I frequently see high praise for Kagi here, both for the quality of the search results as well as the ostensibly customer-friendly business decisions.<p>For the people that use their search and trust the company - why? Not to say I don’t trust them or trust them less than any other company claiming to be privacy and security focused, just would like to know how others made their decision.<p>The obvious strawman argument seems to be that since they charge for search, their business model is based on subscriptions rather than monetizing search data. Nothing would stop a company from charging for search AND selling data
Not sure how much "trust" I actually need there. It's mostly convenience for me where it's easy to kill results from websites you never want to see again. This process allows for getting terrific results real quick after you start using it. Also not having ads is great, because you know the result ordering isn't affected by that, and your ad blocker won't be breaking your experience every now and then.<p>On top of that it's pretty fast and the price is right.
What's to trust? Either a search engine gives me useful results or it doesn't. Of all the search engines I've tried, I get the best results from Kagi.<p>As to data collection, I appreciate their claims a lot, but "trust" is a relative term. I think it's very unlikely that they're <i>less</i> trustworthy than companies such as Google. It's likely that they're more so. But even if they aren't, I'm not in a worse position than I would be if I didn't use them.
I don't <i>particularly</i> trust Kagi but I will always prefer something that I can pay for, which has no ads, over anything funded by advertising and monetising my data.
Their stance on Ukraine is bothering me. If not that, I’d be trusting them 100%. Had to revoke all recommendations and start actively point out to others this.
I don't trust Kagi (any more than I trust any random stranger). I was an early customer but I stopped using it because I really disliked the idea of my search activity being permanently tied to my identity.<p>I read that they added a privacy pass feature that supposedly makes the two unlinkable, so I'll take another look soon.<p>P.S. On the topic of search engines, Brave Search has improved a lot over the past 2 years. I still think it's lagging behind Google a bit, specifically when it comes to local results in non-English speaking countries, but back then I couldn't even reliably use it look up programming docs. Kudos.
Ah, I think you may have most of your interest in the privacy aspects, but I personally lean more on the results.<p>I'd say I have faith that they're doing the right thing, but it's by no means the reason I use their platform. If privacy is your main goal, I understand the hesitancy. I'm not sure how one would prove privacy (maybe that new feature they had with tokens unassociated with an account), but that would be very interesting.
I pay for the quality of their search results. I don't place any special trust in them.<p>This is not because I have a reason to consider them untrustworthy; I work on the assumption that we have reached peak enshittification, and that everyone on the web is selling my data.
Trust isn't really a factor I'm concerned about.<p>The quality of results is good and I can customise it more than any other search engine to suit my needs.
For one, I would like to see competition, because I believe that it may help the enshittification problem. We need regulations and a sane amount of competition. So I'm happy to help smaller search engines survive as a business.<p>Second, Kagi has implemented privacy pass: <a href="https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html" rel="nofollow">https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html</a>. So there is actually a way to use Kagi in a way that they cannot track you. This is very neat.
You should never trust Kagi, it is funded by investors and VCs, so eventually it will succumb to platform decay or “enshittification” for lack of a better word.<p>The investors would want a return on their investment soon, so you should start questioning your honeymoon period with Kagi if you’re using it.<p><a href="https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round" rel="nofollow">https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round</a>