this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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“Paid search engine” <— no thanks.
More like yes please, I get better results and better customization, and no ads or paid results.
It makes my life easier and speeds my workflows up. And unlike free alternatives I almost never find myself reverting to Google.
If free alternatives make you Fever to Google, why not just use Google? It’s always free
There is a free trial and there was 1 month for free 2 months ago. You can try it and see if you think its worth the price
I tried it and i personally believe its not worth the price, but testing it is better than just refusing the concept from the start
Suit yourself. They aren't perfect but I find value in them so far.
freemium pls :cry:
although good freemium examples like proton mail for example seem too good to be true with free vpn and all the jazz. always such a shady feeling when using such services
They have a trial for 100 searches iirc. And they also occasionally share referral links to subscribers that are 3 month premium subs to share with friends so they can try
This is how I discovered I search around 20 times a day. Burned through it pretty quick haha
If you're not paying, you're the product.
if you are paying, you are still the product
That's only when doing business with corporations, but there's also the option of open source (e.g. SearxNG).
Or do you consider yourself the product when using Lemmy?
Do you think Lemmy is free? Your admin is paying, and trusting you to donate to help out.
Ironic considering the pinned post on .world is the admins asking for donations and pretty much everyone is saying "no"
You misunderstood the pinned post; it’s soliciting donations for core Lemmy development, not for the .world instance.
The core devs use donations to the project to fund their tankie .ml instance, which is why they’re getting pushback. There is zero comparable pushback among the community towards funding .world or other instances.
Functionally there's no difference.
The person I replied argued that you are obligated to donate if you want to keep Lemmy free. Right now the Lemmy developers are asking for donations, and people are saying no.
The developers are openly communist, and if you want to use Lemmy you'll have to learn to live .ml, it's not going to change.
They are openly authoritarian "communists", you don't need to simp for China, Russia or NK to be a communist. But they do and they leverage the .ml Instance to do so. This is the point of contention for most (including myself) donating to them, and it was brought up in those threads numerous times. If they put in place a new admin team that was as unbiased and fair as possible, they would massively increase in donations. They won't though because they know exactly what they're doing with .ml to further their personal political ideology.
To paraphrase one user on one of those threads "Devs should do dev work and not mod work, admins/mods should do admin/mod work and not dev work".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
There is a massive functional difference to anyone with two braincells to rub together.
The core devs can (and should) step in front of a bus (or tank) tomorrow; the core project will just fork, and LW and the other non-triad instances will do fine without them. I’ve had no issue on Lemmy blocking .ml client-side.
The only reminder of the triad’s existence is infiltrator trolls who make alts on other instances to post bad-faith arguments glazing the core devs.
Uh, what a weird message. It's not only unrelated to what I said but it reads like an attempt to twist my words. On top of it, it's totally wrong: Lemmy is free. I can self host Lemmy on a raspberry pi for exactly 0€.
The instance I use... Is also free. I donate because I choose to, but if my friend can't afford to donate they can still use the instance. Nobody is profiting from it.
What I did talk about is products and doing business with corporations. With Lemmy there's no product, whether you pay or not. With SearxNG (which many people self host, and again, is free) you're not the product, regardless of how much you pay.
That's what I was replying to - your comment is way off the mark and very condescending: I don't need to be mansplained that I should donate to the software I already donate to. Note donate rather than pay for.
Dang, where can I get a free Raspberry Pi and internet connection? That sounds awesome!
This is exactly my point. It's like when people call it "free healthcare".
Don't run it on a raspberry pi, run it on the same computer you use to access the Google search you are happy to call "free".
Edit: Actually yes, both this and the healthcare need to be free - otherwise you're grossly misunderstanding one of the key parts of the mission of open source. I pay for this so that whoever can't afford it can access for exactly zero. Same for the healthcare - you might say it's "not free" and everyone should contribute but what to you or me is nothing, could mean that grandma doesn't get to eat. So yeah, free access needs to be a possibility. That's the mission. I contribute to open source software and donate where I can so others who don't have the knowledge or money can access it for free. There can't be a price.
My computer isn't free, nor is my internet connection.
When did I call Google searches "free"?
I'm not paying for my self hosted searxng and I have more control over my search than any kagi user.
Well you are paying for the hosting you're just not paying for the service
It's very lightweight, any toaster could run a single user searxng instance.
If you’d like to give away any free toasters with hackable embedded microcontrollers to prove your point here, I’m a willing recipient and will attempt setup of a searx instance.
Fine for you. I’m just glad there’s an option besides “sell your soul” and “invest hundreds of hours and dollars into self-hosting”.
Upvoted.
I have a counterpoint to those claiming that paid are better. By using a privacy oriented search engine, then they don't know exactly who you are. In theory just your IP. Maybe fingerprinting.
When paying they know exactly who you are. You have to trust them.
So in one case you can protect yourself, in the other you have to trust them.
Also, Kagi also uses the Russian index Yandex 😑
Kagi Privacy Pass
Log into browser extension with kagi account
generate tokens
use said tokens
How does this ensure privacy? The tokens are associated to your account from the start.
There’s a link in the second paragraph to the technical details, including source code for the implementation and documentation for the required infrastructure.
But the tl;dr is that the tokens aren’t associated to your account. Unless you were able to snoop on the original request that generated the tokens (in which case, you’ve got bigger issues!), there’s no way to prove that a token is related to a specific account. A token only proves that an authorization server once granted access to some account.
Edit: Wikipedia has a good intro:
Interesting, thanks for sharing