This Kagi?
Between the absolute blase attitude towards privacy, the 100% dedication to AI being the future of search, and the completely misguided use of the company’s limited funds, I honestly can’t see Kagi as something I could ever recommend to people.
Use of funds is misguided sure, but all the AI stuff is completely optional and has never ever gotten in my way
6 months to a year ago it was all people were recommending, Kagi and searxng. Maybe another paid one I forget the name. Now Kagi is bad?
That article is 2 years old. In the last two years Kagi hasn’t collapsed on itself, it’s not overrun with AI, the world hasn’t ended. They’ve implemented Privacy Pass, extended their browser support to Linux, introduced SlopStop for reporting AI websites, and generally continued to improve their main product.
Kagi is a business, run by people, who make decisions to the best of their ability based on their understanding of what’s going to best serve their needs/priorities.
Like any other product, the owners are guaranteed to make decisions that are not aligned with a fraction of their prospective customers needs/views. That’s what it’s like trying to serve a broad market like “internet search users”. Some of those users are inevitably going to get fired up enough to write a 20,000 word opinion piece on the subject.
For any service, you have to choose if the value proposition makes sense for you and your needs. For me, the value of most free search services has gone down the drain, and the value of spending monthly for Kagi is better than having to think about/maintain a SearXNG instance. YMMV.
Sounds interesting. I currently pay the 5$/month for the Kagi search engine and that works great so I’m inclined to trust them on their other ventures.
Their ‘Research’ AI is pretty decent too. I can get to the same ends eventually, but I can’t read and digest 25 different pages and then launch another 10 follow-up searches in 15 seconds. It’s summarizing and not simply inferencing so the hallucination rate is acceptably low and it also cites the sources so you can click a footnote to fact-check any important details.
I self-host most things, but I can’t self host a search engine. I much prefer paying monthly than having to fight the eternal battle against tracking and ads.
You CAN self-host a search engine, look up searxng.
Yes it’s a metasearch engine, but so is Kagi for the most part, their own indexes don’t cover everything.
woooop my sites on there already
I totally recommend just clicking through random pages on there for a good 10 minutes or so. You’ll be surprised at how many random, cool, interesting things you find that you’d probably never see otherwise in a million years. (also an AMAZING place to find small blogs to add to your RSS reader of choice)
They feed a lot of this into their main search index if you pay for Kagi search too, so a lot of these sites will appear higher than they would on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc, if their content is relevant. Especially fediverse sources.
So, like a baby Yahoo! directory?
I wonder just how long it will stay relevant and how they determine if the content comes from a human. So far I’ve been accused of being a bot several times, clearly reliably detecting humans is beyond the capability of … humans.
Mmm… that’s something a bot would say.
so is that.
So is that
Like a small curated stumbleupon. I gave it a few clicks a little while back and as you’d expect theres a pretty wide range of good to junk content on there, but it all felt distinctly human.
Since none of the pages are ad ridden its hard to imagine the AI crazies wasting tokens on something they can’t really monetize.
