Do we really need many of more of these posts? Just leave already. It’s not a special thing, leaving a platform with billions of people. Robots.txt has been around since… forever?
A while ago, a band I really like (King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard) made a choice to remove their music from Spotify. I'm all for it! I'm not a huge fan of Spotify or something, but the legions of fans then making a huge deal out of them cancelling their Spotify subscription "in solidarity" was by far the biggest impact that choice had... Spotify was almost certainly not affected at all.
Bytes on the internet are mostly free, so I can't say we "have enough"... there's always space for more, but saying "I am in the in-group!" has diminishing returns past the first hundred posts haha
Kagi is awesome. And frankly, it's the end game. Just pay for your search full stop. The original 1990's assertion that "information wants to be free" and all that related nonsense never really passed the laugh test.
Being able to search the web is critical to day-to-day life. Why wouldn't you pay for it? I pay for all sorts of dumb stuff I barely use. I use Kagi every day.
Because I am paying for their service, I know that they are trying to provide me the best service they can - we are aligned. I want to pay for good service, they want to get me good service.
I pay for Kagi not because of political value system. I pay for it because it's just better than Google. I encourage you to try it. It's night and day.
I assume to use the paid search, you need to be authenticated to search? Privacy NIGHTMARE. Just because they're taking your money, doesn't mean they care about you.
I've been thinking a lot about what it would take to build a simple search engine again. I think the time for a decentralized search engine that is human vetted is now. In a way that's what sites like reddit/HN ect have become, but I think we need a real search engine not just a social network. Looking to alternatives does not leaving me feeling great right now, DuckDuckGo is just bing IE microsoft and that's not really a better trade.
Morgan from DuckDuckGo here! Some of our web links come from Bing; that's never been a secret. But at this point, we're significantly more than that. For the past two years, we've been building our own web index (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). Beyond web links, many of our search results, such as local results, maps, knowledge panels, answers, sports, weather, and AI features, don't come from Bing at all. When you combine all of this with our commitment to privacy and a completely different design and user experience, it's clear that DuckDuckGo is a fundamentally different search engine.
> When it comes to the #OpenWeb, I am ride or die.
Isnt the whole idea of #OpenWeb open access to information? How does blocking using robots.txt in line with that?
Do we really need many of more of these posts? Just leave already. It’s not a special thing, leaving a platform with billions of people. Robots.txt has been around since… forever?
A while ago, a band I really like (King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard) made a choice to remove their music from Spotify. I'm all for it! I'm not a huge fan of Spotify or something, but the legions of fans then making a huge deal out of them cancelling their Spotify subscription "in solidarity" was by far the biggest impact that choice had... Spotify was almost certainly not affected at all.
Bytes on the internet are mostly free, so I can't say we "have enough"... there's always space for more, but saying "I am in the in-group!" has diminishing returns past the first hundred posts haha
Kagi is awesome. And frankly, it's the end game. Just pay for your search full stop. The original 1990's assertion that "information wants to be free" and all that related nonsense never really passed the laugh test.
Being able to search the web is critical to day-to-day life. Why wouldn't you pay for it? I pay for all sorts of dumb stuff I barely use. I use Kagi every day.
Because I am paying for their service, I know that they are trying to provide me the best service they can - we are aligned. I want to pay for good service, they want to get me good service.
I pay for Kagi not because of political value system. I pay for it because it's just better than Google. I encourage you to try it. It's night and day.
> The original 1990's assertion that "information wants to be free" and all that related nonsense never really passed the laugh test.
It didn’t even pass the end of the paragraph where the quote originated.
I assume to use the paid search, you need to be authenticated to search? Privacy NIGHTMARE. Just because they're taking your money, doesn't mean they care about you.
They have a solution for that, called privacy pass. It uses tokens to show the system you are a paid user, but supposedly does not reveal who you are.
I haven't tried it myself, so I have no idea if it works as it should. I'm still deciding to subscribe or not.
More info: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Any alternatives you'd recommend outside of the USA?
I use kagi outside the USA.
I've been thinking a lot about what it would take to build a simple search engine again. I think the time for a decentralized search engine that is human vetted is now. In a way that's what sites like reddit/HN ect have become, but I think we need a real search engine not just a social network. Looking to alternatives does not leaving me feeling great right now, DuckDuckGo is just bing IE microsoft and that's not really a better trade.
Morgan from DuckDuckGo here! Some of our web links come from Bing; that's never been a secret. But at this point, we're significantly more than that. For the past two years, we've been building our own web index (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). Beyond web links, many of our search results, such as local results, maps, knowledge panels, answers, sports, weather, and AI features, don't come from Bing at all. When you combine all of this with our commitment to privacy and a completely different design and user experience, it's clear that DuckDuckGo is a fundamentally different search engine.
ditch Bing, and make AI go away, or at least make it opt-in.
those things are why i went somewhere other than DDG.
i find myself searching with cUrl a lot more lately.
Thoughts on Kagi? It's a paid product which slows down network effects. However, I'd argue search being "free" is part of the problem.
This reads like an ant screaming at someone’s foot before they get stomped.