Suddenly I am a lot less interested in Kagi.
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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They are using brave search results, like they do with others. Frankly, you could build totally identical arguments (and to be honest, much more serious) for "partnering" with Google and Microsoft, but then the product wouldn't exist and wouldn't be as good.
The relationship with the Brave founder is so indirect, that this - to me - feels like an argument from someone who is looking for reasons to get angry. Kagi probably uses AWS (or other clouds), which funds Amazon (known for terrible worker rights), funds Google, fossil fuel industry, etc. It's a sad reality, but you simply can't exist nowadays in the moral and ethical way many people would like. You can, only if you are a privileged one. Technologically speaking, Google can probably do it, for example (own hardware, DCs, tech etc.). We can choose to fight those that directly support political agendas we disagree with, or we can damage the smallest players by demanding they will be 100% pure and ethical by not having any relationship with those with those agendas.
In my personal opinion, such unrealistic ethical requirements end up being a reactionary choice as they will ultimately impede new - better - players to emerge and will leave the existing - worse - dominating.
In my personal opinion, such unrealistic ethical requirements end up being a reactionary choice as they will ultimately impede new - better - players to emerge and will leave the existing - worse - dominating.
That's an excellent point. Never thought about it that way.
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Probably because brave is kind of the king of advertising in the space.
They managed to sell tracking activity for monetary gain as a privacy centric product.
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I’ve no stake in either Kagi or Brave (and have my own issues with Brave and their CEO), but “partnership” seems like a stretch of definition here assuming this is in reference to the Brave Search API being added as another source for search results. Am I missing something here?
Kagi December 28, 2023 Release Notes
We have added Brave Search API as an additional source of results. With this, Brave API joins the growing list of Kagi's search sources, ensuring that if you can not find something on Kagi, it does not exist on the web. This will come at no additional cost to you.
Am I missing something here?
the part where Brave Search API is paid, and some people (including myself) don't want their money to contribute to Brave's business.
To better understand (and definitely not dismissing your opinion), was Brave where you drew the line as a customer or was Google, Amazon, etc also of concern where Kagi pays for services?
A lot of people really don't like Eich. When he was promoted from CTO to CEO of Mozilla, half of Mozilla's board resigned (one said it was because she refused to be a member of the board that appointed him, the other two didn't say why they resigned) and there was a massive campaign to get rid of him including websites showing popups to all FireFox users telling them to use another browser - specificially because of Eich.
He lasted 11 days as CEO of Mozilla, and founded Brave after leaving.
Since then, he's done things with crypto and said things about covid which have angered people even more.
You can count me as one of those people so don’t get me wrong; I’m all for not supporting Brave or Eich. I was just curious why this instance where Kagi is paying to use Brave’s search API (which, IMO, doesn’t carry the weight of being labeled a partnership any more than me being a partner with Sony because I pay for PS+) among many other companies/products is the dealbreaker for those that use Kagi. And there may be more to the story (or maybe there is an actual partnership I’ve missed) so I’m open to being more informed.
But if thats the root of the controversy, I can respect that even if I don’t necessarily align with the level of outcry here.
I dislike Brave because they cultivated a not-so-deserved reputation. I see newcomers to privacy being recommended this and it's just sad.
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I drew the line at Brave.
Fair enough. IMO, Brave isn’t a big enough player compared to many other companies in the enterprise space used by Kagi (both that we know of as consumers and wouldn’t know of without being an employee with knowledge of their internal SaaS agreements) that Kagi’s specific use case of Brave singularly would have been the deal breaker (for me).
Personally, getting that granular with money flow quickly becomes untenable as a consumer as every business will, to some degree, end up paying for some level of service from the companies we hope to lessen the power of. As a consumer example, I may really dislike how Google is influencing the standards of consumer data privacy in the world and choose not to pay for or use Google products/services directly, but I couldn’t imagine boycotting all companies that use Google Workspace internally for email, docs, sheets, etc.
Kagi seems to be a main player that’s opening the conversation of paying for internet search when the world is used to a standard of “free” search, so saying they can’t utilize the existing search data sources is going to make that experience dead in the water. We need ripples if we hope for change.
Edit: sudneo‘s comment actually summed up my thoughts pretty well.
In my personal opinion, such unrealistic ethical requirements end up being a reactionary choice as they will ultimately impede new - better - players to emerge and will leave the existing - worse - dominating.
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That is kinda disappointing. I had a distaste for Brave after all the initial controversy regarding the ad blocking, which only got worse from the crypto crap they now have in the browser.
I'll still keep paying for Kagi, but this is a step in the wrong direction in my opinion. Let's hope at least the results get noticeably better.
Don't forget the Brave CEO being ousted from Mozilla for being massively homophobic, donating money to try to overturn the right for gay couples to be married.
E: and them injecting affiliate codes when you copy some links, tracking users. Particularly bad when they relentlessly market themselves as being private
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That's not a good look for them.
Kagi can go fuck right off with whatever guerilla marketing program keeps constantly putting it in my face.
It's clearly not organic growth, and I will never try it because now I don't trust it.
In fairness to Kagi, if you’re seeing a lot of it on Lemmy and Mastodon, that’s because nerds are gonna nerd. There’s a huge concentration of tech folks in those spaces and there’s a huge culture of prostelytization, “I know best so I must educate,” and “I just found this cool thing!” within the tech community. People remix the intros they got with their spin. Until the communities in these spaces significantly diversifies, you’ll see a ton of that. Kagi might be paying for some guerilla marketing; I chalk it up to tech oversharing.
In all fuck you to Kagi, Brandon Eich is the last person you want to attach your cart to for solid results. We should now expect explicitly paid results worse than Google that materially improve Eich, crypto bullshit through the roof, and a complete lack of privacy to Kagi who won’t share it so it’s totally cool guys.
they've just (as in yesterday, on Jan 5th) added a Lemmy/Kbin lens to their engine (meaning that it's easier to search specifically the Threadiverse):
Kagi is popular on Lemmy and a lot of Lemmy users are using Kagi. We have released the first version of a Lemmy/Kbin search lens
I don't really think they've been playing some kind of a long guerilla con of advertising here for half a year and then adding a feature that would make searching more convenient for their supposed covert marketing department.
and if they did, the Brave decision is about to backfire on them.
It was organic, because Kagi is just better. the recent issue sucks though and I cancelled. Might uncancel though. Changes are rapid on the Kagi Discord.
I doubt Kagi actually spent money for guerilla marketing. I myself often recommend Kagi on Lemmy before this because it's actually good (and I certainly didn't get paid). Now I'm going wait and see how it develop before deciding if I'll recommend it to others again.
Have you ever actually tried it? I only did the trial run, but from my experience it pretty much delivers. Results are at a similar level to Google with a lot of junk removed and it was quite fast on top. Nothing else I tried came close. Neither Bing, Yandex nor Brave (all other alternatives are based on Bing), all have substantial holes in what they index or how current it is.
That said, I still wouldn't pay for it. At the end of the day it is just another search engine, a good one at that, but it doesn't really do anything fundamentally new. Google can find all the same sites.
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already cancelled my subscription and mentioned that when the form asked me why I was cancelling.
Brave has their own search index, that could be very useful for a search engine.
I don't understand why they would want to drag Brave into this.
Because money.
Right. They flat out said the Brave API is cheaper.
They retracted the term "partner" as they are to Brave as they are to Google. I still might cancel but we were paying Google API fees already so hmmm
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