting a couple of corners.

Kagi is putting themselves in a position which is inherently easier to trust than a VPN vendor (or early Google), due to the nature of the business model.

What if your searches are about something illegal? Wouldn’t Kagi have to comply with a search warrant? Pun weakly intended.

> Wouldn’t Kagi have to comply with a search warrant?

You can't find what isn't there. And there is not logging requirement in America. So put simply, no. If you searched for something sinister, and the U.S. government inquired, Kargi would--if they aren't lying--pose no risk to you.

If your concern goes beyond that, you're beyond bilateral trust. The concept of a search engine is beyond you.

Don't use Kagi for this instances if you're that way inclined

With both you’re hoping there are no logs. It’s odd you used a different scenario where search intentionally makes the call to save searches linked to you and sell to ad companies, instead of sticking with the same scenario used for the vpn. You don’t want the search engine to log your searches linked to your ip or a user id that ties back to your billing info.

Then there’s a non-zero chance that either the VPN or the search or both are actually honeypots which not only log everything, but have a whole monitoring and alerting machine setup.

You’re more trusting than I. I assume the VPNs are no where near anonymous. I assume paid search is no more private than any other search. I assume the government doesn’t get or need warrants to know what we do online (do you think Prism just went away or hasn’t been replaced with a superior iteration?)

If anything paid search is more privacy invading than free ones. With free ones when logged out they know your IP which could serve any number of people so it wouldn’t be shocking that the searches being look into came from someone else on your connection and not you (tor relies on this), whereas with paid search you must be signed in to use, with an email address tied to you and a cc tied to you, all plausible deniability goes out the window.

The VPN doesn't know what I search for, it "only" knows what host I connect to and all the associated metadata.

Unless they MITM you and whatever app you’re using doesn’t do cert pinning, or they don’t have a legit root cert that they can sign completely valid certs with

To MITM me they'd need the intermediate or root certs of whatever I am connecting to? I don't see how even pinning the cert would help if the chain is invalid to begin with.

Yes sorry there was a typo in my earlier comment, but that’s what I was saying. If they have a stolen root cert, or are given one, they could produce 100% valid certs and youd never be able to tell they were doing it. I find it hard to believe the root certs of the internet have been kept safe all these years from the intelligence branches of these governments that are at cyber war all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised to one day learn root certificates were willingly given to intelligence branches for “national security” or whatever

> Unless they MITM you

how high would you estimate the odds of this actually happening for lets say mullvad?

How would I know? There’s always a VPN new kid on the block everyone shills for. Used to be that ProtonVPN was our savior now it’s nobody even knows it exists.

Point is unless you control every hop in the chain you can’t know it’s safe

You have to make multiple leaps of faith at some point nowadays unless you're rebuilding all of the internet

Or with DDG.

Hmm, and apparently you can also ask it to block shit like pinterest from your search results?

This is one of my biggest loves of Kagi. I have all pintrest domain's blocked and it's great. And it's really easy to add a block too so when I get a result for a website that is useless or I don't like on to the blocklist it goes!

Yes. Quite useful. Also groups listacle spam ("top 10 X" type articles).

If they could group ecommerce sites in the same way they group listicles, that would be damn handy. (Just identifying sites with payment forms would go along way). It's not that I don't want ecommerce sites, it's just that sometimes I'm in research mode and sometimes I'm in shopping mode.

Being able to set up custom search weights would be cool. Like up-weighting results from sites you like and down-rating sites you don't.

It can do exactly this, as well as outright blacklisting. Very good stuff

Yes it’s a pretty handy feature

there are browser plugins that do this as well :) . uBlackList for one

There were studies where it took as little as 10 searches to find out your exact identity. If you pay per month, month's worth of searches is more than enough to de-anonymize you. Ideal solution would involve pay-per-search.

That's surprising given how I assume the pareto principle applies to search terms.

>Ideal solution would involve pay-per-search.

I guess if you're really hardcore and are willing to trigger a transaction per search.

But in reality it doesn't work becsuse there's a small transaction fee for every charge. So it's really hard to charge below a dollar without major penalties. You can get around that with a token system, but we go right back to square one. I guess that's one problem crypto mitigates.

Do they provide "personalized results" like google claims? That would seem to imply they -must- attach searches to your account, wouldn't it?

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize...

AFAIK the personalized results are not based on your search history, rather a personalized list of blocked, lowered, raised, or pinned domains. I think some people share their lists, not unlike PiHole.

Heya, I work at Kagi. This is correct, we do not personalize searches other than by respecting the user's customizations (eg. domain preferences, lenses, etc...) which are all entirely user-controlled.

Looks like this could change in the future, quoting from my Kagi settings screen:

> Save My Search History

> Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any searches by default. In the future we may add features that will utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this.

A fair call, but to quote their privacy policy:

> Unlike "free" search engines, we do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account.

So if you trust them to do what they say, then yes, that pretty much solves the issue. If not, well...

Yeah, I don't trust startups in Palo Alto to do what they say.

Use a single use burner privacy.com card?

They at least claim that they don't save the search history. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/privacy.html

Seriously, on its face it's worse than google privacy wise because of the payment thing. Accept cash payment as some email providers and VPNs or stop telling people to trust you. And claiming Bitcoin changes anything privacy wise for the layman just blares red flags all over the place.

It's not really about privacy. It's just a better experience on Kagi.

I love Kagi, too. I’ve mostly switched over. The one main thing I still find myself using Google for though is sports scores. That’s one thing I wish Kagi had. I love just searching “bears” or “colts” on Google on a NFL game day and immediately getting the live score at the top of the results. Kagi doesn’t have that feature yet, and I hope they add it.

I honestly hope that they don’t. You’ll never cover all sports and you’ll never have global coverage, all while sucking up a ton of developer resources. Focus on search.

I use Kagi now and love it.

But I used DDG for a few years prior and rarely ever used Google. I think DDGs results are subjective in that for some people they are better or as good than Google's.

Let's hope Kagi keep up the good work.

I'm not sure when you tried DDG, but until relatively recently I found it had equal to or better results than Google for most things. I did have to sometimes fall back to Google, but it was only for certain classes of search. There was a time when there were fewer and fewer times I had to fall back to Google and fewer and fewer successes when I did.

That said, I agree, Kagi is an upgrade over both.

If Kagi keeps charging, it will never be popular. They could lower their price to $0.99 a year with the same result. And that's a good thing.

It's unlikely they can make a profit doing that. Servers, devs, etc cost money. This way they keep the audience smaller and can make money as well. It's a business, so you do what you gotta do.

I think you're missing the point: a price barrier regardless how big is good.

I think the main point was that any price barrier over 0 dollars limits your audience, regardless of profitability. That literal pay wall simply makes people start to question. Especially if a "free" alternative exists and they don't care about the pitch (in this case, privacy or less low quality results in search).

That's arguably a good thing since a premium model mitigates the temptation of ad or data selling based approaches. But the fact is many don't care nor mind those as long as they aren't extremely intrusive. Even if they are (full page banner ad with small x), they may tolerate it anyway.

By that logic, life itself can never be popular. Everyone in the world makes/has access to a non-zero amount of money, and where it goes is our collective human decision for how the world should operate. You're spending money right now, because of your opportunity cost!

Kagi v Google, in terms of "How do you operate as an organization wrt the world?"?

Kagi wins hands-down. I couldn't care less about the privacy angle, the QUALITY is amazing. It's like traveling back to 2008, and for $10/mo that's a sweet deal.