this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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I don't get the impression that Kagi intends to compete with major search engines. It is clearly marketed toward privacy-focused, tech-minded individuals. You can take that one of two ways. Either you are frustrated with the erosion of search engine quality due to advertising, or you disagree with the predatory practices such as data mining that comes along with such advertising. In both cases, the only real way to signal to major search engines that you disagree with these practices is to stop using their services (including their APIs).
For example, I have been using DuckDuckGo for decades. At first, I had to compromise search result quality, but now it has enough users and support that results are on-par with the likes of Google.
I do not think that Kagi is bad or that people should not use it. It simply isn't for me, because it does not actually address the reasons I do not use search engines like Google.
I think it's not that complicated -- Kagi's search results are just far more useful. I think it's marketed at people who want good search results, not anything dealing with privacy (although, Kagi doesn't log your searches, so it's fully private for most everyday definitions) -- your viewpoint for you makes perfect sense to me and sure I respect it, but I don't think it's right to say that people are linking their credit cards to do a have-to-be-logged-in-first search on Kagi chiefly for reasons of privacy focus.
(I just tried the same experiment Doctorow tried, of searching for something that I'd been unable to find through Google, and Kagi did the same thing for me that it did for him (i.e. found it). That's actually not important enough for me to pay for Kagi, but "Google is shit now" is no fringe opinion and it's pretty easy to verify that Kagi does in practice work markedly better.)