Quite a controversial decision… I love Kagi though, but I don’t understand why they would want to drag Brave into this.
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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.
Google allows Brave to run ads, so by using Google you’re promoting homophobia… Microsoft allows Brave to run Windows, so by using any Microsoft product you’re promoting homophobia…
I assume you’re demonstrating the argument, not actually arguing it
Suddenly I am a lot less interested in Kagi.
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?
I dislike Brave because they cultivated a not-so-deserved reputation. I see newcomers to privacy being recommended this and it’s just sad.
Brave is great, it even lets you sync your browser session without having to use an email. And their android app lets you watch youtube vid without ads and in the background.
It along librewolf are the only browsers that come with good default privacy settings.
Edit: Looks like I struck a nerve on some people lol
You’re comment implied it’s a good privacy centric browser, which is wrong.
It actually is, it comes with good fingerprinting protection by default.
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Good fingerprinting protection != good privacy.
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.
That’s a really easy conclusion to come to when you weren’t the one being targeted.
And that’s a lot of words to say this isn’t your issue so you aren’t doing anything about it. Nobody needs the hand wringing. You can just say it.
Care to expand? Not sure how anything I’ve said is hand wringing nor what you’re implying I should be doing.
Your entire comment can be boiled down to “I don’t find this “tenable” and the issue isn’t important to me relative to other issues”.
That’s fine. You can think that. Just go the brevity route next time. It respects the reader more than a wall of text.
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
Has he done more than giving 1000 USD in 2008? Any statement for example?
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Cool story bro.
You don’t get labeled as “phobic” for thinking that - you get labeled as “phobic” because you’ve made it, and your complete inability to mind your own business, your entire personality.
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He didn’t support gay marriage in 2008. Neither did Obama, but he gets a free pass. Is Obama massively homophobic?
Firstly, fuck off with this misrepresentation.
He spent money to actively oppose LGBT rights. That’s very different to merely not publicly supporting it in order to avoid public backlash from people he had to win over to be elected.
One of those is spineless or, charitably, savvy politicking. The other is outright hateful.
Also, he hasn’t come out and said that he was wrong or tried to make up for it in any way.
Didn’t know he doubled down on it. When did he do that?
2014
He didn’t comment on it in 2014
Yes he did. Stop defending homophobia.
When did he double down?
2014
Didn’t know he doubled down on it. When did he do that?
Has he made a statement to the contrary?
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.
Nor should you, now that you know the project is beholden to scumbag money.
Capitalism ruins everything.
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.
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
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.
I had no idea (the CEO of) Brave was so bad 😢
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Seems like a match made in heaven, a bigot and an asshole.
I use Brave an don’t understand the hate it gets. Seems like a good alternative to Chrome if you don’t like ads. Can someone fill me in on where the hate comes from?
Brave ain’t exactly perfect, but at least they aren’t sucking at the tit of Google’s Search monopoly.
I wasn’t aware of the tipping controversy. That’s not a good look, but I don’t use their crypto features (apart from IPFS every once in a while).
No tech company is squeaky clean in 2024, and Brave’s baggage seems better than Chrome’s.
firefox is a lot easier to use than brave imo (since in brave you have to change half the settings to get it to work well)
This hasn’t been my experience
Firefox doesn’t even come with ublock origin installed, brave has all the lists built in and will even ask you to block the cookie prompts as well without having to go the adblock settings.
There is also Vivaldi to consider.
Edit: The people downvoting this comment instead of having a discussion are really winning me over to their side /s
Welcome to the linux world of ideology driven recommendations.
I fell for this crap when I switched from using nvidia to amd because the constant bashing that nvidia gets by linux users only to discover that hardware acceleration is so broken on amd that using the cpu yields better results lol.
This is why federated FOSS solutions are the best.
This statement makes no sense. Federated search means nothing. Ultimately someone needs to scrape, index, store and retrieve data. At the moment, a handful can do it efficiently, and to have a wide coverage, engines use also other APIs. Kagi does this, for example, by combining Google and others (e.g. brave) with their own indexer.
How do you imagine a “federated” search would be any different? Using multiple APIs is effectively “federating”.
As I said in another comment, to be fully ethical you should not run on any major cloud (owned by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM), not run on anything on fossil fuels (few DCs), not use any API of major companies (google, apple, etc.) and so on. So basically if we ever want a new, better, solution (tech) we just need to materialize a few billions of dollars to allow this fully ethical solution with no dependency on immoral parties. Alternatively, the whole market dynamic should be disrupted, because that’s the problem.
Are there federated search engines?
I thought there was but I think I was thinking of searx.
