this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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I apologize if this is old news, but I just noticed it. It looks like Kagi has added Fediverse Forums as a default Web search option.

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[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 159 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Cool. Wish more search engines would do that.

But, as far as Kagi goes, it's a paid service and it's an American company. So I won't be using them.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 53 points 5 days ago (22 children)

What non-american search engine do you use?

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 237 points 5 days ago (5 children)

I write questions on bathroom stalls and then check back in on them every few days.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 131 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Why are you using Grindr Classic for search?

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 19 points 5 days ago

For the personalized results, ofc

[–] dubyakay@lemmy.ca 13 points 5 days ago

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

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[–] clgoh@lemmy.ca 24 points 5 days ago (3 children)
[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It uses Bing in the backend though.

[–] MoonlightFox@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago

Yes, but not fully. They have their own index as well. They have also recently started a partnership with Ecosia to focus more on that effort.

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[–] Wolfram@lemmy.world 37 points 5 days ago (5 children)

Not using Kagi because its an American company is valid. But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product. There is still a transaction with a free product.

Kagi is not free because they respect your privacy and don't sell your data.

[–] x00z@lemmy.world 23 points 5 days ago

I have donated €1500 to opensource software projects and paid a whopping €7 for software. These (privacy respecting) projects got my money because they weren't transaction based. Capitalism is not the only way.

[–] MisterFrog@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago (4 children)

I'd happily pay for search, but Kagi is way too expensive.

10 searches a day, for $5/month? (US)

Like, that is way too much.

I can receive thousands and send thousands of emails per day for that price. Is search really that much more expensive?

[–] technopagan@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 days ago

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.

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[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I don't use them or never read their privacy policy so i don't know. But it's not because it's a paid service that company won't use your data to sell it for more profit. That's EXTRA profit for them, so why the hell not. And them being based in the US means I already can't trust them with their poor privacy laws.

[–] sudneo@lemm.ee 11 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Writing them off as an American company is totally valid, but I'm happy to pay for a quality service because it keeps ads out and lets me vote with my money. It's really not much to cling to psychologically, but it helps. When I and others completely degoogle our lives it moves no needles at GoogHQ, but paying subscriber metrics are a KPI discussed in every board room in the world.

[–] clove@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 5 days ago

Lile they say, perfection is the enemy of privacy! Kagi has been the best as an engine out of all I've tried. If a better competitors comes up, I'll give em my money.

[–] ericjmorey@discuss.online 15 points 5 days ago (5 children)

I'm not a fan of Kagi's founder, so I generally don't use it.

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[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 75 points 5 days ago (1 children)

heres to the painfully slow and gradual rebirth of the internet.

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[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 57 points 5 days ago

It's had it for at least months but even if its years old it's still a cool feature and deserves attention

[–] KeefChief13@lemmy.world 42 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Been using this for a month or so its nice

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

Does it work on lemmy content too?

Edit: thanks all!

[–] KeefChief13@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago

Yeah big time

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[–] Glitchvid@lemmy.world 45 points 5 days ago (7 children)

I've been using Kagi for the last year+.

Personally, I wish they'd tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.

Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they're limited by their existing index providers, I wish they'd run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.

In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.

TW: Self harmAlso not a huge fan of the company and a lot of it's ardent customers, who heavily protested a suicide prevention popup if you used it to searched for how to kill yourself.

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[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 48 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (7 children)

I’ve been using Kagi for about a month now, and I think I’m gonna stick with it. Paying with dollars instead of data/attention feels more healthy for everyone involved.

(Fully realizing, of course, that there’s nothing stopping them from doing both, and that’s why we need better laws. Voting with your wallet will never be a complete solution… but it is something I can do right now.)

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 13 points 5 days ago

I have been on it for about a year and I have no complaints.

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[–] MoonlightFox@lemmy.world 15 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Just came across https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html . Seems like there are more good reasons to avoid it besides it also using Yandex as an index.

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

They're definitely stretching themselves too thin, but as long as I get better and more relevant, cleaner, no advertising search results for my knowledge work and research. With my privacy in tact.

Then I'm continuing to pay them for a product I find to be superior than the alternatives.

[–] clove@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 days ago

Eh, doesn't discouraged me from using em. For me is them or Google. As those are the only two useable engines for my type of surfing.

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[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago

Imagine if someone added that feature to SearX/SearXNG

[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 days ago

Kagi is shaping up to be really cool with this and the Orion browser supporting firefox/chrome extensions on ios.

[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

It's had that for a while now. It was the main reason I'd pipe up to recommend Kagi, but now there's also their search anonymizer and tor endpoint.

[–] aeharding@vger.social 12 points 5 days ago

I use the Kagi forum toggle so. much.

[–] pigeonholedpoetry@sh.itjust.works 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

It’s had this for quite some time

[–] MoonlightFox@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (12 children)

Obligatory mention that Kagi also use the Russian search index Yandex. This aids the Russian economy and the Russian war effort.

Edit: I recommend reading my in depth explanation here https://lemmy.world/comment/15520236

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

Every single time with red comes up there's always this FUD. You, specifically, don't miss any opportunity to make mention of this. Across Lemmy, which is rather suspicious. Helping the Russian war effort? That's a pretty big leap here.

Why?

Imagine a search engine aggregator aggregating search engine results from multiple sources for aggregation. The more indexes they support the better the results are going to be for everyone, I don't see this as a problem for data aggregation.

Why should data aggregation give any sort of shits about geopolitics?

Regardless, the topic of this post, fediverse search, is part of their own search engine anyways afaik

[–] MoonlightFox@lemmy.world 19 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I have been sick a lot lately, so have had a lot of time on my hands. I don't have a search for Kagi or something. I wanted to use Kagi though, so I was disappointed when I realized that they want to continue this practice.

What are you implying with it being suspicious? In what way?

If Kagi pays a Russian company for a service, that company pays taxes to the Russian government.

Russia spends 32% of its budget on the Russian military. So for every dollar they get in taxes, one third is spent on the Russian military.

With a corporate tax rate of 20% that means 6.4% of Yandex profits go to the military. Since Kagi is mainly a paid service, I don't want my money to go to the Russian military, and I guess a lot of other people don't want this either.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hikes-national-defence-spending-by-23-2025-2024-09-30/

The Russian people are not to blame, and I am sure a lot of great people work at Yandex and at different companies in Russia. That said, Russia chose to attack a peaceful democratic country, they are currently sanctioned by a lot of western countries in hopes that it will pressure their economy enough to force them to stop the war.

There isn't much we can do to stop the conflict besides hurting them economically and supporting Ukraine. If we continue to use Russian products and services then that does not work. Unfortunately this affects everyone in Russia.

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[–] JackAttack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think when I tried them out a while back they also had a usenet search? Can anyone clarify on this?

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