Turns out Kagi does do advertising

They promote their search engine but their users don’t get to see ads. I don’t know what’s wrong about that. Every company advertises with its products. I don’t see what’s reprehensible about that.

We did not say we maintain anonmity, but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.

They’re right, anonymity and privacy are two different things. Since you have to pay to use Kagi, you’re not anonymous. But they allegedly don’t know what you as the user search for when using their search engine. So they’re being honest here and how can honesty be bad here? Anyways, we’re on privacy@lemmy.ml, not anonymity@lemmy.ml or whatever.

“AI is mentioned zero times”

While I still give you this one, they’re technically correct. The word “AI” isn’t there but they mention AI features, haha. It’s a bit debatable since Vlad said “kagi.com” - which doesn’t mention AI or AI tools. Only when you go to the pricing page there are mentions of AI tools.

Blog post or article - whatever. The effect is the same: It’s on the internet, people read it and get influenced. Just because I picked the wrong word doesn’t kill my point. I’m sure you get what I meant.

Just try it. You can always cancel your subscription if you don’t like it (or just pay once without subscribing). I’ve been using it for half a year now and absolutely love it.

I get that but it’s a dick move by the author of that article to publicly speak bad about a product and then don’t even wanna listen to what that person who made that product has to say to defend it. Especially if there’s some false information that get’s spread by that article. I’m not saying anything written in that article is true or false - just explaining the situation from Vlad’s view.

They allegedly don’t know their user’s search queries. That’s how it’s allegedly private.

To me it’s understandable. Imagine you start a project like this that grows over the years and you even have some employees after a while. Now someone writes an article about your project with accusations that are wrong (at least in your mind). Wouldn’t you be pissed either? At least I can’t imagine anyone who could just ignore that.

They know the names of their customers but they don’t know their search queries. There’s the privacy. At least that’s what they said. Since Kagi isn’t Open Source it always comes down to trust.

Imo only in terms of privacy. I tried it a few times over like two to three days but I always went back to Plex. Jellyfin is a nice piece of software though. I can imagine my switch will happen in a few years.

Yes, you can. You can block any domain you want to appear in your search results. Here’s the documentation for this feature.

Kagi is awesome! I recently fell in love with it.

Me too. I was so reluctant to pay for a search engine at first since there are good alternatives out there I don’t have to pay for. But I just at least wanted to try the first 100 free searches and was blown away by how great it is. It has some unique features like prioritizing or blocking specific domains, lenses and custom bangs. I payed the $10 the same day for Pro tier and 5 days later (yesterday) I even upgraded to Ultimate tier with ChatGPT-4 (called Kagi Assistant). I really, really enjoy Kagi so far. Most probably it’s gonna be my one and only search engine for the next years to come.

I have a Synology NAS so I use Hyper Backup and upload my backups in the Synology C2 Cloud. Of course all my files are encrypted first before they get uploaded.

My thoughts exactly. Next is: “OMG did you know there’s the all seeing eye on the dollar notes! That means you’re being spied on wherever there is cash!!!”
Stuff like this just makes me wanna roll my eyes.

To me it looks more like this website tries to guess what filter lists I’m using. In my case it for example detects “EasyList Portuguese”, “Latvian List” and some others that I definitely don’t use. Also there are some lists it doesn’t detect. It definitely makes it easier to fingerprint me but it can’t tell exactly all the lists I use.

But it also detects other addons like Dark Reader. And since pretty much everyone has their own set of addons in their browser they’re easy to fingerprint anyway. One probably should just use uBO with standard filters as the only addon and that’s it. But I can’t live without Dark Reader and some other addons that I use. That sucks but it is what it is. At this point adding additional filter lists probably won’t make it worse.

True. I recommend a DNS based adblocker like Pi-hole and an extra adblocker like uBO in your browser. If you can’t access a website you’ll immediately know who is the culprit blocking the site you’re trying to access.

Dunno. That would mean websites would know what filter lists inside an adblocker browser addon you use, which I can’t imagine tbh. But I’d say it’s a gamble. With more block lists you can achieve more privacy but maybe (if privacybro is right) fingerprinting you is easier. You decide what is the right choice to make here.

Do you know any minimal Invidious UI you can run from a Podman/Docker container? Like just the frontend, so that I can use Firefox instead of that. I think having that as a base and adding the freetube features would be great.

Use your favorite search engine and you’ll probably find something. Or self host a Piped instance. It’s very similar to Invidious but imo even better.

I did that a while ago but always ran in timeouts for some search engines (varied from time to time). Also the order of search results is often completely fucked up. And sometimes I search for something and got something completely different. For example I searched for something like “open source software” and the search results were filled with porn lol.

Also what’s bad about self hosting this in your home network is that your SearXNG instance does the searches from your home network of course. That means all the searches to all the selected search engines like Google, Bing etc. are made from your IP which is counterproductive when it’s privacy you’re trying to achieve.

Better use the fork I still don’t care about cookies. The reason why is stated on the GitHub page.

Open uBO settings > Filter lists > scroll down and click on import > a text box opens where you put the links of your custom filter lists (one per line) > apply changes