Search Engines
www.ioslife.dev
Despite being a free product, free search engines make a lot of money. Kagi’s Why Pay for Search says that, “In 2022 Google generated USD $224.47 Billion dollars from advertisement revenue while processing approximately 8 Billion searches per day. At 365 days per year this amounts to approximately USD $0.07 revenue per search. If an average user searches 5 times per day, assuming a 30 day month this results in Google generating USD $11 revenue per user per month.
  • venji10@feddit.de
    367·
    9 months ago

    I don’t think a blog named “iOSLife” belongs here. Apple is one of the worst offenders in terms of privacy violations.

      • Rustmilian@lemmy.world
        54·
        9 months ago

        Looking at your post & comment history it becomes blatantly clear that you’re the poorly written AI spreading propaganda here…

      • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
        712·
        9 months ago

        Hi, once again just gonna ask for help identifying where my site is on a blocked list. If you can’t, then I would appreciate you stopping from saying that. Thanks! :)

          • stankmut@lemmy.worldEnglish
            10·
            9 months ago

            The user mentioned a blocklist, but I’m not able to find that list either. If we are going to accuse someone of maliciously pushing an agenda, I’d like a little more proof before jumping on the bandwagon.

          • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
            94·
            9 months ago

            I also searched it on Google and DDG and didn’t find it on the blocklist.

            At this point I can only assume you are trolling by saying the same thing over and over again. I’ve made it very clear I am not promoting anything, rather just looking for opinions on the best options.

          • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
            74·
            9 months ago

            Yes, they did but my domain isn’t on that list from what I can tell. I’d love to know the list you found it on.

  • macallik@kbin.social
    181·
    9 months ago

    I think the article appears biased because searxng appears to offer the same functionality as Kagi, in spite of being free, yet Kagi is shown to be the best in class for some reason? Also it doesn’t touch on the critique that kagi having a login potentially aggregates all of your searches into one account that is stored by one company.

    • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      67·
      9 months ago

      Kagi’s privacy policy claims that “Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.”

      SearXNG is tricky because the privacy policy comes from whatever instance you are using.

      Anecdotally, I have had better results from Kagi than SearXNG. The SearXNG instance I have been testing out keeps getting rate limited and mostly shows results from Qwant and Bing.

      I don’t really have a bias as I am testing out all of these options and trying to find the one that works best for my family.

      • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
        71·
        9 months ago

        Kagi can claim whatever they want in their privacy policy. Where’s the code of their servers? Because I see none. How do we know they aren’t keeping logs that could be easily correlated (by themselves or a third party who access their servers)?

        Even if we had the code, I would still be skeptical, we can’t be sure what code are they exactly running on the server side and having an account linked to every search is just awful.

        SearXNG is anonymous while offering the very same features, if not better.

          • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
            11·
            9 months ago

            You aren’t wrong about not knowing if SearXNG instances are running a modified version of SearXNG that tries to log you.

            Fortunately, we don’t need to trust those instances. They do not require you to login, so there’s not an unique identifier (like an account) to associate your searches with other than your IP address which you can hide with a VPN, or even better, using a .onion instance (something that Kagi does not have at all AFAIK).

            For using Kagi, no matter if you switch your IP address every time, if you delete cookies after closing your browser or if you buy a new laptop for every search query, you’re uniquely identified because you need to log into your account.

            And for that account, you have to use a payment method. Sure, you can try and pay with a Monero to Bitcoin exchanger and do not give any personal information (and if we’re being realistic, we know most Kagi clients aren’t doing this). Even if you paid anonymously, you can only achieve pseudonymity because you’re associated with your account.

            With SearXNG, I could use a different .onion instance for each query and be completely anonymous (that’s completely overkill, but it illustrates my point well).

              • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
                11·
                9 months ago

                No. Kagi’s fault is needing an account, a unique identifier which all searches could be correlated to.

                SearXNG could leak your IP if your VPN provider was keeping logs? Definitely. And so does Kagi. Tor could be attacked by a three letter agency and compromise your .onion connection to SearXNG? Definitely. And it would be easier to de-anonimyze you when connecting to Kagi, which doesn’t have an onion domain. Do you need to give SearXNG your email and/or payment information? Not at all. But Kagi requires it. Can you look like two completely different users when doing two queries to SearXNG? Easy. Not possible with Kagi. Do we have the server’s code? We do for SearXNG instances. We don’t have Kagi’s.

                I think it’s pretty clear the privacy compromise here.

        • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
          21·
          9 months ago

          That’s a good point that I hadn’t considered. I do like the idea of SearXNG, but didn’t have great results when testing it. Maybe I should give it another shot on another instance.

        • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
          88·
          9 months ago

          Friend, I am just responding to your false claims with information from the privacy policy so that other users can be informed with what is clearly stated

            • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
              71·
              9 months ago

              If you notice, I am only including more information when someone (mostly you) has brought up concerns about one of the offerings. If you had brought up concerns around Whoogle, then this conversation would be about Whoogle instead of Kagi. I am not promoting anything and my post clearly says,

              Which one should I choose? That’s up to you and what your threat model is. Each one of the products I listed have pros and cons. They all have different and unique feature sets. They all pull from different search indexes. You should choose the one that provides the best results and amount of privacy you desire.

              I’d love to have more discussion around the other offerings in my post and even ones not listed.

  • Linus_Torvalds@lemmy.world
    187·
    9 months ago

    Kagi user myself. Great experience, worth the $10.

    Side note: Your posts feels a bit like self-promotion 🫥

    • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      104·
      9 months ago

      Yeah, Kagi seems pretty cool so far.

      Not trying to self-promote, just looking for feedback on my findings and to see if anyone has other opinions to share around the products

        • long_chicken_boat@sh.itjust.works
          11·
          9 months ago

          that’s still only pseudonymity. with SearXNG or even with Duckduckgo, I can just open a new window of my browser with a different IP and be a completely different person. Hell, I can even use a different SearXNG instance and my search query won’t even go through the same server than before. With Kagi, that’s impossible. You must always be logged in your account. Every search you do, could be potentially linked to your account.

    • Rustmilian@lemmy.world
      31·
      9 months ago

      I don’t see how it’s self-promotion if there’s no profit to be made. In my book, it’s no different than someone making a text post here.

      • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
        62·
        9 months ago

        I think all of the “drama” in this thread could’ve been solved with me copy and pasting my words into a self post

  • digger@lemmy.ca
    81·
    9 months ago

    I appreciate that you included sections of the relevant privacy policies. I like your approach.

    Please run what you write through spell check. You misspelled: extremely, business, advertisers, educated, and default. The word October could be capitalized, but as part of a hypothetical search query, it could be lower case on purpose.

    Lastly, Qwant is struck through in your last sentence. It’s unclear if you chose that formatting because you don’t recommend it (as stated earlier) or for some other reason.

    Keep writing! We need more of this!

    • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      53·
      9 months ago

      Oh yikes. Those are egregious spelling errors hahaha. Thank you for reading and the feedback!

      Yes, I struckthrough Qwant since they are sending your IP to Microsoft with every search. :)

    • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
      84·
      9 months ago

      I didn’t even read OP’s post but…

      You state that Kaji is the best when actually they are clearly the worst

      It’s Kagi not Kaji. If you’re going to criticize something at least get the name right.

      If you pay them then everything you do on their site is linked directly do you.

      Privacy is not anonymity… and it’s a pev of mine that people confuse this.

      However, you can get pretty close to anonymity paying them in crypto:

      https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

      These “articles” from unknown websites su h ad ioslife are clearly a native ads, this one for Kaji. Kaijis marketing agency has a lot of bots on this platform so it will get upvotes and but you are fooling nobody.

      👎

        • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
          44·
          9 months ago

          Hey could you point me to the blocklist that my domain is currently on? I am not able to find it on any public list. It also would be extremeley surprising to me if it was on a list as this is the first article I have shared with the world.

    • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      75·
      9 months ago

      TIL I am a bot. :)

      I also made it a point not to state anything is the best or the worst and mentioned that the choice is up to you and your threat model.

      Also, thanks to @[email protected] for pointing out my typos. I have fixed them now.

        • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
          54·
          9 months ago

          Well now, that would’ve saved me a lot of time and research. I also wouldn’t have learned nearly as much from reading all the different privacy policies. Luckily, I didn’t do that which allowed me to create my own personal recommendations for my family and myself.

    • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      55·
      9 months ago

      I want to reiterate that I have no affiliation with Kagi or any other search engine, I currently don’t even pay for Kagi. I am just a human on the hunt for the best search engine to protect my family’s privacy.

      That said, I just saw your update regarding Sentry.

      Looking at Kagi’s Privacy Policy, there are two things to say in response to

      It states that Kaji is the best when actually they are clearly the worst, they do record your IP to deliver their services and they do share your data with a notorious 3rd party tracking company- sentry.io.

      “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.”

      “Anonymous logs are shared with Sentry when bugs, crashes, or warnings occur for debugging purposes.”

      Also:

      If you pay them then everything you do on their site is linked directly do you. I.e. zero privacy.

      “Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.”

  • kraniax@lemmy.wtf
    73·
    9 months ago

    This is clearly biased. Your points against SearXNG are weak. And you purposefully ignore the huge privacy implications of needing an account to do searches.

    I don’t think this is written by a bot, but I’d say it’s either a camouflaged ad or a rather biased article.

    Edit: To be clear. I do not care that a certain company has a good privacy policy. I want verifiable facts, not unverifiable claims. Their backend is proprietary, while SearXNG is free software. There’s only one entity behind that company, which could be (or turn) malicious at any moment. Meanwhile, SearXNG is hosted by multiple individuals and organizations, you could even use a different instance each time, so it’s impossible to corelate your search queries.

    So yeah, this is a rather biased article towards a certain company.

    • ioslife@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      33·
      9 months ago

      Thanks for your feedback. My goal was just to look through the privacy policies with this, but you bring up a good point that that might not be a good experiment and could less to false assumptions. I do wonder if Kagi has had any this party analysis to back up their claims since it is not OSS.