this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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That is because of their business model, you are the customer.
You don’t HAVE to use a real email either. vlad even says so. But it’s needed to collect payment. Otherwise they don’t track you searches, or even see them. The fees are for their operations and development.
How exactly am I the customer if they don't track me? Do they display ads? How do they cover the costs for this search engine?
You are paying them for the service and the costs to make a custom search engine. The only thing they keep track of is the number of times you queried the service. They don’t track queries or even see them. You don’t have a search history and can’t see previous searches because it’s not tracked
There are no ads. They aren’t just proxying your search like DuckDuckGo.
I see! Thanks for the clarification. I just checked their prices. Looks like you get X searches for a specific price. Not appealing to me but I bet many people are fine with that. I rather prefer a little bit of ads at the top of my search results (which I could block with an adblocker anytime) but that is just my personal preference.
Correct. You can go lower and pay per search as well. And set a warning and hard stop limit.
I do a LOT of searching for work. So the 1000/month is plenty and use it on all devices.
They have features others don’t as well. Such as blocking certain domains from returning results. For example I filter out answers.Microsoft.com because that’s their question boards and it’s rare that anything useful is said there etc.
They also support custom bangs similar to ddg.
I find that I get better results for my job and faster with Kagi. So it’s worth the cost for me.
I'm not really understanding what you wanna tell me with "you are the customer". They display ads at the top of your search results and that's how they make money. Considering that, yes, you are the customer. But they don't track you and your search queries are anonymized so they respect your privacy. With an adblocker you don't even see the ads. You can make an account to earn PRE (the crypto currency they use) with your search queries. But you don't need to do that. You could even run your own node server(s) and earn even more because you're helping the search engine by being a part of the infrastructure. But you can ignore all that and just use the search engine.
Anyway I'm really satisfied with the search results. Didn't even feel the need to switch to another search engine since I've started using it a few months ago.
Kagi does not do that. In fact their search results give you statistics on links/returns about things like trackers etc. there aren’t ads in Kaji returns.