Oh shit, uneasy feelings for managers… :)

Clearly a national emergency.

Micro$oft, as we used to say in the old times…

Yeah I honestly liked this text too.

No it was part of the request actually :)

America has a lot, but not free media :)

Meta and Twitter are social media companies. They have access to peoples tweets. It’s similar to having access to these messages you and me are typing, except many people use their own names there.

It’s not too bad privacy wise, just social messages.

Google on the other hand has the private searches of billions of people. Everything you put into a search engine because you are worried, afraid, sick, or curious about something.

Google records all this private activity and saves it under your personal profile, and then uses cookies to track every web site you are visiting on the web (using not only Google search but Google analytics cookies that exists on almost every website).

They also combine this data with whatever you are doing on your android phone, or what places you go to using Google maps, or what video meetings you are having with Google meets, what emails you have in Google Mail, what video you watch on YouTube, what calendar events you are having with Google calendar… And so on.

Then they feed all this data into algorithms designed to figure out what you are likely to do next. They sell this data to advertisers so they can target you with ads. They also send this data to American agencies like nsa to be stored and analyzed.

There is a giant difference here between Google and the other companies you mentioned. Google is literally watching moments from people’s entire lives, while the others only see your social media messages.

This is why Google is completely absurdly in it’s own class of anti-privacy. No other company has this amount of data about people’s every moment awake.

Now they use their dominant position to try and take over the entire web, so it’s not possible to escape them anymore using a different browser, blocking cookies and tracking, or using another search engine.

If everyone is forced to use their browser, we have lost everything good about the web.

They should be treated like the cancer to a free web they really are.

Darth Vader wants to protect children… Right.

I haven’t done that but yes, it’s pretty much unheard of that the user can actually control what shows up in search if you come from Google-land.

For a conversation to happen, there must be trust. I don’t think anyone trusts them, so there is no attempt at serious communication.

They should be treated with contempt.

Shit didn’t work. :)

Google, the Internet Government.

More like organic user reviews I would say.

Ah yes.

I also worry a bit about all these email aliases I use now. They do tie me to fastmail for the future. And if they would disappear, it would be a pain to replace. But that’s life. Have to take some risks. :)

That’s an apples to oranges comparison. Proton is not a web search engine.

Edit: But for email, sure. :)

Yup try it and set as default in the browser. You will start to see a lot of sites that never showed up in google also. They have these “listacles” in search results where they group relevant sites into a small list, which makes it super simple to go to them for results.

If you want a sample search, try “best tv shows 2023” or something like that.

It’s honestly why I’m paying for it.

I also pay for email for the same reason. :)

For email, Fastmail is just excellent. I use their email aliases function a lot. So you can one-click generate an email to use when you sign up on a service and when you don’t use that service anymore, delete the email address.

Makes it impossible for them to sign you up on advertising lists since you can just delete that email address if they annoy you.

Ah sorry, I misunderstood you. Yes they count as a search.

I don’t think you can compare pricing to Google. They make profits by combining any payment with selling your data for profit. There is no way Kagi can compete with that since they don’t sell your data.

To me, search is the most important thing I use the internet for. I just think it’s reasonable to pay a good competitor that doesn’t sell your data and provides excellent search. But if you can’t pay them, of course that’s fine. Maybe you need 10 dollars for something else. But for me, Im not in the financial zone where I even miss 10 dollars or notice it’s gone.

I understand if you can’t afford it. Money doesn’t grow on trees in this world. But Kagi has been very transparent about the reason for the costs - it’s what they need to charge to not lose money, since they don’t sell your user data or track you.

It’s unrealistic to think that having a search engine is free, and the reason Google is free is because it tracks you and sells your data to advertisers, and probably also makes sure you get search results that benefit those advertisers. It’s quite simply a bad choice to use an ad company to search the web.

Kagi also had a blog post about search usage, where they used googles search statistics to determine that the average person searches 3 or 4 times per day (90 to 120 times per month). This amount (100 searches) is free on Kagi.

300 searches costs 5 dollars.

If you are doing 1000 searches per month, that’s as much as myself and I work as a programmer / devops guy. We search a lot. That’s much more than the average person. We are in the top 1% actually. Nice to be there for something right? :) Cost for us is 10 dollars.

I couldn’t find anything about your claim that conversion would cost extra, not on the pricing page and not in the FAQ section. I also did a few conversation searches and there was no info about additional price. Can you link to where it says that?

That used to work until reddit started a war against it’s own moderators and made a lot of people leave to Lemmy.

Reddit is in a slow death spiral I believe.

Worth every dollar. The quality is so good that you will switch and forget Google exists. I haven’t used Google search in 6 months even once.