• PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Im a massive proponent of FOSS, But I have not heard a single sustainable FOSS model for maintaining free search engines. It just takes so much capital to operate.

        I think a paid model is much better than a privacy disrespecting / ad driven one.

        • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          FOSS and paid are not mutually exclusive, but Kagi is not FOSS and of dubious transparency/trustworthiness.

          Also Kagi is not operating a search engine, but a search aggregator mostly dependent on Google. They don’t need much upfront capital to operate.

          An actual search indexer competitive with Google is too expensive to be profitable without (tens of) millions of paid users or hundreds of millions of free ones (i.e. bing and maaaaybe yandex?).

          True google alternatives are therefore only going to come out of big capital (MSFT), or less likely a government (EU?) funded company. There might be an argument to be made for decentralized search as well, but the only actual contender in that field right now is a crypto thing that probably relies mostly on bing/google. Still, a decentralized open indexer may actually make some sense in theory.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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      6 months ago

      Lemmy just likes shitting on popular things to feel superior

      You keep on Kagi’ing

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Astroturfing bad

      Good search good

      The former is unconfirmed to be sure

      I’m liking $0 SearXNG: lots of instances if you don’t host your own (for max privacy I think)

      Germany/Spain hosted instance with all the checkmarks (Vanilla, IPv6, 100% uptime): https://searxng.site

      If you fancy paying for a decent cause, don’t see a problem with the paid option sometimes suspiciously mentioned on Lemmy. Free trialing it saw a pleasant experience.

        • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          Responding to the human who typed:

          I know Lemmy doesn’t like it

          Explaining many Lemmings seem to like it, and attempting to explain why some may bristle at its mention

          That’s all :)

            • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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              6 months ago

              Sorry, meant it as a reply to each segment of your sentence, to clarify what I think we like and don’t like:

              Lemmy doesn’t like [astroturfing], but [Lemmy likes] great [search]

              I haven’t seen anybody say Kagi’s search itself is bad! Oh, I should have mentioned some don’t like the idea of paid search period. That’s another complaint.

              Overall positive impressions from many users here, is what I see. “Lemmy doesn’t like Kagi” is somewhat of a mischaracterization I think.