this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Plug for https://kagi.com/ for those who can afford to pay for search engine. Best search engine experience, love the personalized results where you manually raise and lower specific domains.
Much like the current hullabaloo about the head of ProtonMail being suspect because of his support of Trump, there's a ton of shady shit about Kagi, too. They're Venture Capital funded. What's the deal with the T-shirt company? Why did they lie stupidly about stuff like "we don't do paid advertising... oh wait whoops now we do."
Further, the CEO of Kagi just has that techbro attitude of "You are required to listen to what I have to say."
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/112258758788834454
Seriously, his behavior is unhinged.
Aside from political leanings of services like Protonmail and Kagi, I look at one key thing: where they are headquartered. Kagi is in California, while Protonmail is in Switzerland. IMO, this means that if a civil war breaks out, they are less likely to poison or remove their service.
It is all about whether the workers and leadership are within reach of the law, be it official or the jungle.
Ah, so Duckduckgo leadership is still the only one in thr clear?
Find a searx / searxng instance or run one yourself! Depending on corporate software will continue to be a cat and mouse game.
Yeah, I definitely haven't seen as much sketchy stuff about their leadership, that's for sure. It's really hard to find a trustworthy group doing this kind of thing, partially because of the sheer amount of money needed to get such a thing off the ground to begin with... which usually ends up meaning VC money, which ends up meaning shady decisions to be able to pay it back.
Well, appreciate the headsup. The battle is always staying informed.
While at it, any recommended alternatives to ProtonMail?
Tutanota is a common recommended alternative, (which is now just called "Tuta").
Tutanota, as specified in my initial reply
I have had reasonable experiences with startpage as a search engine.
You can also use Kagi's video search AI to vet the political alignment of a video before watching. I don't want to waste my time on facist-leaning content, be it political or economic.
Kagi includes search results from the big search engines, which would mean Google and Bing. So while they do some of their own crawling to improve the results, some of your money will still be going to Google and Microsoft. It's still a step in a better direction though. I don't know whether Kagi has any plans to become more independent in future.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
I tried finding API pricing for Google but it's probably buried somewhere. They make it sound "free" but with usage limits, which surely Kagi exceeds? Either way, it's probably on a "per-call" basis, and Google gets a lot less money that way compared to crapping out money driven search results.
"Our unique algorithms down-rank pages with a lot of ads and trackers (which we have found correlate with a decrease in content quality) and promote content from independent, ad-free sources and personal websites."
I'm sure it's not perfect, but my experience with Kagi has been very very good. With DuckDuckGo I'd often have to revert to Google to find what I was looking for, but not with Kagi.
I pay for Kagi, so my opinion might be clouded by confirmation bias.
Ah, does Duckduckgo not do that too anymore? I thought there wasn't a fully independent search engine.
I can't think of a fully independent one.
DDG uses Bing primarily.