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Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#321
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.

However, most of current fremium games are precisely based on this model (Fortnite, LoL, TF2, most of mobile games, etc...) The service is subsidized by "whale players" that regularly spend a lot of cash, but they are a lot of freeloaders (to entertain the whales and to build brand popularity).

I think this supports my point and the OP’s example. Video game makers have figured out how to segment their customers into two groups (former and latter in the OP’s example), and this only works because they’ve made their games extremely cheap or free.

A cheap/free game supercharges network effects to amass players, each of which incrementally adds value to every other player. Most players will never directly pay enough to offset their own cost to the game maker. However, they will create a real community that draws in a small number of whale players who will directly pay for themselves and indirectly pay for all of the free players.

Not so different from the two-sided markets on Facebook and Instagram.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#322

I love that Kagi now uses Privacy Pass, and they look like a cool company in general. That being said, they essentially took the IETF draft I worked on for a while [1] and also my Rust implementation [2]. They built a thin wrapper [3] around my implementation and now call it "Kagi’s implementation of Privacy Pass". I think giving me some credit would have been in order. IETF work and work on open-source software is m…

Honestly, I think what TFA calls "Kagi’s implementation of Privacy Pass" is the integration of the feature into their server and clients, not the RFC (which they acknowledge), or the protocol implementation.

[I work at Kagi]

Indeed, this is the intended interpretation of "Kagi's implementation of Privacy Pass" - we're talking about building out the server infrastructure, the UX, the browser extensions, the mobile applications, the Orion browser integration, the support and documentation, the Tor service, etc. The cryptography is obviously an extremely important piece, but it is far from the only piece.

As other commenters have noted, the code in question is MIT licensed [1] and we're pulling it in as a standard dependency [2], it's not like we've gone out of our way to obscure its origin. The MIT license does not require us to do anything more.

That said, I can understand the author wanting more visible attribution, and that's very reasonable, we'll add a blurb to the blog post acknowledging his contribution to Kagi's deployment of Privacy Pass.

[1] https://github.com/raphaelrobert/privacypass/blob/main/LICEN...

[2] https://github.com/kagisearch/privacypass-lib/blob/e4d6b354d...

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our only recourse is that we punish them with our wallets, advice and habits and reward good actors. I'm a firm believer of this but we need more people to join in. And it already works to some degree. I've now had a working search engine for almost 3 years. My last 3 jobs (9 years) haven't forced me to use Windows. I can chat and organize events without Facebook knowing. And it is not like the quality has gone down…

I envy your bubble.

I admit it is a nice one.

My base salary has doubled and I enjoy my work a lot more now that I don't have to accept all kinds of MS shenanigans to play a part in how I work.

Having a working search engine shouldn't be underestimated either: living from 2012 to 2022 knowing that search used to be a solved problem but wasn't anymore was really annoying.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#326

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…

For me the killer kagi feature is that I can manually up and down weight domains in results. I can "pin" and always get wikipedia results or "block" and never get pintrest or raise or lower as needed. Brave search has a similar feature, but they only seem to support "block" not "lower", which is what I use a lot more often. https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

This is the exact sort of QOL feature that could convert me. I get tired of seeing the same recycled AI listicles for certain search genres, and it sounds like Kagi could help me manage that for my preferences.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#327

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…

If you can't imagine a gap then I think it might not be for you. I tried kagi after finally getting sick of some of my google results. Kagi was able to deliver on some of those results. It's not like, shockingly better results. I do think they're better on average, but I'm not sure. However, in the cases where I couldn't find what I was looking for on google and could on kagi, well, that's a binary result. I'll take…

Very interesting experience. Thanks for sharing. I’m a sucker for good UX/UI, and it sounds like the product is legitimately useful long-term. I wonder how well it integrates into Firefox/Chrome, since I see extensions for both browsers. I’ll check it out!

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#328
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently ran a search on Google. There were zero results on the first page. It was 100% ads. (15” MacBook). I tried a different search on iPhone to be sure. The first result was on the 3rd screen. When did they start doing that? How do people use that crap?

> 15” MacBook I just tried it on Duck Duck Go and the first result was from Apple.com On google I get 3 rows of "Products" but the first real result is also apple.com

Is that his device or his search term? Either way, my view of the internet is probably different than the average with pihole + ublock. Three pages of ads is kind of unbelievable.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#329

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.

That’s interesting — Claude WITH web search. Like Claude makes suggestions about search terms? Or maybe helps to navigate the results? I’m struggling to picture how google search is a 2-“person” job

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#330

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…

Here is a case for 'not google': https://i.imgur.com/PQNm1Yc.png I want a search engine to return useful results. Right now, google has been captured by revenue generating results. It wouldn't be so bad if useful results were making money, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Yeah, those results are ass. Do you happen to have the Kagi equivalent of the search? I’m curious to see how they compare.
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