How is kagi more private? It requires an account to use, and it’s going to be a paid service. So it always has a strong user ID associated with every query. Whether it is not stored and not processed cannot be verified. It’s the same story about trust.
Being a paid service means Kagi's incentives are different. Instead of selling your data or profiting from feeding into ad-tech food chain, we are interested in selling you a subscription.
We do not associate queries with an account, as a matter of fact we do not save queries at all. You are right that this can not be verified, the question you need to ask yourself is what kind of incentive we have for misusing user data in any way.
Unless users want us to do start using their search history to improve quality of searches (something we may introduce as an option in the future as we've been asked to), we have no reason to do so.
> Being a paid service means Kagi's incentives are different. Instead of selling your data or profiting from feeding into ad-tech food chain, we are interested in selling you a subscription.
Until your growth slows down and you realize you can get away with doing both.
There are so multiple industries (TVs, Games, Streaming) where paid users are still being monetized to the maximum extend possible by showing them ads, selling their data, etc. that this argument is just dishonest now.
Personally I find that you did a great job with Kagi. I agree that the incentives are important, and I hope that Kagi will be successful and may prove that a different business model is possible. I'm also inclined to trust Kagi, but that's just that, trust and not much to lose.
Can you provide a TL;DR of the article? I'm a DDG user but open to considering alternatives, never heard of kagi and tried searX a long time ago.
Currently, whenever DDG doesn't cut it, I add the !sp bang and get Google results through StartPage. I know that SP is owned by an advertising company but I still prefer them to straight up Google. I tried using searX to get proxied Google results but it required a few extra steps so I don't usually go for it.
I use kagi as it still uses all of the ddg !bangs, and at some point they will ask me to pay for them (they are in free beta ATM) rather than show me ads which I'm excited for.
[1] https://lemmy.ml/post/31321