I apologize if this is old news, but I just noticed it. It looks like Kagi has added Fediverse Forums as a default Web search option.
Cool. Wish more search engines would do that.
But, as far as Kagi goes, it’s a paid service and it’s an American company. So I won’t be using them.
What non-american search engine do you use?
Qwant. It’s French.
And Qwant is really great! Have been using og for a couple of years, and have no need to fall back to Google, DDG etc.
It uses Bing in the backend though.
Yes, but not fully. They have their own index as well. They have also recently started a partnership with Ecosia to focus more on that effort.
Obligatory mention that Kagi also use the Russian search index Yandex. This aids the Russian economy and the Russian war effort.
Edit: I recommend reading my in depth explanation here https://lemmy.world/comment/15520236
Source?
Every single time with red comes up there’s always this FUD. You, specifically, don’t miss any opportunity to make mention of this. Across Lemmy, which is rather suspicious. Helping the Russian war effort? That’s a pretty big leap here.
Why?
Imagine a search engine aggregator aggregating search engine results from multiple sources for aggregation. The more indexes they support the better the results are going to be for everyone, I don’t see this as a problem for data aggregation.
Why should data aggregation give any sort of shits about geopolitics?
Regardless, the topic of this post, fediverse search, is part of their own search engine anyways afaik
I have been sick a lot lately, so have had a lot of time on my hands. I don’t have a search for Kagi or something. I wanted to use Kagi though, so I was disappointed when I realized that they want to continue this practice.
What are you implying with it being suspicious? In what way?
If Kagi pays a Russian company for a service, that company pays taxes to the Russian government.
Russia spends 32% of its budget on the Russian military. So for every dollar they get in taxes, one third is spent on the Russian military.
With a corporate tax rate of 20% that means 6.4% of Yandex profits go to the military. Since Kagi is mainly a paid service, I don’t want my money to go to the Russian military, and I guess a lot of other people don’t want this either.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hikes-national-defence-spending-by-23-2025-2024-09-30/
The Russian people are not to blame, and I am sure a lot of great people work at Yandex and at different companies in Russia. That said, Russia chose to attack a peaceful democratic country, they are currently sanctioned by a lot of western countries in hopes that it will pressure their economy enough to force them to stop the war.
There isn’t much we can do to stop the conflict besides hurting them economically and supporting Ukraine. If we continue to use Russian products and services then that does not work. Unfortunately this affects everyone in Russia.
Just came across https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html . Seems like there are more good reasons to avoid it besides it also using Yandex as an index.
They’re definitely stretching themselves too thin, but as long as I get better and more relevant, cleaner, no advertising search results for my knowledge work and research. With my privacy in tact.
Then I’m continuing to pay them for a product I find to be superior than the alternatives.
I encourage subscribers to go make themselves heard on this post if you support being able to disable particular indexes such as Yandex.
Thanks for the link, I’ll def be more critical about it in the future.
I’ll still use it (for now) because as a no-nonsense customizable search engine its by far the best I’ve tried.
Neat feature. Any word on if Kagi has ties to the Kremlin?
Its an American company so I suppose it is possible.
If you’re worried about Kagi’s connections, I recommend checking out this podcast with the CEO
