Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.

If someone is interested about Kagi vs Google (made by Kagi): https://mastodon.social/@kagihq/113971972586118949

Cool, but I will still prefer to use duckduckgo and type Lemmy in the end of my query.

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

I think when I tried them out a while back they also had a usenet search? Can anyone clarify on this?
- They do.
  
  Not sure if you use that feature but does it work like an indexer and allow direct downloads of "Linux isos"?

heres to the painfully slow and gradual rebirth of the internet.
- We learned a lot of lessons from the first one. Here's hoping we don't make the same mistakes.
  
  lets see if federation can keep the hawks away. they will certainly be trying (again) once we hit critical mass.

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.
- I encourage subscribers to go make themselves heard on this post if you support being able to disable particular indexes such as Yandex.
- Thanks for the link, I'll def be more critical about it in the future.
  I'll still use it (for now) because as a no-nonsense customizable search engine its by far the best I've tried.
- 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.
- 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.

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.
- 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.
  
  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?
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  There are plenty of paid products that do not respect your privacy and sell your data.
  And there's free products that do respect your privacy and don't make you the product. They are community products.
  For instance I offer my bandwidth and storage to thousands of strangers to share torrents and they do the same to me. No secondhand transactions happening.
  
  But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product.
  That's definitely one model for operating a public service, but its far from the only one.
- What non-american search engine do you use?
  
  https://metager.org/ is run by a German non-profit. Since late last year it's pay to use because their advertising partner (Yahoo) cancelled their contract without warning. But it's cheaper than Kagi. Also the non-profit is part of the project that's building the European OpenWebIndex ( https://ows.eu/ ) that's releasing this year.
  
  As a former Kagi user (quit all my US company subscriptions recently in order to support EU) I've now used Startpage for a month and it has been great so far.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com
  
  I write questions on bathroom stalls and then check back in on them every few days.
  
  Qwant. It's French.
  
  I ask friends who are more intelligent than me
  And if they don't know I assume it is forbidden knowledge that would drive me mad to know
  (I am only half joking)
  
  Mojeek
  
  Startpage.com
  Better than qwant in my opinion.
  
  Search engine? I started rawdoging urls a while ago.
  The internet is increasingly more useless, the sites i really need are bookmarked anyway.
  
  Does anyone use yacy?
- 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.
  
  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.
- I'm not a fan of Kagi's founder, so I generally don't use it.
  
  Any specific reasons? I'm a very happy Kagi user and the founder is active on their discord and seems like a really nice guy.

Imagine if someone added that feature to SearX/SearXNG

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

Been using this for a month or so its nice
- Does it work on lemmy content too?
  Edit: thanks all!
  
  Yeah big time
  
  Yes it does! :)
  
  ive been finding lemmy content on duckduckgo and other engines for a while now. dont intend to try kagi tho so cant answer your question.

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.
- Have you tried the small web lens? They run their own index specifically to help surface the content you mention is hard to find by default.
  
  Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn't extremely broad, unfortunately.
- Kagi has multiple indexes of their own
  And the AI stuff is all opt on from what I can tell. I've never gotten any AI thing except when I asked for it
  
  They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can't.
  Running a scraper doesn't need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.

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.)
- Since they implemented privacy pass, there is now something stopping them from doing both. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
  Obviously with it you trade the need to trust them for your own personalization (as they can't know it was you searching).
  
  Funny how the tech space is hyped up about privacy pass when Kagi implemented it, but got outraged when Cloudflare worked with Apple to try to use it as a CAPTCHA alternative.
  
  A very reassuring technology to have!
  But my worry was more about them changing their business model once they get big enough.
- I have been on it for about a year and I have no complaints.

It’s had this for quite some time

That's nice indeed! Thanks for sharing.

The mandatory signing in to perform any search is a deal breaker. Privacy first
- They have a system for detaching your account info from searches now
- It's because you have to pay for the search engine. They dont serve ads
- Feel like you’re jumping the gun a bit with this opinion. Kagi is one of the best options if you prioritize privacy. Have a closer look at their policies.
  
  Policies can change, they’re for profit, and I’ve heard leadership may be right wing/trumpy but I can’t find clear evidence of it so I want count that against them at this point.
  Either way subscriptions are you giving away your identity essentially. They have you, your name, your credit card, your address, your associated searches, there is a lot to consider here more than just “look at what they say.” You are choosing to give them clear identification of you and your searches. That requires a lot of trust.
  TL;DR: A lot of for profit companies say a lot of things. I am not anti-Kagi but you’re being very reductionist and ignoring valid concerns.
  Edit: I am not against Kagi or spending money on quality services.
- https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

I use the Kagi forum toggle so. much.

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.

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
- 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
  
  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.
  
  I'm grateful someone mentioned it. Paying Yandex is a deal breaker for me. As much as Yandex may want to be independent, they cannot be because of the country they're based in. With the way things are going, the same may be true of Google and Kagi itself somewhere within the next four years.
  Kagi defends itself by saying it's "only used 2% of the time" which would make a better argument that turning off the feature to distance themselves from Russia has little impact than a defence for working with them. There's also the "but we've always done it like this" defence and something about "providing the best results" but neither are great arguments.
- Source?
  
  https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo
  
  https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo
  https://redlib.kittywi.re/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_kagi_search_engine_directly_funds_yandex
  https://kagi.com/changelog#5340
  
  Best I can find links a sweedish page on the topic
  https://fedia.io/m/privacy@lemmy.ml/t/1334785
  It's kind of odd I can't find more sources which does make me a bit skeptical
- and they use Brave, too.
- When does anti Russian gov aggression just become racism? Does using Google aid the war in Palestine?
  
  I see your point, but I think there is a meaningful difference.
  Russia started a war with a peaceful nation. It is in no way, shape or form a provoked war.
  There are a couple of ways you can react to hurt the agressor. With the goal of making them stop hurting the innocent. Military action is one, economic is another.
  Most European countries have decided to hurt them economically. As a European I agree with this, and fully support it. I try my best not to support the Russian economy. If Russia as a country changes in the future, my view will probably change as well. This is a war that Putin started.
  That said, I believe the support from the US to Israel was wrong. The US has been supporting genocide. One could argue that supporting the US economy supports these sorts of actions as well. However, the scale is important and how much involvement is important.
  If you had mentioned an Israeli company, I would agree 100%. The difference is that the US have not been spending 1/4 to 1/3 of their entire fiscal budget fighting a peaceful democratic nation as the agressor.
  Anyways, at this point I am kinda mad at the US for being a unreliable partner and going to trade war with Europe and bailing in their responsibilities when it comes to the war in Ukraine and creating uncertajnty within NATO, threatening nations etc, anyways. So not spending a lot of money on US goods and services at the moment either no.

Why can't it just be automatic?
- Kagi lets you prioritize/demote/block per-domain but that's a separate feature
- Kagi lenses "focus" the search. So normal web search definitely can contain fediverse results, but with the lens switched on, you ONLY get fediverse results.
  
  Thanks. This is good to know.

Neat feature. Any word on if Kagi has ties to the Kremlin?
- Its an American company so I suppose it is possible.
- I have no idea, but they amongst other indexes use the index from the Russian company Yandex
- If you're worried about Kagi's connections, I recommend checking out this podcast with the CEO
  
  Will check that out? Thanks!!!

Does anyone else's search on lemmy actually work as expected? I feel like it never finds anything really relevant. I can search for audio interfaces for example and all the first results are about software in general and not actually the hardware component.

Makes sense they advertise here enough
- I'm not sure they do at all. There are just a bunch of Kagi users here.
  
  I mean the idea is to appear organic, it's not very effective advertising otherwise. It's free real estate there is no reason they would not be doing it.
- you see ads on Lemmy?
  
  I tend to be suspicious of any brand name dropping. It's where most reddit advertising happens too.
  https://old.reddit.com/r/SocialMediaMarketing/comments/1edu8u6/commenting_as_a_social_media_strategy/
  The only factors keeping guerilla advertising off Lemmy are its relative obscurity and maybe association with less advertising-friendly instances (which afaik are mostly defederated from the biggest instances). We aren't immune to astroturfing by a longshot.
  In the case of Kagi, the degooglers are basically their market. Here is probably one of the best places to reach an audience since it's basically people fleeing similar tech bro overreach from reddit.
  I think Kagi is fine btw but I also think knowing that we're just as if not more susceptible to this kind of marketing is important to keep in mind for the health of the fediverse.
- What advertising?

Oooooooh. Kagi added this lens! Since you can add custom lenses, I thought I added this (and forgot) to my own account. Cool!

I think brave (*search) let's you do the same thing with their goggles feature which let's users make custom search filters. I could be mistaken though
(and yes I know Brave as a company comes with baggage. Pretty much all of the search options do unfortunately :/)
Edit: I'm taking specifically about Brave search. I cant see any reason I'd ever want to use Brave browser frankly.
- How is Firefox's baggage anywhere close to homophobia and a crypto scam
  
  Firefox isn't a search engine...? I'm talking about Brave search, not the browser, I have exactly zero reasons to use Brave browser lol 😅
  Brave the company sucks, but most of the alternative/private search engines give poor results and/or are just a meta search. Brave search performs more competitively with google than most (thank you google for making that easier every passing day), and isn't dependent on Google or Microsoft continuing to allow other engines to use their results.
  From what I understand kagi has some issues too, but not as much baggage as brave has. Brave has a lot 😅. But Kagi and Brave will often appeal to different people, since Brave is free and Kagi is a subscription with a monthly quota of available searches

Is Kagi big? If they are, does this mean we’ll see an influx of users from this?
- In the order of 40000 people, so pretty tiny compared to the big search engines.
- Not really. I was quite surprised when they recently celebrated 40k users.