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How I Use Kagi

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Re: How I Use Kagi

#71
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Yandex, they pay them for some of their search results. Here is their own statement, where they refuse to stop, even though people keep asking them: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

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> Is Yandex an arm of Russian intelligence? Any more than Google and Bing are arms of US surveillance?

Yes.

Re: How I Use Kagi

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You sound really mad that people would criticize Russia.

I mean by all means, stick with Google and its ever-declining search quality and ever-expanding monopoly power while it builds AI tools for Israel to automate the slaughter of civilians, instead of a search engine startup that... has some minor partnership with another search engine that is located in a country where you don't like its government?

Re: How I Use Kagi

#73
DDG has been solid for me, and I rarely use g! anymore. I certainly can find better things to do with a hundred dollars than spend it on something I don't need and that other services do just as well for free.

Re: How I Use Kagi

#74
post #23
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you hear about the EU! https://e360.yale.edu/digest/europe-russia-ukraine-war-natur... Hell, a Spanish company just violated export sanctions and sold a machine used to make artillery barrels to Russia, and the Spanish government just shrugged. I'm not sure why Kagi has to be squeaky clean down to the last dollar when our own governments don't even have to meaningfully enforce their own sanctions.

This kind of whataboutism is what leads to the current sad state of the world. One can look at any moral choice issue, say "but what about… [insert something here]" and then proceed to ignore it and do nothing. I choose to take moral stands. Yes, it might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I still choose to do so. Having read the (rather disappointing) responses: all of them create some sort of artif…

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Re: How I Use Kagi

#75
post #12

Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine. (I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)

Dig deep enough (not even very deep at all, actually) and you’ll find evil. It’s not like the US is in any way squeaky clean.

Re: How I Use Kagi

#76
post #12

Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine. (I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)

Do you personally sanction all countries that commit atrocities or is it specific to Russia? I don't care what you do or don't support with your money, but I'm genuinely curious about the mindset.

Your question doesn't seem to be made in good faith - you seem to be implying that there is no way OP sanctions "all countries that commit atrocities," because of course they don't - that would be impractical. And furthermore, "committing atrocities" leaves a lot of wiggle room.

For most people there is a tradeoff that happens between being informed, the value provided by a service, and the ethical or moral cost.

For something like internet search, which is a commodity, it's quite easy to eschew one service for another.

Re: How I Use Kagi

#77

Kagi completely replaced Google for me except for location-based "food near me" type searches. I understand location/place results particularly with reviews are a really tough thing to do as a company, but it is one really helpful thing thing Google search still hasn't destroyed yet. As a side note I find Kagi Translate often far superior to Google too

For over a decade location-based "food near me" type searches are the only kind I still use Google as well.

I think this their only moat, but it is a pretty deep one. They had decades to hone their localization, presumably spending a ton of money on local human quality assurance and it pays of.

This will be pretty hard for any competitor to replicate, especially when they have to operate under more economic pressure than Google had to during their golden years. Certainly no competitor so far comes close to Google for local search.

Re: How I Use Kagi

#78
post #12

Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine. (I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)

Do you personally sanction all countries that commit atrocities or is it specific to Russia? I don't care what you do or don't support with your money, but I'm genuinely curious about the mindset.

It is not possible for any one person to maintain 100% awareness of the entire planet, nor is it feasible for most people to simply live in the woods as a hunter-gatherer and take nothing from others who might do wrong elsewhere.

Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction no wrongdoers, or some?

If some, how do we decide which ones? One good metric would be "minimum impact on my own life". Another would be "amount of badness I'm personally aware of that entity doing". A third would be "how closely is the entity that I'm actually affecting ties to the group committing the atrocities?"

So; I personally sanction some countries that commit atrocities, one of which is Russia.

Re: How I Use Kagi

#79
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them. It's been a long time since I've clicked a search result or seen an ad. Google usually has what I need right on the page and uBlock removes the ads.

These days it's often the sites in the results themselves that are either ads or highly SEO-optimized low value sites. You can manage a blacklist and a list of sites to promote/demote in the search results. And manage different "lenses" to have different buckets of blacklist/promote/demote settings tailored for what you're researching. And can also be used for their Kagi Assistant when you allow it to perform web sea…

IMO this is really Kagi's killer feature. If I see a poor behaving site (Pinterest, for example), I can easily exclude the domain from every search I ever make. I don't have to carefully craft an enormous search query of all the sites I don't want to be shown. Demoting news sites that have a reputation for promoting bad takes, and prioritizing results from sites that are known to be good.

The quick switch to move to reddit based search, or old web results, are also great, but for me, it's the tailoring of my results to what I actually want, and more importantly, what I don't want is what sold me.

Re: How I Use Kagi

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you personally sanction all countries that commit atrocities or is it specific to Russia? I don't care what you do or don't support with your money, but I'm genuinely curious about the mindset.

It is not possible for any one person to maintain 100% awareness of the entire planet, nor is it feasible for most people to simply live in the woods as a hunter-gatherer and take nothing from others who might do wrong elsewhere. Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction n…

Or as the saying goes:

Perfection is the enemy of good.

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