Kagi Search API
help.kagi.com
help.kagi.com
The only thing we can do is vote with our wallet if we see that they have lied all the way.
This will only lead us to Russel's teapot [0].
BTW, their current privacy policy is at [1].
and i doubt mean a non biding privacy policy. heck metabook and google both always had one saying the same thing
And you cannot really confirm the above use case very well. What if it is so sophisticated that it knows when it is being monitored, or it is so random or well hidden, that it might take years to spot.
We are just doomed.
Is there an enforceable claim that Kagi will never store such info?
The making an account for searching linked to govt-verifiable payment and ID data, however ephemerally, is also a high bar for me (and for women in the US with the incoming administration's focus on over-regulating pregnancy outcomes, holy fork NO)
If the government really wanted to, they can just get SSL private keys from CAs and decrypt all the traffic no matter who you search with, anyway. It's probably only a matter of time...
Bitcoin is not anonymous at all, a public ledger is the opposite of anonymous if anything. At best it's pseudonymous.
I think parent used Mullvad as an example as they actually support creation of accounts 100% anonymously, as you can literally mail them an envelope with cash.
Well, acktshually…
BTC can be anonymous through careful wallet management combined with methods such as CoinJoins[1].
And before anyone says it, I know I can use tor and VPNs and every other privacy tool out there to become more anonymous, but that makes doing normal www things more difficult than it needs to be.
/s
There's a simpler argument to use instead of trying to bend over backwards justifying this thing you really want to do but deep down know that it's bad for you. In fact, it's already become mainstream lingo. It's called You Only Live Once!
Those are the only four words you have to utter and everyone who was about to start arguing with you will back way instantly and you'll save yourself these strained self-serving justifications. The beauty is there is no counter argument to such pristine nihilistic capitulation.
Once Kagi, a startup, breaks the precedent with this credit card requirement crap and actually starts getting significant marketshare everyone else will say, "these guys just normalized requiring a credit card upfront for this type of service. That's great, we can now open another front in the enshittification of the internet and tie highly revealing information to real people more directly." And yes, some of these people will undoubtedly be less savory types and of more questionable moral character than the Kagi crew. And I dare say in all likelihood, so will the late stage Kagi crew as well.
On the other hand, if you do a little good faith research you'll find some email and vpn providers do allow you to send cash (gasp) via postal service to activate your account. It doesn't matter if only one customer uses that option. It is the existence of that option that creates trust.
Unless there is such an option or something nearly identical in ease and function, all these aspirational cross-my-heart-hope-to-die assurances are just ridiculous.
""" Just to acknowledge that Kagi already implements with OpenNode to accept crypto payments so this is specifically about Monero.
> I understand the technical issues with implementing Monero, but given the number of users that will be attracted to Kagi specifically because if its privacy, it seems quite inconsistent to only offer non-anonymised payment formats.
We heard the same argument before implementing crypto, and the reality is it attracted very small number of users (less than 0.3% Kagi users pay with crypto). Since this was extremely hard to implement, and there are already ways to convert Monero to Bitcoin so there is path to payment, and based on our previous experience we expect the impact of implementing Monero directly to be minimal, we have decided to focus our very limited resources elsewhere (eg. make search better). Thanks for understanding. """
[1] https://opennode.com/contact/
[2] https://kagifeedback.org/d/493-enable-anonymous-payments-ala...
[3] https://kagifeedback.org/d/493-enable-anonymous-payments-ala...
In short, the extension receives blindly signed ‘passes’ for each authentication and these passes can be used to bypass future challenge solutions using an anonymous redemption procedure. For example, Privacy Pass is supported by Cloudflare to enable users to redeem passes instead of having to solve CAPTCHAs to visit Cloudflare-protected websites.
We did not say we maintain anonmity, but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/searchengines/comments/m0i869/comme...
> There is no more incentive to collect, misuse, or otherwise do anything with user data. In fact, for Kagi, user data is a liability. We don’t want it. We have nothing useful to do with it. You have to log in for Kagi and create an account because that’s the nature of a subscription-based business model; you somehow have to tie the payment to an account. But other than that, there is really no incentive for Kagi to ever want to touch your data.
https://blog.1password.com/real-cost-search-engines-intervie...
Instead of being scared to share information with [your search engine], you will chose what data you want it to have and volunteer your data only after knowing its incentives align with yours... The search will be personal and contextual and excitingly so!
>You have to log in for Kagi and create an account because that’s the nature of a subscription-based business model; you somehow have to tie the payment to an account.
If data was really viewed as a liability, they would adopt a data minimization model similar to Mullvad and not tie user accounts and email addresses together at all.
Then normies can login with email and everyone is happy!
If they really didn't want it, there are options.
It's not the email alone that is valuable. It is the email paired with your search history that is valuable. If you remove the email, and instead tie to to a uuid, the search history is much less valuable. This is the basics of data minimization.
Which, again, is fine if Kagi doesn't want to do. They just shouldn't pretend that there isn't any other solution other than email, because there is.
That is not what I said. Hundreds of data breaches where emails have gotten leaked and there have been no real consequences for the offending company so from a company perspective, email is not data that carries any real liability.
It certainly can be when it is tied to other data. For example, your entire search history.
If I understand this part correctly
> We plan to release this API to all Kagi members after the beta period.
eventually this will be usable (for the 2.5c per search) for any member, without the added 19$ per month (just your standard sub cost). I expect this will come in handy as a tool for AI assistant apps.
Anyway, happy Kagi user for around 2 years now, recommend it very much!
Could someone with knowledge possibly give some hints of when the beta period is over?
The assistant beta was ~1 year in beta.
Assistant had many bugs in the early stages, but it's different kind of beast than Search API (more things that can go wrong). With Search API it's probably "only" billing/UI bugs which they want to catch in the beta and maybe some problems with the search results from the API endpoint
Though in this case I'd say a few weeks, maybe 2 months. (They keep things in beta longer than it needs to be, to be completely sure nothing goes haywire especially if it's billing related like the pay per use API endpoint).
Assuming this page was launched today, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt. But this page has said that for as long as I've been a Kagi member (at least a year now I think), so that estimate seems pretty far of :)
Was more looking for someone with inside knowledge who might be able to give some sort of indication for when this becomes available to us "normal" users :)
Edit: Thanks to Internet Archive, here is that page in 2024-02-08: https://web.archive.org/web/20240208023510/https://help.kagi...
> We plan to release this API to all Kagi members after the beta period.
> Any ETA when the Search API will be available for professional? Ball park of a few weeks or more like 2+ months?
And the answer was "2 months" from Vlad (Kagi Founder)
EDIT: After my comment he also commented this on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42307588
Brave has complete search independence and has been doing this for a while, but I hear Kagi has great results, but at the same time I'm perfectly happy with Brave
Would be cool to hear from people who've tried both
Not that I'm against Brave in any way, I think any alternative to Google's dominance is healthy. It just seems the touting of privacy, independence etc from alt search engines often has very loose meanings on those words, or sometimes comes across as god of the gaps platitudes.
Apart from that, while i don't like google for all the reasons we all know - still their support of search operators and the results based on them is a magnitude better than all other search engines i tried so far.
And yes my daily driver is duckduckgo atm, tho sometimes i still fall back to google if duckduckgo doesn't deliver and sadly have to admit that google often results in better results than the others... sad but true.
I gave a Kagi trial with limited searches to a friend and they reported using Kagi when Google failed.
Yeah. It's that much better than Google. Which is better than DDG. Time is money, and I have $10/mo to save so much time.
Really it's about incentives. The other engines want me to see what the advertisers want me to see. Kagi's customer is me; they'll show me what I want to see.
As i mentioned in my post, something i personally really value is search operators.
So i did a direct comparsion on Kagi to google with a simple dork (its not like this would be my daily search but its a simple example for the usage of search operators and i just had no better idea *shrug)
intitle:"Index of" intext:2024 intext:backup
Old and simple directory indexing dork for backup files/directories.
Kagi returns me 13 Results. Google Returns me 108 Results.
The quality of the results is quite similar.
So i can't tell on other searches using operators, and since my kagi kontigent for my free account is 100 searches i will think about some better search terms and try it again tomorrow. But on first sight, i can't approve the Kagi > Google statement.
btw this gives more, though some incorrecT: 2024 backup intitle:Index intitle:of
I also tried others after the post, i just didnt update here - for example i did a site:laughingman.dev (my domain) to see what gets indexed, and saw also that google finds more stuff than kagi.
I don't wanne badmouth kagi - please dont missunderstand me. And yes search operators especially in the way i use them is a very specific thing, but well thats something i do daily and i rlly like it - if often helps me to find stuff alot more precise than with just some basic stuff. It also helps to sort out false postive results more reliable. If this is not a case for kagi well than kagi might just not be for me - which doesnt mean its not good for others. Im only speaking for myself
Can anyone from Kagi help us understand the reason for the difference? All things equal, I’d love to use Kagi but I can’t tell my client that their search costs went up by 500% for no reason.
I emailed them about it and that policy applies to storing any data derived from search results as well.
I was very adamant early on that they should be investing in developing their own indexing infrastructure so they can have true independence, but this has never been part of the vision as far as I can tell.
Isn't 2.5c per search kind of expensive? serp api is 1 cent for the $150/month = 15k searches plan
It's also strongly recommended when you're on the selling side, as you should be prepared to explain what added value justifies that your product is so much more expensive.
And honestly, anything that gets more people into the idea of using not-Google for searching is good for Kagi - even if it is to an ostensibly competitor.
Kind of doesn't make sense to compare to them.
There is demand for search APIs, and companies like Kagi can build a business around that, grow and then compete more generally with Google over time. Serp makes that difficult.
For competitive reasons Google might not want to sell a search API directly (they might indirectly fuel a lot of competition against their main ad supported product). So letting Serp offer this service in a bit of a gray area makes it hard for competitors to form a beach head in search, while giving Google legal flexibility to shut down any service that tries to compete with them in any way through Serp's data.
High end "boutique" search offering a refined search experience (at high computational cost) is a niche Google search can't compete with, since they're offering their search for free, and they'd take massive losses if they drastically increased the amount of compute per query.
But this is ridiculously expensive: > $25 for 1000 queries
Depends for what use case. For traditional everyday queries, it does sound expensive indeed, if you're not recovering any of the spend from whatever you use the API for.
300 searches per month $5/mo
Though If the API will get available, I won't use it as much as I want to.
I have ~1700 searches per month and use the professional plan (10$/month), which would be 1.7*$25 = $42.5 per month, which I'm glad I don't need to pay.
Kagi Search API is not officialy launched. We have a small, invite-only beta atm while we are working on it. We expect it to launch in about 2 months.
I’ve been using it for about a year and Google makes me wince now, in much the same way as using a browser without an ad blocker. Plenty of people do that every day just fine, but I’m glad I don’t have to.
I understand paying extra for the LLM API but this confuses me.
I've been considering Kagi a lot, but I find it sorta expensive (especially if compared to 'free') at least in my region. I learnt that they were discussing regional pricing[1], like the one in Netflix and other services.
[1]: https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing
I wonder what it would take to use Kagi together with something like SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng
A lot of APIs like this have serious restrictions on what you can do with the returned data, such as not being able to store it. This can greatly limit potential applications for anything beyond just "show some search results to a user".
Somehow Google detected it was a bot and my script crashed. Has anyone done something similar?
and honestly the quality between all of these search engines are basically the same.
This is ludicrously expensive. Who is their target customer base for this product?
its possibly quite a clever strategy to have a high price, essentially the tesla playbook:
get a good standing with HNW people and provide an awesome product, meanwhile the incumbents laugh at it because its not scalable and has no significant growth. But also they do not shoot it down. Once its big enough and economies of scale kick in, then the price is lowered or the market pays that price.