Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.
Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.
I apologize if this is old news, but I just noticed it. It looks like Kagi has added Fediverse Forums as a default Web search option.
It's had it for at least months but even if its years old it's still a cool feature and deserves attention
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.)
I have been on it for about a year and I have no complaints.
Since they implemented privacy pass, there is now something stopping them from doing both. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Obviously with it you trade the need to trust them for your own personalization (as they can't know it was you searching).
I've been using Kagi for the last year+.
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.
Have you tried the small web lens? They run their own index specifically to help surface the content you mention is hard to find by default.
Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn't extremely broad, unfortunately.
Kagi has multiple indexes of their own
And the AI stuff is all opt on from what I can tell. I've never gotten any AI thing except when I asked for it
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.
Obligatory mention that Kagi also use the Russian search index Yandex. This aids the Russian economy and the Russian war effort.
Edit: I recommend reading my in depth explanation here https://lemmy.world/comment/15520236
Source?
Best I can find links a sweedish page on the topic
https://fedia.io/m/privacy@lemmy.ml/t/1334785
It's kind of odd I can't find more sources which does make me a bit skeptical
and they use Brave, too.
When does anti Russian gov aggression just become racism? Does using Google aid the war in Palestine?
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.
Just came across https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html . Seems like there are more good reasons to avoid it besides it also using Yandex as an index.
Eh, doesn't discouraged me from using em. For me is them or Google. As those are the only two useable engines for my type of surfing.
Thanks for the link, I'll def be more critical about it in the future.
I'll still use it (for now) because as a no-nonsense customizable search engine its by far the best I've tried.
I encourage subscribers to go make themselves heard on this post if you support being able to disable particular indexes such as Yandex.
It's had that for a while now. It was the main reason I'd pipe up to recommend Kagi, but now there's also their search anonymizer and tor endpoint.
The mandatory signing in to perform any search is a deal breaker. Privacy first
It's because you have to pay for the search engine. They dont serve ads
They have a system for detaching your account info from searches now
I use the Kagi forum toggle so. much.
Neat feature. Any word on if Kagi has ties to the Kremlin?
Its an American company so I suppose it is possible.
Sadly true.
I have no idea, but they amongst other indexes use the index from the Russian company Yandex
If you're worried about Kagi's connections, I recommend checking out this podcast with the CEO
Will check that out? Thanks!!!
It’s had this for quite some time
Kagi is shaping up to be really cool with this and the Orion browser supporting firefox/chrome extensions on ios.
I think when I tried them out a while back they also had a usenet search? Can anyone clarify on this?
They do.
Not sure if you use that feature but does it work like an indexer and allow direct downloads of "Linux isos"?
Makes sense they advertise here enough
you see ads on Lemmy?
I tend to be suspicious of any brand name dropping. It's where most reddit advertising happens too.
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.
If someone is interested about Kagi vs Google (made by Kagi): https://mastodon.social/@kagihq/113971972586118949
That's nice indeed! Thanks for sharing.
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.
Cool, but I will still prefer to use duckduckgo and type Lemmy in the end of my query.
Why can't it just be automatic?
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.
Thanks. This is good to know.
Kagi lets you prioritize/demote/block per-domain but that's a separate feature
Is Kagi big? If they are, does this mean we’ll see an influx of users from this?
In the order of 40000 people, so pretty tiny compared to the big search engines.
Not really. I was quite surprised when they recently celebrated 40k users.
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.
How is Firefox's baggage anywhere close to homophobia and a crypto scam
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