Why pay for a search engine

A point I hardly ever see anyone bring up: I’m not a fan of the idea of doing all my searches while signed in, potentially creating a company-knows-me-better-than-myself situation. I do my searches in private windows mostly behind commercial VPNs so that it’s difficult enough to profile me that companies probably won’t bother. Public search engines have to get really bad before I move to a sign-in-required one.

But given that this community which ostensibly touts privacy at every turn seems to overwhelmingly support feeding everything (not just searches) into OpenAI/Claude, I guess my aversion to having all my searches rounded up by a company (even if it’s not Google) is very fringe.

Btw I’m by no means a privacy maximalist.

> my aversion to having all my searches rounded up by a company (even if it’s not Google) is very fringe

Kagi provides strong privacy guarantees [1]. They could be lying. But so could your VPN providers.

[1] https://kagi.com/privacy

I'm calling marketing fluff here, given that its founder seems to hold a skewed model of kagis power in regard to collecting personal information altogether: "personal information is what you can be identified with as an individual. no information you submit to kagi is personal information except if you use your real email address to register"[0]

[0]: https://d-shoot.net/img/kagi/weregood3.png

Well being technology oriented, this community has disproportionate number of technology enthusiasts. Remember when everyone and their dog was cryptobro? There were multiple such spikes, coinciding with hype cycles of coins, nfts, etc.

These days the most vocal are GPTmaxxing, tomorrow there will be a new shiny thing.

The image looks like it's from this post [1].

Long story short, this appears to be a case of a CEO needing to restrain themselves from saying (or typing) everything that comes to mind when faced with a combative user who clearly isn't trying to understand something or bring anything to the table.

At the end of the day, what you care about when it comes to privacy in search are your search records. They say--in a way that generates liablity--that they don't store them. I see no reason for them to break that promise. Between a commercial VPN and Kagi, I trust Kagi more.

[1] https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

A user asking for the state of GDPR conformance is not by any means a "combative" user. They just want to know if their personal information a treated in their best interest and according to current laws.

Privacy is a VPNs first business, for kagi that would be search. It feels like you mix your evangelism with a bit of whataboutism here... why do you bring up VPN providers when we talk about the privacy guarantees of kagi?

Tangent to that, I hadn't realised their Orion browser was mac only, which is a flag of some colour to me. A company that takes privacy seriously ought to be taking Linux or cross platform seriously and if they do not I assume they do not.

> We will always respect your privacy.

I don't trust "always" in tech, and take its usage as a negative signal -- if you have no problem promising something both of us know will have a 99.9% chance of being broken, I'll devalue other parts of the promise as well. (Incidentally that applies to basically any promise that involves "always", not just in tech.)

Wording aside, I don't think these privacy policies have teeth. If they violate it, at worst they'll lose some users and have a harder time acquiring new users who care about this stuff, which may not be a lot of users.

Therefore, I prefer not giving them easily correlated data in the first place. Sure, my VPN provider knows I'm going to google.com/bing.com/duckduckgo.com/etc., violate away, that's the necessary sacrifice of using the Internet without going full paranoid mode. Thanks to TLS they don't know the content.

It might appear like that from a corporate PR perspective, but from the perspective of a user that's just one of those rare cases where you get a glimpse of honesty, which is just (if not more) as valid as some undefined liability to be the ground for you assessment

Seems like a good use-case for zero-knowledge cryptographic tokens.

You could buy an allocation of tokens that would be difficult to link together when used through a large VPN and fingerprint-resistant browser.

> faced with a combative user

the user from your line: "I really want to stress that I don't have anything against you or kagi :) just trying to be constructive."

Is combative that he was explaining what GDPR was while while other side was insisting on confidentially incorrect view?

I... Actually think that is an extremely poor answer from Kagi's founder, one that would give me pause before trusting them with personal data.

The most charitable reading there is that they clearly don't understand what PII even is, why it is important, and therefore that they would handle it properly.

While you can already sign to Kagi with disposable email and pay with crypto, we will also be bringing privacy pass (blind token) support soon. We already have a working proof of concept.

More info here https://kagifeedback.org/d/653-completely-anonymous-searches...

Offering another perspective: A company that takes privacy seriously creates their web browser as a zero telemetry and with 'pay for your browser' business model so there is no incentive whatsoever to mine user data (Orion is both of these, and unique in the browser world as such).

And a company that is 100% supported by user funding (which Kagi is) can only do so much with resources available, which is the reason we have to pick our battles (read more about Windows/Linux/Android versions for Orion https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l... ) People often criticize us for doing too much (eg link in the parent of parent comment) but we also at the same time do get critique that we are doing too little :) If Kagi is not doing something, believe me, it is not for the lack of will or ambition. (Kagi CEO here)

A key difference is that you’re actually the customer here. I am much more comfortable telling my doctor everything about my health, for example; than Gmail with all my emails.

It’s a personal choice at the end of the day; and I aspire for a world where there is genuine choice of companies. For the time being, I’m supporting competition by using Kagi (and I get a better search engine!)

> company that takes privacy seriously ought to be taking Linux or cross platform seriously

Going out on a limb, but guessing that the chief hurdle a company like Kagi faces is willingness to pay. I'm going to guess the 'this is a great product, but I just can't bring myself to pay more than 20¢ per year for search' crowd is crowded in Linux. (I may be totally wrong on this!)

> from the perspective of a user that's just one of those rare cases where you get a glimpse of honesty

User asked for data download. Company said there isn't any. User said that isn't GDPR compliant, which is nonsense. Company gave correct, snotty response.

I get it. I've been pissed off at companies before, too, and basically engaged in a support conversation to get something ambiguous in writing that I could use to cost them time and money in New York, California, Texas or the EU. (Big regulatory organiations, some of which love fodder with which to justify their existence.)

User was going down a rabbit hole. Kagi followed them there. They shouldn't have responded to that thread after it went into territory that on HN would have been flagged and in real life been settled with a glare.