Technology

We were always paying, the price just wasn't obvious

They explain a bit more about what that means here: https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave/75

TL;DR They use multiple sources for search results besides their own indexer, the most obvious one is Google. To lessen dependence on one single search provider they have been adding other sources, one of them is now Brave. That is the whole thing.

On Dec 26, Kagi started including search results from Brave search index, after we previously added Mojeek and Yandex earlier in the year. Brave has a public search api and we currently implemented it for about 10% of queries as a first test (same as any other API we use, there is no mutual development or anything of the sorts). This was announced in our Dec 28 public changelog. Approximately a week later on Jan 5 after several posts on social media about ‘Brave partnership’ the situation escalated.]

So, if you do not like to use Google in the first place, I don't really understand why lessening the dependence on google would be a bad thing?

It's free just because someone else pays for you (I'm one of these "someone"s, I own one of the instances at searx. space). Unless you host you own instance at your own expenses.

The anti-Brave idiocy/hysteria is getting out of hand on the Fedi. And everybody knows it's mostly virtue signaling anyway.

I think "partnering" is a bit strong - Kagi uses Brave as one of their various sources for search. I agree that Kagi's response was poor, though.

The report of "partnering" seems to be overblown (it's just used for another data source), though I understand some people don't want anything to do with Brave.

Kagi didn’t “partner” with Brave, it’s a me a like the lemmy search.

They didn’t “partner” with lemmy either 😀

This is my first time hearing of SearXNG. Did some poking. They don't have their own engine tech all all, eh? Just riding on top of other results?

Yeah I keep hearing about how great Kagi is from lemmy but then I read that they partnered with Brave and read their response to the complaints and immediately said nope.

I read somewhere that they'd make it opt-out, but I can't find that setting anywhere.

I reached out to (one of?) the Kagi devs after that and all the "politics kill technology" stupidity

It is a metered payment to the shitheads at brave, not a "partnership" as it were (although I am not convinced that will hold true). I asked about subscribers being able to opt in or out of search engines and he said they are looking into that.

I am not particularly happy about this but I very much get the vibe they are just a dumbfuck "tech bro libertarian" as opposed to someone who actually supports those beliefs. So... if they let me opt out, I'll renew. Otherwise, fuck 'em.

so you mean we can configure searxng to work like fediverse lens? if yes, how to?

@eya searxng is great, I use it as my primary search (meta) engine, but if you don't want any connection with brave (which I understand, I don't like them either), searxng itself allows you to pull results off of brave if you enable it. I would not be surprise if kagi does something like this.

He really is starting to look like he's ready to have a heart attack at any time doesn't he