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Why pay for a search engine

(help.kagi.com)
162 points lr0 | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 03:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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oefrha ◴[14 Oct 24 05:18 UTC] No.41834417[source]▶
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.

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JumpCrisscross ◴[14 Oct 24 05:41 UTC] No.41834530[source]▶
> 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

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1. oefrha ◴[14 Oct 24 08:12 UTC] No.41835338[source]▶
> 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.