This year has been extraordinary for Kagi ( https://kagi.com ).

Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.

Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:

  • Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
  • “Lenses”, which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
  • All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type “!yt” in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
  • Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more

This blog post goes into full details about Kagi’s capabilities.

  • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    not at all. with that, you achieve pseudonymity, because even if they can’t know who you are, they can tie every search you do to the very same account, your “pseudonym”.

    with DuckDuckgo (and I’m not a DDG fan to be honest) I can just change my IP and clear browser local storage to make several anonymous searches.

    with kagi, even if you take the inconvenience of creating a new account each month, all your monthly searches are tied to a single account.

    • shortwavesurfer@monero.townEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      not at all. with that, you achieve pseudonymity, because even if they can’t know who you are, they can tie every search you do to the very same account, your “pseudonym”.

      Good point

      with kagi, even if you take the inconvenience of creating a new account each month, all your monthly searches are tied to a single account.

      Not as far as i can tell. If you used a new burner email every time and paid through trocador with monero your payments could be tied back to the instant exchange, but no farther since monero uses ring signatures.

      • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Not as far as i can tell. If you used a new burner email every time and paid through trocador with monero your payments could be tied back to the instant exchange, but no farther since monero uses ring signatures.

        I didn’t mean to your real identity (if you’ve managed to do payment well enough and never leak your IP while using it), I meant that even if you create a new pseudonym every month, all your monthly searches are tied to a single pseudonym, which can reveal a lot about an individual.

        • shortwavesurfer@monero.townEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Ah, i understand now. They “say” they dont record search history.

          From their Privacy & Terms page:

          • Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.
          • We do not log or store your IP address. Your IP address is used only temporarily when enriching location/maps searches, and is not shared with any other party.
          • We do not use any web browser analytics or other frontend telemetry.
          • We do not display any ads, or have any first-party or third-party tracking in service of ads.

          But they totally could