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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7149 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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As an alternative to Google search, I recommend Kagi.

Kagi

I personally got a really bad feeling about Kagi after reading this thread on /г/privacy.

The first quote OP pulls might just be unfortunately phrased:

In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized... AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data...

But the second one is harder to dismiss:

We did not say we maintain anonmity [sic.], but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.

The anonymity/privacy distinction they're drawing here is gross. I honestly do not care about whatever official privacy policies they have up on their website. Their whole business model is built on trust, and I can't trust Kagi when the CEO himself says something like this. I know, here, Vlad's responding to a comment about Kagi being a paid service. But this isn't inherently antithetical to anonymity. VPNs manage. Mullvad accepts XMR and doesn't ask for an email address. Kagi does neither.

I'll quote in full (because it's, again, a really bad look for Kagi) this paragraph from a post (click for screenshots) by an ex-Kagi user who was active in the Discord sever:

And Vlad's attitude is also where Kagi's dedication to privacy falls apart for me. Generally, if someone brings up a security or privacy concern, Vlad's response is either "trust me bro" or "that's not actually important". He has repeatedly stated that he feels less than 100 people on earth need full anonymity in a search engine (he has never, that I could find, explained where he got this number or idea from). He believes that email addresses don't count as personally identifiable information, because you can simply use a burner account. If you say that you wouldn't want Kagi using information from your theoretical Kagi Email Address in your search results, and would rather have a Proton-style privacy focused email? He says that there's nothing to worry about, Kagi wouldn't do anything bad with your data. If you bring up "what if Kagi gets sold to someone else?" He says well, if they sold to someone who did something bad with your data, they'd lose all of their privacy focused customers, so clearly they'd never do that. Basically anything where you say "I don't want someone to have this data about what I'm doing in a search engine", his reply is "well, we wouldn't do anything with this information." A lot of questions about what information Kagi collects on people is met with either saying nothing (which isn't true, they connect your account to an email address for payments, since it's a paid service), or saying he isn't sure, or saying it doesn't matter because they won't use it anyway. Asking what data Stripe collects on them through Kagi, and more importantly what data Stripe sends back TO Kagi, also gets you a vague "I don't know" answer. He doesn't entertain any discussions about GDPR because he thinks they have nothing that applies anyway. Questions about what would happen if the government tried to force him to collect information about users are just brushed away with "well we'd simply close the company", although he also notes that he has no problem with criminals being caught through their searches and doesn't want criminals using the platform.

But the second one is harder to dismiss:

We did not say we maintain anonmity [sic.], but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.

According to the thread you linked, that statement is about payment processing, not about the privacy of what you searched for.

Indeed, as I said:

I know, here, Vlad's responding to a comment about Kagi being a paid service. But this isn't inherently antithetical to anonymity. VPNs manage. Mullvad accepts XMR and doesn't ask for an email address. Kagi does neither.

My point is that you don't have to collect this data in the first place. You don't have to "know everything" about your customers. VPNs have a working anonymous monetization model. Which matters all the more here because the CEO seemingly does not understand very basic GDPR laws and can't be trusted with personal information.

Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII.

But how, exactly, is Kagi determining which emails are "random" and which are personal? They can't possibly know this. And yet, as far as I can tell, Vlad has said this thing about emails multiple times online.

Seconded. I pay for it and it's worth every penny. It's the only thing I've found which is on par with how Google used to be.

I recommended that here recently too. It uses Google’s API, and it’s worth paying for. Otherwise I recommend Startpage to people.

So, this is where we're at, huh. Things that were basic and readily accessible have been ruined to the point to get anything worthwhile, you have to pay money for it, now.

The future is absolute dogshit.

(Yes, yes, I get it, if you're not paying money for it you are the product blah blah blah. Atleast allow me a moment to scream to the heavens when I witness how far we've fallen from greatness.)

Everyone wants what they want. Nobody ever wants to pay for it. You end up paying regardless, one way or another; even with Google. Yeah it’s a minor annoyance, but I have no problems paying for Kagi. The benefit I get is much greater than the cost.

Yes, yes, I get it, if you're not paying money for it you are the product blah blah blah.

You can't really just fast talk through that point though, at no point in history was Google a charity. They were never offering free search because they just believed it was the right thing to do for humanity. They've always believed they were getting something valuable out of the exchange, either immediately or in the future, and that the trade as it used to be became unattractive for one of the parties is not some sort of decadence, just an evolving situation.

At least with a straightforward transaction as with Kagi, it's very clear what they're getting, and as long as they keep getting that the deal is unlikely to change.

So? The point was that Google, despite being a service expecting return, was still good. That's what allowed the entire fiction to function - you got an actual good product that searched the interweb while google got to collect advertising info and revenue.

Now google search has just devolved down into pure advertisement where businesses quietly pay google in the background to make sure thier results are at the top, regardless of wether you want them or no. If you want anything comparable(presumably), you now have to pay upfront. ...except, going by what people are saying in this thread, no, it's not all that and a bag of chips for various reasons, which makes it doubly-insulting.

Everything gets worse, nothing gets better. You can't even pay for better anymore.

Like I said. The future is absolute dogshit.

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