With all the talk about privacy, people seem to be forgetting that censorship is also a major problem for today's internet.
Many "alternative" search engines are better for privacy, but they are still vulnerable to censorship, because they rely on g**gle and m*crosoft's indices for their search results. This isn't a deep-hidden secret either, many of them disclose what search index they use on the "about" page, for example:
I had a high school friend shill me brave because he worked there. Was genuinely into all the tech bro stuff and gold. So much gold. I used it for maybe 2 weeks before I got tired of the crypto. I should thank him though, that pushed me into FOSSland.
Unfortunately there is still one thing that you have to opt out of manually, and that is monetized new tab pages. It's not strictly crypto-related, and it's only like three clicks to opt-out, but can be slightly annoying if your workflow relies heavily on browser profiles like mine. Still a great browser tho.
We do our best to avoid censorship and bias. Some results from traditional sources will reflect biases, but they’ll be balanced by results from other sources. Also, we have built product features to help with bias reduction. For example, our "World News" Lens includes articles from respectable media outlets across the globe.
One of the signals that does influence our ranking is the presence of ads or trackers. We penalize bloated sites regardless of their agendas.
You could argue that it’s worth the money to get better results and avoid Google, but with so many companies trying to take $10 a month you have to draw the line somewhere.
No, I'm with you. $120 a year is too steep for searching for me. I like what they are trying to do but I don't think the average person will spend that much.
Why downvote? That's a fair point. There is a free tier with a few free searches per year (2000 or something). You could sign up and use this budget whenever your search engine of choice fails you.
Yea, I just think I either pay for something like Kagi, or I am subject to something like Google. I'm not sure there is a third way that pays for the servers and talent needed to deliver search results, but my imagination might just be limited.
Lol, I know how you feel. Not long ago there was suddenly a bunch of chatter about it on Lemmy and I was thinking the same thing, that it had to be marketing. But I'm a curious sort and I was so sick of bad google results so I tried it.
Now that I have used Kagi I'm convinced it was organic chatter. I really do like it, I think it's better, and if they offered money for posts I'd take that money because I'm paying $10 a month for a search engine, lol.
I thought this was a possibility at first, then I used it. The lad time is basically instant, the results are always good and it has a bunch of features with AI etc.
Or people just like it? This isn't hard to understand and has always been a thing. When people find something they really like they will tell other people about it.
With Kagi I get what I want and sort through way less to no junk. With their lenses I can push reliable sources up and other sources down. I really like it.
Why would you trust a browser whose business model is based on user activity tracking.
Who before they were even remotely popular or profitable had one of the largest ad campaigns I've ever seen for a tech product. Who's funding that and where is their value proposition coming from for that funding?
I'm finding Copilot better than any search and better than buying by itself and world's better than Google search, but it's totally not private... So anything you seem sensitive or private you just can't use it for
In part, yes. Here's a document explaining it all. In short, they use many different source, of which Bing is one. However when they query for data on those services, there's no personally identifiable information shared, so they can't create profiles about you.
Unfortunately, this map isn't accurate anymore. For example it says that Startpage only uses Google search results but that's outdated. Now Startpage uses Bing and Google search results.
https://www.startpage.com/privacy-please/startpage-articles/enhanced-search-results-on-startpage
'In working with Microsoft, Startpage is now incorporating Microsoft Bing search results and ads within some results pages, using a custom-built private search solution. Google search results will continue to broadly be used, but incorporating additional high-quality sources will have ongoing returns for our users'
Worse are subtle manipulations imho. There are scientific experiments showing that changing the order of search results can alter how people vote. How much outside of the spectrum suppressed because it doesn't sell as well? Who knows!
Very interesting. Too bad it gives really bad results.
Searching for "pokemon" doesn't show in the first page of results
the official website
the wikipedia page
Instead it shows a bunch of random websites that mention the term including this wepage straight out of the year 2000: http://dvdmg.com/pokemon.shtml
As a second search I tried searching for "best fallout for mods" and its first result was some unrelated meta topic (discussing ai generated content) which happened to use the expression "is this the fallout of [action/event]?".
"The commoncrawl organization for crawling the web and making the dataset readily available. Even though we have our own crawler now, commoncrawl has been a huge help in the early stages of development."
There is nothing I can find which says how much of the index is CC and how much is their own; if there's a decent amount of CC, this is originally for researchers etc. it's not the best resource in the world for a search index: https://commoncrawl.org/
That being said, as an independent search engine, it's always good to see people take on the massive task of actually building an index, not becoming a proxy.
These are private companies that are govern and controlled by commercial incentives. And are in their all right to do so. The users are always free to change service.
But as always, conviniance beats everything. Most people don't care or are not ready to go back. E.g. use mp3s and manually upload files to choosen device or if even supported. aux contact that was removed. Music and movie resolution loss due to streaming most people don't care..
They are frustrated when the airpod doesn't work with Android device accept the situation and go along with their lives.
Most western people download their games and do not think for a second that all games are useless when an new device is announced and the company can resell same game again even thought if thought from design to be back compatible.
Censorship are applicable for governments enforcing laws and regulations that impact what you are allowed to do or say which in many parts of the world unconstitutional. If people even put an ounce of energy to complain on their governmentns that they do on companies we would live in a better world.