Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

blog.kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 359 posts

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#151

Post by Klaus23 »

If account settings are not possible because you could fingerprint users, then client-side filtering or reordering might be a solution.

Safe-search or not, just transfer both result lists and make the client only show the one you want. The same could be done with languages, where you at least get the results for the bigger ones. Blacklists would hide your blocked crap sites. It may even be possible to implement the ranking adjustments to some extend.

Client-side filtering would put more load on the server and search sources, but I hope the cost increase is tolerable. Blacklisting and reordering could be virtually free. This could make Privacy Pass available to many more users who don't have overly complex account rules.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#152

Post by Timshel »

abound wrote: post #107
echoangle wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do I validate that I’m actually getting the same value as everyone else? Is the value I should get published somewhere (in a verifiable and not editable way) so I can see that I’m not being tracked? Or does the extension validate this and the correct value is hardcoded in the extension like stebalien suggested?

There's no auth required at this stage of the handshake, so you can test from any number of devices/locations/networks/etc and confirm you get the same value. We could publish it, but it will change every epoch/month. Plus, if you don't trust the service to not issue special key pairs to track you, you probably won't trust us to not do the same when publishing the key material. There are schemes involving third-parti…

While it's relatively trivial to run something like:

  fetch(new Request("https://kagi.com/search?q=test", { method: "GET", headers: new Headers({ "X-Kagi-PrivacyPass-Client": true })})).then((r) => console.log(r.headers.get("www-authenticate")))
A simple response in the body to something like https://kagi.com/privacypass> would be easier to check.

And you answered someone else:

> It is also something anyone else could do to keep us honest :)

While true I believe for such a feature making it as easy as possible for your users to check independently is just better.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#153

Post by pimeys »

jjice wrote: post #105
autoexec wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the user of a service things like payment overhead, a small userbase, and dev salaries aren't my problem. My only concern is what I'm getting for what I'm paying. $5 a month for fewer than 10 searches a day is clearly not a good deal. $10 a month might be worth it for some, but an extra $15 a month on top of that for AI results is kind of crazy.

That extra $15 a month is for access to LLMs. They currently support the Claudes, the GPTs (not o1), Mistral, Gemini, Llamma, Qwen QWQ, Nova, and DeepSeek. It's currently unlimited access in the standard chat format. You can also choose if you want the chat to RAG search results into the context for additional info, and then cite those sources. To me, replacing a Claude/ChatGPT subscription with $15 on top of a compa…

This. I used to host my private searxng service which is a bit like what Kagi is selling. Yes, Kagi offers site blocking, rewrites and pinning which is great. But the best part is the access to R1 combined with Kagi search which adds context.

You can just quickly write !ai to the toolbar and you have a deepseek chat open. Or !sum to summarize the current page or video.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#154

Post by paradox460 »

drdaeman wrote: post #28

Neat! It's rare to see that a service you use actually does something that benefits the user rather that itself. An unexpected, but a really pleasant surprise. I wish this extension would integrate better with the browser by automatically understanding the context. That is, if I'm in a "regular" mode it'll use my session, but if I'm in a "private browsing" mode (`browser.extension.inIncognitoContext`) it'll use Priva…

With kagi you'll get used to them making the correct choice. It's been stunning how they haven't really had any missteps

I wish my kagi t-shit could say the same. Bottom hem unraveled on the second wash, and so it's been consigned to the sleep and yard work shirts. They issued me a coupon for a free shirt as replacement, but it's yet to ship

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#155

Post by beeflet »

mulderc wrote: post #144
beeflet wrote: post #138

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.

I will try it for more technical queries, but the results seem to be worse than Google/DDG. The reverse image search sucks and has never returned a single result for me. I suppose the advantage is that it whitelists/blacklists against spam, but it frequently comes up empty handed. So maybe it needs to crawl/scrape the web deeper or it needs a better search algorithm or trust model.

I could probably get better results by crawling the web myself at home.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#156

Post by cube2222 »

perdomon wrote: post #119

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…

Other than the things others mentioned, with the ultimate plan you can use Claude with Kagi web-search, which is not something that the Claude web app supports, I believe.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#157

Post by baridbelmedar »

api wrote: post #140
sxg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other part to this is that the internet accelerates network-effects, which you can further supercharge by making your product as cheap as possible or free to the former group in your example. It’s hard to make money by charging a lot to a small group of people since now you’re dealing with anti-network effects. Doubling the price of a product will likely more than halve your user base.

This is one of the best explanations I've seen for this phenomenon. If you try to build a network of paid users, you lose because you'll be run over by 'free' competitors monetizing indirectly.

Playing devil's advocate...

Yeah, the ad supported model has its problems, but it also makes the internet way more accessible. If we think about it, companies and people with more money are basically subsidizing these services for everyone else. They're the ones seeing the ads that keeps the lights on for users who can't afford to pay.

If everything was subscription only, a ton of people like students, low income families, people in developing countries would be shut out. "Free" services, even with their flaws, create a kind of digital subsidy. It's not perfect, but it means way more people can use these tools.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#158

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

api wrote: post #140
sxg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other part to this is that the internet accelerates network-effects, which you can further supercharge by making your product as cheap as possible or free to the former group in your example. It’s hard to make money by charging a lot to a small group of people since now you’re dealing with anti-network effects. Doubling the price of a product will likely more than halve your user base.

This is one of the best explanations I've seen for this phenomenon. If you try to build a network of paid users, you lose because you'll be run over by 'free' competitors monetizing indirectly.

The free competitors have raced to the bottom and don't provide a useful service any more.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#159

Post by noident »

I'm not affiliated with the Tor Project organization, but I have some questions.

From Tor docs [0]:

> Add-ons, extensions, and plugins are components that can be added to web browsers to give them new features. Tor Browser comes with one add-on installed: NoScript. You should not install any additional add-ons on Tor Browser because that can compromise some of its privacy features.

How does Kagi square this with Privacy Pass, which requires a browser extension rejected by Tor [1]? Did Kagi analyze whether it is possible to bucket users of Tor into two distinct groups depending on whether the extension is installed? Do I need to trust another organization other than the Tor project to keep the signing keys for the extension safe? Was there any outreach to the Tor community at all prior to releasing this feature?

It's great that they're Torifying the service, but depending on a 3rd party extension is not ideal.

[0] https://support.torproject.org/glossary/add-on-extension-or-...

[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-...

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#160

Post by scroot »

trvr wrote: post #125
esafak wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't immediately notice the difference between Kagi's and Google's results, Kagi is not for you.

This is so true. I've been on Kagi since March 2024. On the occasion that I find myself on Google on someone else's computer, I find it completely unusable from a search result perspective. It's all just junk. Kagi has me as a paying customer forever.

ditto
Post reply on HN