• 22 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The Patriot Act and Snowden’s leaks have shown companies will go against their privacy policy to appease governments. Search engines especially are targeted by five eyes with the PRISM program where copies of all your data, linked to your payment, are sent to Five Eyes and stored. Gag orders and legal threats prevent disclosure, as has been done with prior tech companies who have tried to push back against this.

    Be wary of trusting corporations with your data as monetization is a powerful incentive.


  • Valve is great! Private and non-profit organizations give me some hope for a better internet one day.

    Regarding Kagi, there are other potential concerns with privacy, data leaks and price gouging as well. The Patriot Act and Snowden’s leaks have shown that companies will lie in their privacy policy to appeal to authorities even if they claim they are not storing information. All your health related searches, sensitive personal details, private life, etc is also always linked to your payment method waiting for a potential data leak if they are lying. (Or a copy is just sent to five eyes)

    All that is to say, be wary of trusting your privacy to companies. Monetization is a powerful motivator!


  • I’m worried eventually even Kagi will get enshittified. It has been a common trend that almost always occurs. Open source is the only way to ensure stability. Conflict of interest is what leads to companies either overcharging, or even accepting to get bought out.

    Don’t get me wrong, Kagi seems to be a great company thus far! But for something as important as search it would be best to have an open source solution.



  • Conflict of interest is the best explanation. The goal of search engine companies is not to provide information as efficiently as possible but rather something else entirely.

    A lack of competition is another factor as well with the monopolization of Google, Microsoft, etc. There may exist better search engines, but the average joe, and even some of us, have trouble finding them. The quality search engines don’t get a chance to expand and or are bought out like with Altavista (Regarded as the best search engines from the golden age). For example, crowdview.ai is the best search engine (outside of kagi from what I’ve heard) but I’m unsure if they will be able to stay afloat for a long enough time to get a chance to expand and take shots at Google.