So, like a baby Yahoo! directory?
I wonder just how long it will stay relevant and how they determine if the content comes from a human. So far I’ve been accused of being a bot several times, clearly reliably detecting humans is beyond the capability of … humans.
Mmm… that’s something a bot would say.
so is that.
So is that
God Elon is embarrassing
It’s always funny rewatching iron man 2 or home alone and being like “oh look, goebbels and hitler!”
or like lemmy? kagi is also very pro activity pub. this feature is kinda old actually. give it a try! also give kagi search a try
Like a small curated stumbleupon. I gave it a few clicks a little while back and as you’d expect theres a pretty wide range of good to junk content on there, but it all felt distinctly human.
Since none of the pages are ad ridden its hard to imagine the AI crazies wasting tokens on something they can’t really monetize.
Whereby they can detect anomalous usage of language. Moreover, using whereby and moreover seem to be key indicators that something is written by ai .
Verily ole chap. Mucho verily
This Kagi?
Between the absolute blase attitude towards privacy, the 100% dedication to AI being the future of search, and the completely misguided use of the company’s limited funds, I honestly can’t see Kagi as something I could ever recommend to people.
Use of funds is misguided sure, but all the AI stuff is completely optional and has never ever gotten in my way
Part of your monthly fee goes to purchasing their AI services. That’s not optional.
6 months to a year ago it was all people were recommending, Kagi and searxng. Maybe another paid one I forget the name. Now Kagi is bad?
That article is 2 years old. In the last two years Kagi hasn’t collapsed on itself, it’s not overrun with AI, the world hasn’t ended. They’ve implemented Privacy Pass, extended their browser support to Linux, introduced SlopStop for reporting AI websites, and generally continued to improve their main product.
Kagi is a business, run by people, who make decisions to the best of their ability based on their understanding of what’s going to best serve their needs/priorities.
Like any other product, the owners are guaranteed to make decisions that are not aligned with a fraction of their prospective customers needs/views. That’s what it’s like trying to serve a broad market like “internet search users”. Some of those users are inevitably going to get fired up enough to write a 20,000 word opinion piece on the subject.
For any service, you have to choose if the value proposition makes sense for you and your needs. For me, the value of most free search services has gone down the drain, and the value of spending monthly for Kagi is better than having to think about/maintain a SearXNG instance. YMMV.
Like any other product, the owners are guaranteed to make decisions that are not aligned with a fraction of their prospective customers needs/views.
And the part where the CEO and the company pretends that data protection / privacy laws don’t apply to them? Can you overlook that?
IDK what the situation was like specifically two years ago, but now:
They have a whole section in their privacy policy on GDPR and CCPA etc, as well at clear instructions on how to use their service 100% anonymously leveraging TOR and Privacy Pass (+bitcoin and a burner email if you don’t want people even knowing you have a Kagi account)
https://kagi.com/privacy/rights
Seems weird to put in a whole Privacy Rights section about the privacy laws that apply to them if they don’t think privacy laws apply to them.
That’s good. Seems like they’ve added it just this year:
2026-02-17
Added Your Data Protection Rights covering GDPR, CCPA, and state privacy law data subject rights.
Makes sense yeah. I use free search engines but your right, they almost never give the result I’m looking for.
This is actually pretty nice. I guess we will see similar projects popping up in the near future.
Sounds interesting. I currently pay the 5$/month for the Kagi search engine and that works great so I’m inclined to trust them on their other ventures.
Their ‘Research’ AI is pretty decent too. I can get to the same ends eventually, but I can’t read and digest 25 different pages and then launch another 10 follow-up searches in 15 seconds. It’s summarizing and not simply inferencing so the hallucination rate is acceptably low and it also cites the sources so you can click a footnote to fact-check any important details.
I self-host most things, but I can’t self host a search engine. I much prefer paying monthly than having to fight the eternal battle against tracking and ads.
You CAN self-host a search engine, look up searxng.
Yes it’s a metasearch engine, but so is Kagi for the most part, their own indexes don’t cover everything.
searxng
I have this on my projects lists, I’ve seen it recommended in a few places.
If I’m understanding the purpose (privacy filtering for searches), Kagi is a service fitting a similar role. Kind of like Headscale vs Tailscale. Is that right?
saving this comment for when i dive deeper down the rabbit hole later. at the moment i think im only self-hosting jellyfin and owntracks, and I have a couple llm models in LM studio but haven’t messed with them in a while.
I totally recommend just clicking through random pages on there for a good 10 minutes or so. You’ll be surprised at how many random, cool, interesting things you find that you’d probably never see otherwise in a million years. (also an AMAZING place to find small blogs to add to your RSS reader of choice)
They feed a lot of this into their main search index if you pay for Kagi search too, so a lot of these sites will appear higher than they would on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc, if their content is relevant. Especially fediverse sources.
woooop my sites on there already
Thus including the type of people who screwed everything up in the first place
This sounds great. You still need a subscription to use it? I may be the thing that finally convinces me to get one.
I don’t think you need a subscription. I just tried from another browser where I’m not logged in and it works.
They have a small web ‘Lens’ in their search (you can limit search to specific categories), so you’d need to subscribe for that. Although, with an account, you get 100 searches/month for free.
They also have a Fediverse lens:
Nice.
deleted by creator
Would you call neocities.org a walled garden as well?
Sadly, yes.
What makes it a walled garden?
