They seem to do quite a bit of indexing themselves. A good alternative that’s from Europe would be Qwant, but they don’t have a feature for searching the fediverse. It would be nice if it got added to fedi-search :)
Qwant and Ecosia are building a search index, but I don’t think there is anything that can really compete with Google and Bing at the moment: https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/
Sure! It’s what they call Privacy Pass. It’s implemented using an extension that’s available on most browsers (including Tor). The extension uses a session to generate tokens This step is linked to the account. The tokens themselves are not linked to an account, but are used to access Kagi itself afterwards. When you search using Privacy Pass, the extension offers those tokens instead of a cookie, so you lose any user preferences you’ve previously set up. Those searches are not linked to an account.
More info: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
You can also create an account with a throwaway email and pay with bitcoin, so at that point I think it’s pretty good for anonymity
Glad you like it!
I’m in the same boat. Paying for search put me off at first, in big part due to having to login to use it. But now that I’ve tried, it’s a lot easier to use than expected. For example, you can get a session link to use for incognito searches, or an even more private option with anonymous tokens that let you use it without the searches being linked to your account at all.
The more I think about it, the more sense it makes. If a search engine is free, its goals won’t be aligned with my interests as a user and we get stuff like sponsored search results.
That sounds like a pretty good idea, since most search engines don’t play very well with the fediverse. Could be a good workaround. I’m wondering how expensive it would be to host something like that. Maybe someone with experience hosting instances could give an estimate?
This stirs up some trauma
Be the change you want to see in the world! ☺️
:P