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Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#161

Post by JumpCrisscross »

noident wrote: post #159

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 Priv…

> Was there any outreach to the Tor community at all prior to releasing this feature?

Do we know what fraction of Kagi users access it through Tor?

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#162

Post by noident »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #161
noident wrote: post #159

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 Priv…

> Was there any outreach to the Tor community at all prior to releasing this feature? Do we know what fraction of Kagi users access it through Tor?

It must be a small fraction since they released their Tor onion service 3 hours ago in the original linked article :)

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#163

Post by laurex »

baridbelmedar wrote: post #157
api wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fam…

Playing the... angel's advocate...

There's no reason why a subscription model could not also be used to subsidize people who can not pay, other than that companies are structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).

There are good network effect arguments about why this strategy can be effective, not simply 'altruistic.'

Ads simply make the extraction happen across the board, except that the ad model somewhat privileges technical users who know how to circumvent ads.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#164

Post by wkat4242 »

pimeys wrote: post #153
jjice wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also self-host that part. OpenWebUI integrates very well with searxng.

But kagi does a good job too, indeed.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#165

Post by Thorrez »

>We are working on enabling this feature for Trial and Starter plans, which have access to a limited number of monthly searches. [...] and theoretically, users on this plan could redeem more tokens than the limit of searches allowed on their plan (again, we do not know who the user redeeming the tokens is, or what plan they are on).

This doesn't make sense. Is this saying they're worried about a user on a trial or starter plan using someone else's tokens? That can still happen when tokens are disabled for trial and start plan users: the trial or starter plan user can use tokens generated by someone on an unlimited plan.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#166

Post by themadturk »

godelski wrote: post #18

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…

I've been paying $5 a month for over a year and have hit the 300 search limit only once. I feel like I'm pretty active on the web, but perhaps I just have days where I don't search as often as others.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#167

Post by dalenw »

Thorrez wrote: post #165

>We are working on enabling this feature for Trial and Starter plans, which have access to a limited number of monthly searches. [...] and theoretically, users on this plan could redeem more tokens than the limit of searches allowed on their plan (again, we do not know who the user redeeming the tokens is, or what plan they are on). This doesn't make sense. Is this saying they're worried about a user on a trial or st…

They're saying that when someone uses a privacy token to search, they cannot track which account it's tied to. Therefor, they cannot track limits & billing.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#169

Post by solardev »

dalenw wrote: post #167
Thorrez wrote: post #165

>We are working on enabling this feature for Trial and Starter plans, which have access to a limited number of monthly searches. [...] and theoretically, users on this plan could redeem more tokens than the limit of searches allowed on their plan (again, we do not know who the user redeeming the tokens is, or what plan they are on). This doesn't make sense. Is this saying they're worried about a user on a trial or st…

They're saying that when someone uses a privacy token to search, they cannot track which account it's tied to. Therefor, they cannot track limits & billing.

What's to stop a single unlimited user from generating and sharing infinite tokens with the rest of the world, then?

Edit: Each account is limited to 2000 tokens per month, unless they email support to request more. (from the FAQ near the bottom).

Still seems like there could be a secondary market for resold tokens, though. Not just as a money making system, but possibly as a privacy initiative? If enough accounts pooled tokens into a shared pool and withdrew a random one from it each time, it would be a further safeguard.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#170

Post by Thorrez »

mhitza wrote: post #27
jacekm wrote: 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.

Kagi's privacy guarantee is more of a "trust me bro" and I say that as a Kagi subscriber. While they may claim that they preserve privacy or anonimity as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information nothing prevents them from associating searches with user. Even protonmail enabled logging for a particular user at one point. Their guarantee is on the same level. At the same time, privacy pass is a very…

>as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information

Privacy Pass unties the searches from the user account and payment information.

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