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Why pay for a search engine

(help.kagi.com)
162 points lr0 | 2 comments | 14 Oct 24 03:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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whilenot-dev ◴[14 Oct 24 05:59 UTC] No.41834630[source]▶
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

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JumpCrisscross ◴[14 Oct 24 06:07 UTC] No.41834674[source]▶
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

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1. eviks ◴[14 Oct 24 08:12 UTC] No.41835342[source]▶
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
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2. JumpCrisscross ◴[14 Oct 24 13:36 UTC] No.41837399[source]▶
> 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.