Live data from Hacker News

Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

blog.kagi.com

141–150 of 359 posts

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#141
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi accepts bitcoins but Vlad (the founder) mentioned on their forum that so few people use this option that it does not make sense to work on accepting Monero.

(vlad here) Rather, we are opportunistic about it and we want to focus on things that make impact (which most of the time is search, not billing). If there is enough demand, we will work on Monero support - and yes I agree, buying privacy pass tokens, without even needing an account, is one of those super-cool use cases.

I know I’m just one guy, but lack of Monero support kept me away.

This feature looks like it narrows the gap a bit though.

Nice work

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#142

This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient. Then $10/mo (or $108/yr) for unlimited. I'm curious if anyone knows, are companies like Google and Microsoft making more than $10/mo/user? We often talk about paying with our data, but it is always unclear how much that data is worth. Kag…

It's just about the best Internet-related money I spend. I get fast, quality results on a service that doesn't obviously bend over backwards to monetize me. Ironic, in a way. I thought it was spendy at first, and now I can't imagine cancelling my subscription.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#143

Can someone make a case for Kagi? I'm using Google + Claude for all my websearch needs. I don't feel like there's a gap there, but maybe that's because I've never experienced anything better and can't imagine it? I do value privacy, but I wouldn't pay extra for more private search results. I might pay extra for __better__ search results, but that's hard to measure. Just curious if anyone has had a legitimately great…

[dead]

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#144

It's a shame that their $5 tier is only 300 searches/month, or 10 searches per day. It's kind of ridiculously low. I could burn through half of that in a single day of debugging Also I just tried it and you can't really search for porn

Unlimited is only $10, more than worth it for me.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#145

This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient. Then $10/mo (or $108/yr) for unlimited. I'm curious if anyone knows, are companies like Google and Microsoft making more than $10/mo/user? We often talk about paying with our data, but it is always unclear how much that data is worth. Kag…

Depends on how you use it. For non-developers, under 10 searches per day on average sounds right. Not everyone has a job where they sit on a computer all day.

For me, I use Kagi only at home for personal use. And most months, I don't exceed 300. Of course, if I included work related searches, then yes - 10 searches won't get me far.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#146
post #118
post #65

I’m not insinuating for even a second that Kagi actually do this, but as a general rule, isn’t any privacy claim dubious at the moment given that more and more governments appear to be able to compel companies to identify their users (especially those searching for illegal content) and further forcefully insist they not disclose it? It’s disheartening to think the great progress we’re making in this sector could be u…

Government's power over companies does not negate cryptographic privacy protections. For example, one criminal who used ProtonMail got caught because ProtonMail handed over their recovery GMail address to the law enforcement after they were compelled[1]. However, that means end-to-end encryption worked: that was the only thing they could hand over. I think the same principle applies here. [1] https://www.techradar.co…

The government forces companies to backdoor their systems and use compromised implementations of what would otherwise be private and secure systems (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit). It's also worth noting that the only thing preventing your searches being linked to your account via IP address and browser fingerprinting is to use Tor which conveniently will also not protect your from the US government either. Account settings can also link a person's searches to their account.

The good news is that while the NSA will absolutely be tracking everything you search for while using Kagi they also do the exact same thing with every other search engine you use so what difference does it make.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#147
The way I feel about Kagi reminds me of how I felt about Google circa 1999.

The cynic in me wants to stop myself from becoming a fanboy because we all know how the story of tech startups goes and it's bound to repeat itself again; the optimist in me still wants to believe that there can be forces of good on the web.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#149

It's a shame that their $5 tier is only 300 searches/month, or 10 searches per day. It's kind of ridiculously low. I could burn through half of that in a single day of debugging Also I just tried it and you can't really search for porn

that's because you're a computer professional and the professional plan is more appropriate for you.

I gave a hundred searches to some normies I know and they told me that they save them to use when Google can't find what they want because Kagi works better (!) so they hoard the searches as backups to Google.

All I know is that I haven't used Google on purpose for a year and it's really turned into an eyesore

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add the ability to export your account config (yaml?) and use it with privacy pass. Maybe even sync it with git. To avoid fingerprinting by config, have a page where the community can share and vote on best configs, then clone and use a popular one that suits your needs.

This defeats the purpose of Privacy Pass. Something similar is discussed in the post: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#:~:text=customizatio...

Their suggestion is that when using Privacy Pass you'd also send "&config=XX" where XX is an ID of a publicly shared config, so that you get the customisation of whatever config you choose without tying the config to yourself, just tying it to the searches you're doing with Privacy Pass.

So while it does add a data point that could help track you, it's not defeating the whole point.

Post reply on HN