this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 43 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

So, like a baby Yahoo! directory?

I wonder just how long it will stay relevant and how they determine if the content comes from a human. So far I've been accused of being a bot several times, clearly reliably detecting humans is beyond the capability of .. humans.

[–] FlordaMan@lemmy.world 49 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Mmm… that’s something a bot would say.

[–] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] borth@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)
[–] datavoid@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

It's always funny rewatching iron man 2 or home alone and being like "oh look, goebbels and hitler!"

[–] BenDoubleU@lemmy.radio 14 points 2 weeks ago

or like lemmy? kagi is also very pro activity pub. this feature is kinda old actually. give it a try! also give kagi search a try

[–] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 12 points 2 weeks ago

Like a small curated stumbleupon. I gave it a few clicks a little while back and as you'd expect theres a pretty wide range of good to junk content on there, but it all felt distinctly human.

Since none of the pages are ad ridden its hard to imagine the AI crazies wasting tokens on something they can't really monetize.

[–] masterofn001@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Whereby they can detect anomalous usage of language. Moreover, using whereby and moreover seem to be key indicators that something is written by ai .

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Verily ole chap. Mucho verily

[–] teohhanhui@lemmy.world 30 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)
[–] grandma@sh.itjust.works 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Use of funds is misguided sure, but all the AI stuff is completely optional and has never ever gotten in my way

[–] XLE@piefed.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

Part of your monthly fee goes to purchasing their AI services. That's not optional.

[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

6 months to a year ago it was all people were recommending, Kagi and searxng. Maybe another paid one I forget the name. Now Kagi is bad?

[–] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That article is 2 years old. In the last two years Kagi hasn't collapsed on itself, it's not overrun with AI, the world hasn't ended. They've implemented Privacy Pass, extended their browser support to Linux, introduced SlopStop for reporting AI websites, and generally continued to improve their main product.

Kagi is a business, run by people, who make decisions to the best of their ability based on their understanding of what's going to best serve their needs/priorities.

Like any other product, the owners are guaranteed to make decisions that are not aligned with a fraction of their prospective customers needs/views. That's what it's like trying to serve a broad market like "internet search users". Some of those users are inevitably going to get fired up enough to write a 20,000 word opinion piece on the subject.

For any service, you have to choose if the value proposition makes sense for you and your needs. For me, the value of most free search services has gone down the drain, and the value of spending monthly for Kagi is better than having to think about/maintain a SearXNG instance. YMMV.

[–] teohhanhui@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Like any other product, the owners are guaranteed to make decisions that are not aligned with a fraction of their prospective customers needs/views.

And the part where the CEO and the company pretends that data protection / privacy laws don't apply to them? Can you overlook that?

[–] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

IDK what the situation was like specifically two years ago, but now:

They have a whole section on GDPR and CCPA etc, as well at clear instructions on how to use their service 100% anonymously leveraging TOR and Privacy Pass (+bitcoin and a burner email if you don't want people even knowing you have a Kagi account)

https://kagi.com/privacy

https://kagi.com/privacy/rights

Seems weird to put in a whole Privacy Rights section about the privacy laws that apply to them if they don't think privacy laws apply to them.

[–] teohhanhui@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

That's good. Seems like they've added it just this year:

2026-02-17

Added Your Data Protection Rights covering GDPR, CCPA, and state privacy law data subject rights.

[–] tirateimas@lemmy.pt 14 points 2 weeks ago

This is actually pretty nice. I guess we will see similar projects popping up in the near future.

[–] brendansimms@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Sounds interesting. I currently pay the 5$/month for the Kagi search engine and that works great so I'm inclined to trust them on their other ventures.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Their 'Research' AI is pretty decent too. I can get to the same ends eventually, but I can't read and digest 25 different pages and then launch another 10 follow-up searches in 15 seconds. It's summarizing and not simply inferencing so the hallucination rate is acceptably low and it also cites the sources so you can click a footnote to fact-check any important details.

I self-host most things, but I can't self host a search engine. I much prefer paying monthly than having to fight the eternal battle against tracking and ads.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

You CAN self-host a search engine, look up searxng.

Yes it's a metasearch engine, but so is Kagi for the most part, their own indexes don't cover everything.

[–] brendansimms@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

saving this comment for when i dive deeper down the rabbit hole later. at the moment i think im only self-hosting jellyfin and owntracks, and I have a couple llm models in LM studio but haven't messed with them in a while.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

searxng

I have this on my projects lists, I've seen it recommended in a few places.

If I'm understanding the purpose (privacy filtering for searches), Kagi is a service fitting a similar role. Kind of like Headscale vs Tailscale. Is that right?

[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 4 points 2 weeks ago

I totally recommend just clicking through random pages on there for a good 10 minutes or so. You'll be surprised at how many random, cool, interesting things you find that you'd probably never see otherwise in a million years. (also an AMAZING place to find small blogs to add to your RSS reader of choice)

They feed a lot of this into their main search index if you pay for Kagi search too, so a lot of these sites will appear higher than they would on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc, if their content is relevant. Especially fediverse sources.

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

Thus including the type of people who screwed everything up in the first place

[–] desmosthenes@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

woooop my sites on there already

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This sounds great. You still need a subscription to use it? I may be the thing that finally convinces me to get one.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago

I don't think you need a subscription. I just tried from another browser where I'm not logged in and it works.

https://kagi.com/smallweb/

They have a small web 'Lens' in their search (you can limit search to specific categories), so you'd need to subscribe for that. Although, with an account, you get 100 searches/month for free.

They also have a Fediverse lens:

[–] Bazell@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 weeks ago
[–] aproposnix@scribe.disroot.org -5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

A small web in a walled garden. No thanks.

[–] HuudaHarkiten@piefed.social 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Would you call neocities.org a walled garden as well?

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] HuudaHarkiten@piefed.social 3 points 2 weeks ago

What makes it a walled garden?