You’re Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds::Google swears everything is fine. A new study—and many people’s lived experience—says different.
You’re Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds::Google swears everything is fine. A new study—and many people’s lived experience—says different.
I like kagi, too. The small subscription fee is worth it to me because I get decent search results and they don’t track you or bubble you…
If you’re interested in an engine that pulls from different sources, doesn’t tie you to an account, doesn’t fund a sketchy man who runs a sketchy company, and doesn’t cost money… Those exist too!
https://searx.space/
Well fuck. I want nothing to do with kagi now.
TBH if they dropped Brave or made it opt-in (ie disabled, not enabled, by default) I’d get on Kagi.
It’s frustrating. But not surprising. Indexing the internet ain’t cheap.
I’m so technologically illiterate I couldn’t figure out how to access the sears.space website. All I can find is versions and instances and a GitHub page
Every site on the leftmost column is a SearX instance. e.g. https://searxng.site/
It’s like… Lemmy, actually.
That’s not an engine, it’s a metaengine. The results are still tied to the engines used, which means if they are trash, you get trash. Kagi uses a mix of google/yandex/brave etc. and then elaborates them as well, in addition to have their own scraper for things like the small web (which is great to surface personal blogs).
They are not comparable. Also, kagi’s privacy policy is exemplar and the account can be paid in crypto now (if you don’t want to use CC).
Besides, there is no such thing as free hosting, similarly to Lemmy, it’s just someone paying.
Really strange nitpick to bring up as a first point. If Kagi is a meta-engine, then SearX is too. Maybe you simply haven’t tried it, because it cites multiple sources per search.
And Brave has ties back to using Google data:
Brave’s search is optimized against Google search results. Ever since its Cliqz ancestry, documented on the Cliqz blog, it optimizes its ranking algorithm to match Google ranking as closely as possible. Brave’s search discovery project uses clicks on Google’s results in the Brave browser to discover new sites. In other words, it’s not sufficiently different from Google to really diversify the search results.
People who host Lemmy and SearchX instances are doing it charitably. And SearX does not pay any big company back, AFAICT.
Kagi is a for-profit corporation that postures as not being one, even talking about “fundraisers” and “humanizing the web.”
Big difference.
Kagi is an engine, searx is a meta-engine. That’s what I meant. Which means kagi does not simply collate results from multiple source (like searx does), but implements its own logic. This means that - for example - it deranks website with many trackers, or can implement various features on top of the results. So it’s not a nitpick, it’s a substantial difference between an engine (kagi) and a metaengine (searx), which is essentially a proxy + aggregation of other engines.
It’s a known fact that brave optimizes result based on google data, and the kagi guys themselves in fact added that - with it being cheaper than google API - it could be a vector to eventually reduce cost for google API without impacting results.
That said, AFAIK kagi does not pose as a nonprofit, I think they make extremely clear that running searches (scraping, paying API, etc.) cost money and that they need to be profitable. Their stance is that by using a subscription model, their business interests align with user’s interests of providing good searches, rather than results that benefit advertisers, which is completely reasonable. This is literally written in their “why pay for searches” article that is presented when they show the pricing.
Of course it is a big difference, and you can argue for pros and cons of both options. I personally think the internet should not be based either on megacorp nor on free labor. Would I prefer kagi being a co-op? Sure. But it’s not like relying solely on free labor is free from any moral implication either (sure, you can donate, and I do to Lemmy for example, but only a minority does).
I picked up from their response that they’re just using the public API, not in any kind of partnership?