Man, this is so random and hilarious. I genuinely laughed so hard.

Why are you using Grindr Classic for search?

And then you write your own (wrong) answers below it in a different hand writing and pen. And call it SEO.

Not working, the only response I get is penis

That was you?

Well then, in answer to your last question scrawled in the Kansas City Walmart bathroom, yes, you should definitely get that checked out by a medical professional.

Instead of bookmarks I use the “share to Standard Notes” option. It names the note after the link, saves the link, allows you to write a summary or tags, and makes it all searchable so it is findable later rather than disappearing like a needle in a haystack.

And I like swiss cheese on my ham sandwiches. Oh, sorry, I thought we were just saying non sequitors.

In all seriousness, that is not an answer to the question. Yes, some (often older) people will always use a search engine to find the same website they browse all the time. But search engines are also incredibly valuable for finding new things or verifying claims. I have a bookmark for the Warframe wiki but that doesn’t help me when I want to research different monitor energy efficiencies or find a repair guide for my toaster oven.

And while people CAN collect a set of (searchable) websites for different topics they are interested in… that is how we got into (one of) our current mess(es). How many people just use reddit for everything and thus make themselves vulnerable to corporate shittery and misinformation campaigns.

I started rawdoging urls a while ago.

Works best when you’ve got a web ring or other friendly community of contributors to reference against one another.

But those are few and fair between in the modern day.

I tried, years ago, I think their federated approach to building a database and crawling are cool - but at least the last time I checked, the actual search algorithm was just too bad. It often gave me completely irrelevant results and seemed very susceptible to spam sites gaming Search Engine Optimisation.

I’ve used Yacy por years. It’s very customizeable and gives good results, and I like that I can curate, to some degree, what it finds. Biggest drawback is that I don’t always feel like starting up a server to do a search.

And Qwant is really great! Have been using og for a couple of years, and have no need to fall back to Google, DDG etc.

It uses Bing in the backend though.

Was gonna say that.

Still uses Google as an index so you’re just giving them money indirectly.

Don’t trust him based on his prior comments

There was this debacle, at least

Sure, but they don’t (their privacy policy is exemplary). They have a whole shpiel about their business model. Just few weeks back they released a feature that makes it technically impossible for them to see who did searches, so no trust is needed anymore. They implemented a very novel protocol, quite cool.

I have doubts considering they are an american company, but I want to see them succeed. Plus, they are remote, so at least a good chunk of the income taxes from salaries are going outside the US.

Maybe. They use several other indexes as their backend so they have to pay microsoft for every search

$10/m is unlimited searches though…

And yeah, searches are actually quite expensive. There’s a LOT of infrastructure that goes into making something unique with your own search engine that isn’t just a wrapper over Google.

The actual compute cost per search, in 2024, was $0.0125. Kagi states they want to keep Costa below $0.015 per search, but their search partners are a major expense.

That ofc ignores all the supporting infra, devs, support…etc that goes into making it all possible.

Have the same issue with them. I recently churned from Kagi after being a paying Pro customer. 10,-/month is simply too much. I’m paying for email (1,-/month) and web hosting (1,-/month) and web search should be in that price range to make it an attractive offer for people.

I wrote to Kagi saying as much when I churned (also criticizing that most of their changelog messages are about LLM updates for “Ultimate” customers), but they responded saying that they believe in their offer and that the trajectory of new users signing up gives them confidence.

I am, however, not willing to shell out Streaming Service level pricing (services that stream hundreds of GB to me every month) for some web searches.

As much as it pains me due to Brave being involved in the whole crypto scam business and their CEO apparently being another a**hole tech fascist, I am using Brave Search for now. Its results were not inferior when I compared them to Kagi and I don’t need 95% of all the extra fluff that Kagi offers.

As soon as there’s an offer for private search results with their own index that is not censored nor ad-driven, that company (maybe Kagi!) will have my money. But it needs to be commodity-priced like mail or hosting.

I think their customer base is basically 90% made of people that - like me - would quit in a second.

Good thing is that there is no vendor lock, it would be a shame, but changing search engine is quite simple.

I don’t know the details, so maybe there is a reason, but I am not part of the “outraged” crowd. I think kagi use case is neat and innovative, bot protection is meh

Should I ask them about being paid? I’ve been doing it for free all this time.

Fair point, I think I agree. Just makes me feel ever so slightly called out for mentioning them frequently myself, though it’s pretty clear you’re not talking about regular users giving honest feedback so that’s more a “me” problem

Thank you

But yandex is useful for those who search in Russian. The low utilization probably comes from a mostly US/EU customer base, but when it is used, it is useful. I would disagree with disabling it. The best would be letting people decide what back ends to use, but that requires a whole rewrite of the search logic on their side, so it’s not happening any time soon…

BTW in EU we still use a lot of gas and oil from Russia, so it’s quite difficult to avoid giving them money (especially because we don’t know where energy came from for every product we buy).

Technically you could extend that reasoning to plenty of EU countries that also send aid to Israel (e.g., Germany, where Hetzner is located, or tuta, etc.).

At some point one has to make compromises, and everyone can place the line where they wish. Considering 1000 searches per month, the price is going to be between $0.20 and $3.84 (synchronous). So let’s say $2, which is probably an order of magnitude more than the real cost. Of that 2$, the margin is maybe 1$? That 1$ becomes profit for some Kazakh company, which ultimately means $0.2 in taxes. If this was in Russia, that would be $0.018 to the federal government, but let’s say that it doesn’t matter. Of that, 40% goes in weapons, making it $0.08/month. In 1 year, that’s $0.96.

Now, as I said I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an overestimation of 10x or more, it also assumes that absolutely nothing goes to Kazakh government, which is fully used to bypass sanctions, and a 50% margin for the company. It also assumes 1000 searches (the average was around 300 if I recall correctly) and that yandex is used for each one of them.

Every cent count, absolutely, but it’s objectively such a tiny amount that a one-time donation to UA army or some humanitarian relief org will offset you for like 15 years.

Running an index is quite a massive endeavor at the scale of Google. They’re a small team.

I think it makes sense considering there’s a competitive market of indexes already. They make small ones to cover some niches and use existing ones for the rest.

Keep in mind they also add their own reranking and stuff on top of Bing Google whatever

Surprisingly I’ve had zero Lemmy results in my searches.

Probably because my searches aren’t “Tell me why Linux is so cool”. Lol.

So you won’t pay for a subscription to use a search engine. Do you prefer the model that other search engines use where they take the content of your searches and use it to advertise to you?

Hoping to be constructive: how do you think search engines should operate? Or maybe how would you like one you consider “good” to operate?

Also wondering how you see something like Privacy Pass that Kagi announced recently: blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

This is particularly useful in the context of a privacy-respecting paid search engine, where the Server wants to ensure that the Client can access the services, and the Client seeks strong guarantees that, for example, the searches are not associated with them.

Theu don’t verify emails and the CEO has even suggested we can use a random string. Also, you can pay with Bitcoin. No forced KYC anywhere along the way.

This is what their Privacy Pass extension is for. Once it verifies you as an user, it doles out a bunch of generic “arcade tokens”, which don’t have any identifying information. You lose Kagi’s personalization features while using them, but your searches aren’t tied to any account beyond just “Kagi”, so you and everybody else using the privacy extension are the same person.

At least, as I understand it.

And if it changes, I will leave and stop paying. They are a user centric model. They thrive because of paying users.

they’re for profit

From my subscription cost, yes. This aligns my privacy goals with their need for income which is not the case for “free” advertising-supported products.