So #Kagi is now partnering with #Brave, i.e. the company of Brendan Eich, who has been CEO at Mozilla for eleven days before he had to leave due to massive criticism of his homophobic views. Brave's most well-known product is a browser with its own cryptocurrency, co-designed by Eich.
A feedback post asking Kagi to reconsider has been closed by Kagi's founder Vladimir Prelovac because "Considering company x founder political views is not a factor in [their] evaluation".
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This thread is well put. I may be canceling my own #Kagi subscription soon. Gotta see whether I can programmatically filter Google (or DDG or etc) results tho. Hmm.
I’ve been testing #Kagi for the last week or so (yes I know about the Brave drama, but I don't want to go there).
So far I'm impressed with the results and I'm considering subscribing. But they had an outage yesterday which lasted HOURS, and because their extension basically intercepts and redirect any search traffic, I couldn't just visit DDG and search. I had to disable the ext first (which is a pain in Safari).
This has me questioning whether a fledgling search engine is the right choice…
I get #Kagi relying on sources that don't share my values. Nothing in our societal order is uncompromised.
But calling gay rights political is a dog whistle that I hear loud and clear. There's no world in which I directly pay money into that kind of leadership.
I don't want "regularly remind people that #Kagi is a bunch of libertarians" to be my job, but as people are currently talking about them more than usual, and many seem to not know about it, let me link to my thread from January about it:
In short, when asked to not collaborate with cryptocurrency-powered, homophobe-led company Brave, Kagi's CEO responded with things like "Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reason we do not have innovation any more."
I've been playing with #KagiSearch today and I've gone from skeptical to in love. I've never felt so much at the center with any search service before. I guess that's what a service where the user is the customer, not the product looks like.
I'm really considering paying €10/m... for a search service!
I've been seriously fed up with Google's search recently: results full of ads and/or SEO spam, to the point that it's hard to find info.
The results in kagi search are overall good (though the map is really lacking), but it's just very expensive. I'd definitely need their $10 per month plan, and I'm not sure I could justify this, given there is free (though arguably worse) competition. 🤔
I guess I could cycle through the trial by creating a new account every week (the joys of having my own domain name) but that seems a little ridiculous, too 😆
Getting really sick of painstakingly migrating to some Cool New Technical Thing With Superpowers and then whoops, It's All Ethics Violations after a while.
First #Kagi - CEO is a white dude who can't read the room when a bunch of users raise serious concerns re: suicide warnings, .ru indexes, Brave collab, etc.
Now #Nix / #NixOS - BDFL is a white dude who can't read the room when a bunch of users raise serious concerns re: toxic members, shitty governance, MIC sponsorship, etc.
On month 2 of using #kagi for search and I think I’m sold.
I’d been using DuckDuckGo as my primary for a few years and it was ok. I did find myself needing to dig hard to get past the aggressively SEO optimized garbage and major social sites to get my desired results, and falling back to Google more often than I’d like though.
So far in two months of Kagi I’ve not fallen back to another search engine once. And I do a LOT of searching.
I'm afraid if I want a real #SearchEngine, I may have to have to pay for it with #Kagi.
I'm still a little fuzzy about what "Eid Mubarak" means, but I think it means essentially "Happy Holidays" to those who are participating in the feast at the end of the month of Ramadan. So, if that's you, Eid Mubarak!
I used DuckDuckGo before, but it's results have been getting worse, and they seem to be focusing on "AI" which is just going to make things even more useless. I haven't used Google in years, but I haven't heard anything good.