I’ve been using DuckDuck Go since leaving Google Search, but that seems to be the first step away. I’m not keen on their AI assist. I tried Start Page, but the first four results were ads. I don’t mind paying a small fee for good search. So Brave Search or Kagi?
Which subscription tier do you use?
Yeah I would say start with the smaller one and its very easy to upgrade/downgrade. For me I do the highest tier one because I work in tech and I want to use all the premium LLM stuff hah
I also use Kagi. Just start with the trial, upgrade to the $5 starter tier when you run out, then upgrade to the pro $10 tier if you hit the limit. It appropriately apportions things if you’ve only used half your month.
I’m on the $10 pro tier as I use over the 300 searches a month in the $5 starter tier ($10 is unlimited).
Kagi has AI on request. If you put a question mark on the end of your search query, you get an AI response. No question mark, no AI.
I think Kagi is worth trying for other reasons, but probably only for people who $10 a month is not a significant cost. It’s not better than food, but it does let me block all Pinterest results so I never see them.
Maybe dumb question but I assume we would be giving up info if we use the question mark, correct?
I see you edited and so I thought I’d follow up with some thoughts.
It isn’t clear where AI queries are processed. They use to have an infobox saying what LLM model it was and that it ran on their systems, but that seems to be gone. They have also since released an AI assistant product that connects to many providers so I’m guessing your searches with question marks are proxied to other companies. Note also that for normal (non-ai) searches, Kagi uses google and other indexes to provide results, so your search is also going to them. But it’s proxied so google doesn’t know which is your search term and which is mine.
Virtually every major privacy focused search engine does this, as running a full search index is incredibly expensive, so outside of google and bing there aren’t many good ones that run their own index and never provide results from other search engines.
They are a start up, have no VC funding according to other lemmy people, and since you’re paying for the service (instead of advertising being their revenue) they are incentivised to make the best search instead of show you more ads.
Basically, we don’t know if they are evil but as far as we know they aren’t. Not owned by google, Facebook, etc but I don’t know if satan owns them.
Hell, I’m sold. I started paying for email, so I guess I will have to make a digital privacy budget.
Not sure what you mean. Are you meaning in terms of privacy or missing out on normal results or something else?
More the privacy issue.