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If someone doesn’t mind their privacy they would just use Google Search + Gmail. This guy is delusional
I expected to roll my eyes at this article but it’s actually quite compelling and well written. The Kagi website’s lack of nuanced privacy discussion already turned me off, and now I’m just going to pretend the service doesn’t exist.
Pretty good discussion with appearance by the Kagi founder here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314
I’m not linking my personal/payment info to my search history because I hate being advertised to and from what I can see, there’s little in the way of scruples/forethought attached to this company. They’re going to sell that info if it isn’t hacked out of them first.
lol I’m not sure who’s side to take here. I tried kagi and I can’t personally justify the cost. The free trial is hard to use because I perform a ton of searches in a day and I keep thinking “I should save free trial searches for a good use case”.
Also, not hard to believe a company would stick the privacy sticker all over their product and turn around and make money off my personal data.
But those “harassment” emails from the Kagi Owner/CEO to me read like a business person with a passion not understanding where these accusations come from. After reading part of that chain, I came out with the feeling that “Lori” just wanted to write some click baity stuff and didn’t really care to dig any deeper. Yes, AI products by a company right now implies they will use your data to train or sell a dataset to some other company. But I don’t see any damming evidence here, just assumptions.
If Kagi is serious about their privacy mission then they should release a clear ToS and a legally binding statement that they will not use our data or meta data for anything.
Click baity stuff? The dude wrote an opinion piece that was only seen by like fifteen people and only meant to be directly linked to folks they engaged with so they wouldn’t have to repeat their reasons for no longer using kagi but then the CEO obsessed over them and Streisand effected it.
My god , that mastodon thread is a gigantic echo chamber
The comments on here arent that different either tbh… “CEO bad” +1 +1
I read the article, and nothing in there seems to be a valid criticism of Kagi as a search engine. It’s all about the founder not understood GDPR, or how Kagi wasted money on free t-shirts, or the writers personal opinion on AI.
This is largely an opinion piece. It has merit as such, but please don’t take this article as factual journalism.
Yeah I had to stop reading because they started bashing the people behind Kagi instead of the actual product.
The product has been working great for me. As for the founder, well I’m minding my own business.
My 100-search trial expired this week and I was literally planning on subscribing later tonight. This has made me think twice.
But it takes me back to why I tried Kagi in the first place: What else can I use that respects privacy?
I don’t think any of them do completely. DuckDuckGo uses Bing, so is Microsoft; Google is… well, Google; Brave is apparently really shady; I’ve never thought much of the results from Bing directly. Startpage seemed ok but apparently uses Google.
What else?
I also like something to be integrated into the browser. As a Mac user, I can’t add new search engines to Safari (and have actually switched to Orion, but may now switch to Firefox or back to Safari).
I use SearXNG and an app called KeywordSearch on iOS and Mac to search natively via SearXNG. It even syncs my preferences between devices.
Also as a Mac user who went from Safari, ended up using Orion up til recent Kagi drama, and found LibreWolf. It works well and I’ve found it to have better compatibility versus Orion. I’ve used that with Searxng for more private searches.
