However, I don't want to pay more than $100/year for a Google/Bing frontend. Startpage works quite well for that. If they made their own indexer I would go all-in, and that would justify such a high price-tag.

I've been using Kagi full time for a few weeks now and it has been a very pleasant experience. Search results seem consistently better than DDG and my !g use is significantly down. And it is really really fast. YMMV.

I'm curious if this company will survive long term. I fully plan to pay a subscription once they introduce that, but the way they describe it in their FAQ makes it sound way too niche for my taste.

They should make one unified (low) price for Kagi with no search caps. And then offer a "Premium" plan with some extra features (NOT the number of searches done). Segregating into entry level and "unlimited" (horrible name btw) plans sounds like a recipe for disaster considering all other search engines are unlimited by default AND free by default.

Maybe techy people will value things like no telemetry and no ads but I question if there's enough of us that value these things AND are willing to pay for this AND choose to become their customer. Good luck to them. :)

Would be easier to trust them if they didn't want an email ID to download their browser. Seeing that they also want to create a search engine, I suspect that your search and browsing history could be linked to it to profile you.

Edge is a good browser, but an absolute privacy disaster. Hardware based session IDs, chatty start pages that push you to Bing, the typical search suggestions on by default. Microsoft runs their own sync backend but does not allow for end to end encrypting all data types. Among the ones not e2ee'd? Browsing history.

And I am using it constantly.

I love blocking domains without uBlacklist.

Also, shameless plug: you can also remove whole domains from search results with uBlockOrigin and https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results

Our template currently supports Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, Kagi, Searx and Startpage. It also includes github/stackverflow presets taken from the uBlock-Origin-dev-filter project.

I understand why I need a sign up to use Search, so they at least can have a subscription model - but that seems like a barrier for entry and also the necessity to instill a lot of faith into a product that hasn't garnered trust (yet, rightfully so)

Here are some of his tweets on the matter:

- https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1501978997860683776?s...

- https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1502113286417838082?s...

- https://blackgnu.net/brave-is-shit.html

> But Brave is more private than Firefox by default > No, not at all. People who claim this have fallen for Brave’s marketing strategy which consists on telling lies and flawed arguments.

The first thing to note here: Firefox defaults to Google as the default search engine and has search suggestions turned on, so whatever you write in the address bar gets sent to Google. Doing worse than that is really, really fucking hard.

> Their adblocker is just a fork of uBlock Origin

How, when uBlock Origin is a browser extension and Brave's adblocker is written in Rust and integrated into the browser.

> Another problem with their built-in adblocker is that it’s better for extensions to be separated from the core of the browser, since they don’t follow each other’s update cycles. This means that you need to update the entire browser to fix a bug in the adblocker. Stupid, isn’t it?

Yeah, Manifest v3 would like a word. uBlock will be fucked, Brave Shields won't care.

> Another reason to avoid using Brave is that uBlock Origin works best on Firefox and there isn’t anything that Brave can do about it.

These are limitations of the extension system in Chromium. Brave Shields isn't an extension, and actually does do things like CNAME uncloaking, which extensions can do on Firefox and can't do on Chromium.

What was that about the blocker being integrated into the browser again?

> Rewards is their shitty program that will replace ads displayed on websites with their own.

The adblocking system and the ads from Brave Rewards are entirely separate.

You only need to identify to cash in the BAT. Yeah, some people are looking to make pennies from their cut of being an ad viewer (spoiler: single ad viewers arem't very valuable). The whole schtick of the system is to tip content creators, where a pileup of BAT can be a real sum of money and some compensation for adblocking tracking ads.

> Brave has been caught inserting affiliate codes > In June 2020, a twitter user (@cryptonator1337) discovered that Brave was automatically injecting referral codes into URLs for cryptocurrency exchange sites. > > So if you typed “binance.us” into the URL bar and pressed enter, Brave would take you to “binance.us/?ref=35089877”. > > There was a huge scandal when this was noted. Later, Brave disabled this in the code, in a “sorry we got caught” style.

Yeah. You know this Firefox Suggest thing Mozilla recently released? Same deal. Type incomplete URL, it suggests an ad from a local catalog. Suggesting an ad when typing a full URL was a bug, was fixed.

And you know what else they did? They turned the whole feature off by default.

I have to give the hit piece credit for not insinuating they replaced urls within the page, as many others do.

[0] https://okeano.com

[1] https://twitter.com/OkeanoSearch/status/1502077779243847686

I switched to it from chrome and never looked back. Tons of good features, really customizable, and (what seems like) a pretty sound business model (no crypto!)

* In all other browsers, clicking a "select file" element and then cancelling out of the dialog does not fire a `change` event on that element - except in Vivaldi, where you get a `change` event with no files in it. * In all other browsers, setting the `Content-Length` header is enough for the browser to be able to give the user a file size estimate. Not in Vivaldi, which seems to use some other heuristic that I never managed to figure out - currently on our systems, the download dialog shows the file size as "unknown" and I've left it at that. * Vivaldi has a feature where, if you close the window and then reopen it, it opens the page you were previously on. It's a nice feature, and I like it. Unfortunately, for the instant that the page is being reopened, any `matchMedia()` listeners will produce weird results. (Note that `window.screen.width` will still report a reasonable value, just one that contradicts the result of the `matchMedia()` query.) This is by far the weirdest and most niche bug I've found.

Obviously every browser has its own quirks - although modern browsers tend to have far fewer of them, so I'm much less tolerant of an evergreen browser that doesn't match spec these days - but what makes it far worse in Vivaldi's case is that, if you do find one of these bugs, the only way to report it is an online form with almost no feedback at all - there's no public list of bugs and not even a way to view the status on your own bug. Apparently they email you if something changes, but I've not experienced that yet.

In all fairness, from having tried out Vivaldi to reproduce these weird bugs, I'm quite impressed with how the browser feels, but the non-compliance with standards and the inscrutability of the bug report system have turned me off completely.

DDG is far easier replaced. Brave for example.

Browser and search engine.

i.e. the browser redirecting you to affiliate links without permission? https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-browser-brave-busted-f...

I'm sold.

Then I open and type "rt". The autocomplete tells me this is a "state controlled Russia network", while for BBC it says "public service broadcaster". So much for "no bias" (technically all they said is the bias is not secret, but still). Not sure where they get these snippets from. Looks similar to wikipedia but it's not verbatim.

I'm not the biggest fan of the BBC, but it certainly is not state controlled like RT is.

> From the late 1930s until the end of the Cold War, MI5 had an officer at the BBC vetting editorial applicants.

Looking at how UK and EU now outright banned Russian TV and media, I think it would go unnoticed if they started removing or just not hiring certain inconvenient journalists. Certain thoughts are just forbidden these days; it's career suicide to even doubt the gov line, just like during covid when it was practically forbidden to question gov measures or vaccines.

The current UK government is not as enthusiastic about the BBC as they might be; and the BBC's senior management treats its relationship with the government as something to be managed.

The BBC is not a monolith. Even if the government was able to unduly influence some people inside the BBC, that influence wouldn't extend to much of the BBC's output, because frankly the BBC is not very good at operating as a single joined-up entity.

A lot of other search engines could also be doing only that, but are not communicating the scope and whether they're doing more than what they're compelled to. The chief concern is with search companies editorializing out of their own volition.

Welcome to reality.

Super smooth experience.

“a privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine”

This is the only acceptable direction now.

On the other hand if any business exists as a legal, registered entity, of course they will comply with local LE requests. Not sure who expects otherwise.

They have checked checkbox newsletter by default. Moreover, why they need a name for registration?