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Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#221

Post by abdullahkhalids »

dmoy wrote: post #179
laurex wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

What's the mechanism by which a private company does e.g. income verification to figure out who gets subsidy or not? Or would the idea be to only subsidize students and not poor adults? It would be one thing if we had like a national "verify I'm on SNAP or equivalent API"

Think of Discord. Anyone can create and participate in a discord server. There are no ads. People with money pay for the premium features and perks and that is how the company makes money [1].

Not every product category is amenable to such business models but many are.

[1] To be fair, Discord likely sells user data to advertisers to make additional money.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#222

Post by maples37 »

joshuaturner wrote: post #202
freediver wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (I don't use Orion, as there's no GNU/Linux version.) We commenced work on Orion for Linux yesterday.

I remember the announcement for Orion but I haven't followed closely at all - any support for container proxies like in Firefox? Can't lose that feature

I'd agree, at least partially in my case: Container Tabs is a killer feature for me with Firefox. Especially compared with the Temporary Containers extension on automatic mode, basically each new tab is like a fresh browser profile with zero cookies/local-storage.

I might consider demoing Orion on Linux even if it doesn't have container tabs, but at this time I wouldn't consider a full switch without that feature.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#223

Post by cootsnuck »

paradox460 wrote: post #154
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

I think I can finally buy into the Kagi hype now that I've found a sincere negative opinion.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#224

Post by freediver »

asukachikaru wrote: post #183
thoughtpalette wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I signed up about 4 months ago on the starter plan and I'm definitely going to run over. I could be smarter about my searches though. I've switched to kagi on ALL of my devices, including work devices. And I could have searched to using google for most gifts/maps stuff instead. some anecdotal data: 11/2024: 183 searches 12/2024: 360 1/2025: 376 2/2025: already at 222 Will definitely (happily) have to upgrade to…

I subscribed to kagi's $5/m plan since last March, and my usage until now is around 3.3k searches, with the monthly distribution similar to yours. Some months it's more, some months it's fewer. Currently I'm debating with myself if I should go for the $10 plan. I'm all down for supporting kagi, but surprisingly I didn't use as many searches as I thought.

One thing we noticed anecdotally (may not apply to your case) is that Kagi users search less when they switch to Kagi from other search engines, and the likely reason is that they just find things faster. Which is basically the main metric we are optimizing the product for - happy users, lower cost for us.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#225

Post by eviks »

Cool feature, curious, does the bangs solution (! Language ! Region ! Safe search) to the inability to use your config not introduce the same privacy concerns?

> allowing users to send a small configuration with every request (language, region, safe-search) to automatically customize your search experience to some extent. However, we currently believe this would quickly result in a significant loss of anonymity for you and for other users.

> For manual search settings customization, you can always use bangs in your search query to enable basic settings for a specific query.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#226

Post by [deleted] »

aryonoco wrote: post #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.

[deleted]

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#227

Post by godelski »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #47
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 don't know nor do I really care what other search companies are making. I pay $10/month for Kagi because it works for me and it's good. I don't even care about Kagi as a company (I don't care about any company); their search works. It's a good product, and I'm happy to keep paying for it as long as it keeps being useful while all the free competitors are still terrible. I use about 2k searches per month. edit: Even…

Honestly, this was a better ad for Kagi than what I got from the site. I'll actually check it out. Thanks

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#228

Post by JumpCrisscross »

noident wrote: post #162
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :)

I’m not diminishing Kagi or Tor, I’m asking for validation for the former expanding resources.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#230

Post by Eji1700 »

So....is this privacy through assumed lack of logging? Not trying to be a dick, just legit don't understand a part of this.

User A asks kagi for tokens. Kagi says "sure, here's 500 tokens". If kagi then logs the 500 tokens it just gave to user A, it now will know if any of those tokens is redeemed at a later date, that they're assigned to user A?

Of course if Kagi just doesn't retain this data, then yeah all is good because the token itself is only marked as valid, not valid and given to user A on date Y, but....that's it right? Or am I misunderstanding something?

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