Kagi doubles down on paid Brave partnership despite losing at least 0.5% of users in 1 day. And invoking Godwin's Law
Kagi doubles down on paid Brave partnership despite losing at least 0.5% of users in 1 day. And invoking Godwin's Law
Brave, as you know, is led by Brendan Eich. s homophobia is so disgusting that he was forced to resign as the leader...
"Should we not be buying VW, BMW, Siemens and Bayer technology and products today because they participated in holocaust and directly collaborated with Hitler?" -- CEO of Kagi when given feedback re: Brave partnership
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their CEO also moderates the discussion on Kagi's Discord. he's been removing criticism by queer folks, while - the last time I've checked before I've left their group - keeping replies like "stop shoving LGBTQ down our throats".
https://nyan.lol/@zicklepop/111716138453426218
edit: also their response regarding a request to add a "don't do it" widget to suicide searches basically boils down to "but if we make a moral choice now, we'll have to do more moral choices in the future!", which is... suboptimal. https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probably-have-a-dont-do-that-widget-like-google/
Ah fuck, I've been using Kagi but of course their CEO is a reich-wing asshat.
Anybody know of any other options? I'm not going back to Google.
Ive been having pretty good time with searxng
Are you self-hosting or using a public instance?
It's much better is you use a public instance as your results will be harder to be tracked: https://searx.space/ choice your favorite one here
DuckDuckGo is honestly a reliable one
Maybe not too helpful, but I've been using startpage for years now and it still seems like the best option for me. It is google-based but at least private.
I'd like to specifically avoid using straight-up Google as a source, proxied or not. Most of the smaller engines do seem to use Google for at least a part of their results, but for me that's preferable to having to completely rely on it since the results are mostly not very good
Wow, this topic in the edit is bad, and I wasn't aware of it. Just canceled my subscription. Now I have until 14/01 to choose an alternative.
https://searx.space/ works pretty well.
God damn it.
I am a paying subscriber to Kagi because the search results are excellent and there are no ads, so of course you show me a thread on “we should maybe add a small message to suicidal users telling them there is help for them” which then reads like a truth-social propaganda thread, filled to the brim with “helping people is a slippery slope!!!! muh freedoms!!” arguments.
This is something I really don't get.
- it is unclear whether anybody in history has ever been helped by that kind of message.
- it is kind of a religious morality that suicide needs to be prevented and that if someone wants to do it, it's because they are not in control. This doesn't mean it's wrong in absolute sense, but it's very opinionated.
- realistically speaking, there is no need to "search" how to suicide.
- trying to conclude what you want to do, rather than what you want to know (I.e. search) is IMHO exactly against what kagi's idea is. It's a service that does only what it is asked for, and doesn't try to "know" you, as a customer or user. No text editor prompts you to suicide hotlines by analyzing the text you are writing, and we would consider it extremely weird if it did. However, with search we get used to the tool trying to guess what we want to do because Google does know you, I think the beauty of Kagi is going in another direction.
But let's assume that all the previous points are invalid, and - for a greater good - it's worth displaying a message when someone is looking at suicide-related topics. What about "how to kill someone", " how to rape", "how to [...]" with the hundreds of things that are universally considered wrong? And even worse, what about the thousands of things that are not universally considered wrong, but that some group thinks are wrong? "How to change sex", " how to blow up a pipeline", etc.?
This I think was their point in that conversation, and I agree with. The moment you try to interpret what the user wants to do with the info they ask you, and you decide to assume responsibility to change the user's mind, there are hundreds or thousands of instances in which users or groups of users will demand you take a position for what they believe is right. Instead I think a search engine should stop at providing information relevant to your query and not assume what you want to do with it. It's not its place to correct people's behavior or educate people. The public education system should do that, the healthcare system should ensure people have the right support. A search engine is (or better, should be) basically like a librarian, or a library index, you ask what you want and they point you in that direction. They don't try to guess why you are looking for books about torture or environmental activism.
This at least is my perspective.
As a Kagi subscriber, I've been very happy with their transparency in general. The feedback site is open to the public and Vlad and other staff members regularly engage in conversation about possible future features, limitations, and even business decisions in the Discord. It's been refreshing.
...which makes the response to this issue all the more frustrating and disappointing.
I think Vlad's comments in the original feedback thread were fair enough, but then later, in the Discord, I saw a lot of "let's move this to a private chat". They even changed their General channel to "slow mode" to prevent live conversations as this topic became hot. Now I see they were also deleting threads?! Ugh. That's not transparent at all. Not what I expected based on my previous experience with Kagi.
Well, I was giving him a few days to backpedal but it seems like he's not going to do that. There goes my subscription, back to ddg I guess. Since they are supposed to be 100% subscription funded (they still are, right?), this is one of the few companies where that hopefully might actually have a noticeable effect if enough people care about it.
edit: also their response regarding a request to add a “don’t do it” widget to suicide searches basically boils down to “but if we make a moral choice now, we’ll have to do more moral choices in the future!”, which is… suboptimal. https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probably-have-a-dont-do-that-widget-like-google/
Meh, good for them tbh. I find these messages to be incredibly patronizing and somehow I doubt you can find a single person who will say "google posting the suicide number has made me reconsider killing myself"
Reading about the suicide thing: I might try kagi again this year. This is the exact type of software I want. It should only perform its intended function (returning relevant results to any query) and not try to influence me into following someone else's moralisations.