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Comment by GoatInGrey | Hacker News Reader

I cancelled my kagi subscription upon seeing this response.

I donate to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia. I lost a family member to Russian artillery as well while providing medical aid to civilians. I very much do not want my dollars to fund the very thing that my donations are intended to defend against.

I'm going to assume you run a similar policy with Chinese search providers. After seeing Chinese warships off the Taiwanese Coast running invasion exercises (a roughly $30 billion annual expenditure for them last I checked), I very much want to minimize my funding of them.

I understand the argument you are making but war is far more serious than "politics".

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I take it you don't use any phones, especially no apple products then, right? After all, apples gigantic sponsorship of the Chinese government is well covered at this point.

Clothing is also a no-no, right? After all, there is *literally no way to purchase clothing from any store that hasn't been produced - in part - by effective slave labor and Chinese machinery.

Really, consumer boycott of nations is infeasible in a global market. The only thing you're doing is virtue signalling.

This is a silly argument. Clothing is not optional; Kagi is. They are deciding to go without an optional good because they don't like what they spend their money on. I applaud them for it and I like Kagi.

No, internet search really isn't optional. Try it for a month. Good luck!

I didn't say internet search was optional. I said Kagi was optional.

… implication of my comment was: “Which search engine may I use that doesn't indirectly cause harm?”

You're asking a question they aren't. They take issue with the specific spending of money on Yandex. So the question is "which search engine isn't spending money on Yandex"

No, the initial comment did also reference China, which Google and Microsoft are also in bed with... albeit to a much less degree then Apple.

Hence he's on point, as ddg ultimately uses bing under the hood, pretty much all search engines would be out.

A plausible argument could be that you're only using it, not actively giving them money (at least for Google/MS). It'd still call that hypocrisy though, if someone made such an argument.

Conversely, Vlad’s strong sense of engaging in ethical business and utmost respect for and understanding of what it means to remain neutral is precisely why I use Kagi, and why I believe Kagi will beat Google in the long run—why I invested in Kagi.

> why I invested in Kagi

Do you mean in the sense of investing in your tools, or do you mean that you're one of Kagi's investors?

Both.

> ethical business

There appears to be a conflict between ethics. Some won’t let a cent of their money go to Russia. Some will as they value their search engine and freedom of information. You and Kagi have picked one over the other.

It’s also their policy in response to “biasing” search results for suicide by including a link to crisis lines

https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probab...

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