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.
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).