←back to thread

Why pay for a search engine

(help.kagi.com)
162 points lr0 | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 03:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
Show context
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.

replies(5): >>41834530 #>>41834654 #>>41835562 #>>41836139 #>>41836273 #
1. dannyw ◴[14 Oct 24 10:49 UTC] No.41836273[source]▶
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!)