I’ve been using Kagi for about a month now, and I think I’m gonna stick with it. Paying with dollars instead of data/attention feels more healthy for everyone involved.
(Fully realizing, of course, that there’s nothing stopping them from doing both, and that’s why we need better laws. Voting with your wallet will never be a complete solution… but it is something I can do right now.)
Personally, I wish they'd tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.
Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they're limited by their existing index providers, I wish they'd run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.
In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.
TW: Self harm
Also not a huge fan of the company and a lot of it's ardent customers, who heavily protested a suicide prevention popup if you used it to searched for how to kill yourself.
They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can't.
Running a scraper doesn't need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.
I see your point, but I think there is a meaningful difference.
Russia started a war with a peaceful nation. It is in no way, shape or form a provoked war.
There are a couple of ways you can react to hurt the agressor. With the goal of making them stop hurting the innocent. Military action is one, economic is another.
Most European countries have decided to hurt them economically. As a European I agree with this, and fully support it. I try my best not to support the Russian economy. If Russia as a country changes in the future, my view will probably change as well. This is a war that Putin started.
That said, I believe the support from the US to Israel was wrong. The US has been supporting genocide. One could argue that supporting the US economy supports these sorts of actions as well. However, the scale is important and how much involvement is important.
If you had mentioned an Israeli company, I would agree 100%. The difference is that the US have not been spending 1/4 to 1/3 of their entire fiscal budget fighting a peaceful democratic nation as the agressor.
Anyways, at this point I am kinda mad at the US for being a unreliable partner and going to trade war with Europe and bailing in their responsibilities when it comes to the war in Ukraine and creating uncertajnty within NATO, threatening nations etc, anyways. So not spending a lot of money on US goods and services at the moment either no.
Feel like you’re jumping the gun a bit with this opinion. Kagi is one of the best options if you prioritize privacy. Have a closer look at their policies.
I mean the idea is to appear organic, it's not very effective advertising otherwise. It's free real estate there is no reason they would not be doing it.
The only factors keeping guerilla advertising off Lemmy are its relative obscurity and maybe association with less advertising-friendly instances (which afaik are mostly defederated from the biggest instances). We aren't immune to astroturfing by a longshot.
In the case of Kagi, the degooglers are basically their market. Here is probably one of the best places to reach an audience since it's basically people fleeing similar tech bro overreach from reddit.
I think Kagi is fine btw but I also think knowing that we're just as if not more susceptible to this kind of marketing is important to keep in mind for the health of the fediverse.
Does anyone else's search on lemmy actually work as expected? I feel like it never finds anything really relevant. I can search for audio interfaces for example and all the first results are about software in general and not actually the hardware component.
Kagi lenses "focus" the search. So normal web search definitely can contain fediverse results, but with the lens switched on, you ONLY get fediverse results.
I think brave (*search) let's you do the same thing with their goggles feature which let's users make custom search filters. I could be mistaken though
(and yes I know Brave as a company comes with baggage. Pretty much all of the search options do unfortunately :/)
Edit: I'm taking specifically about Brave search. I cant see any reason I'd ever want to use Brave browser frankly.
Firefox isn't a search engine...? I'm talking about Brave search, not the browser, I have exactly zero reasons to use Brave browser lol 😅
Brave the company sucks, but most of the alternative/private search engines give poor results and/or are just a meta search. Brave search performs more competitively with google than most (thank you google for making that easier every passing day), and isn't dependent on Google or Microsoft continuing to allow other engines to use their results.
From what I understand kagi has some issues too, but not as much baggage as brave has. Brave has a lot 😅. But Kagi and Brave will often appeal to different people, since Brave is free and Kagi is a subscription with a monthly quota of available searches