For the past year or so, I’ve been using and enjoying the search engine Kagi. Its search results are…fine, no worse than others, and it’s ad-free, stated privacy as a primary goal, and seemed to have a better ethical sense than its competitors.
Or so I hoped.
1/
Kagi recently started using some services provided by Brave, a company run by immensely objectionable people. Kagi community members rightly raised concerns about this.
I was curious to see Kagi’s response. This is a tricky question that requires a thoughtful, careful response. Their response would be telling: not just about the question of Brave, but about their general ethical outlook.
2/
I’m sympathetic to Kagi’s dilemma. Brave may well provide useful services to them. And it is impossible to completely avoid engaging with people and companies who do harm in the world; that is our reality.
We can’t always disengage. What we •can• do, at a bare minimum, is think carefully about how we engage, and make wise decisions (as businesses and as individuals) that take into account our indirect impact on the world.
Again, these community concerns merit a thoughtful response.
3/
What I found was _not_ a thoughtful, careful response. What I found was the founder of Kagi saying:
“Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reason we do not have innovation any more.”
https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave/5
Well shit. That is the reddest of red flags.
4/
My dude, politics were deeply intertwined with tech long before I wrote my first line of code back in 1982. You don’t get to opt out. That choice isn’t even on the table. You interact with humans, you interact with politics.
Vlad’s post is a historically ignorant, pants-on-head-stupid answer to a serious question. When I read it, I hear, “We’re not ethically mature enough to think about our social responsibility, so we’ve given ourselves permission to take no responsibility at all.”
5/
I mean, at •best• that’s what I hear. At worst, I suspect that Kagi’s leadership is sympathetic to (or fully in bed with) the right-wing politics of Brave, and is using a claim of being apolitical as cover for their own politics. That would be par for the course when somebody gives this sort of “I’m staying out of politics” excuse for their politically charged actions.
6/
Which is it? Doesn’t matter.
When I give a company access to all of my searches, I’m giving them an •extraordinary• degree of trust. Earning that trust from me requires a keen ethical awareness, and a sense of responsibility that never shrinks into the shadows and says “Not our problem! Not our responsibility!” when market forces raise ethical questions.
I want a company with a moral compass and a spine.
7/
I want to know that the people at a search company believe that my ethical concerns are their concerns, that they view social responsibility as their responsibility, and that they won’t duck under a rock and make expedient excuses for themselves.
Who is that company? Not Google. Not Microsoft.
I’d hoped it might be Kagi.
Nope.
8/
Search is a wasteland right now. Alas. And there are no good choices.
But look, if I’m going to •pay• a company money for search, it needs to be a company run by ethically mature people. If and when Kagi is run by such people, maybe I’ll give that paid plan another go. For now, well, maybe these childish people will blunder their way to maturity and maybe they’ll just blunder, but either way, they won’t be doing it on my dime.
/end
ADDENDUM 1/2: Kagi is apparently now flailing around trying to find a quick and dirty fix for the uproar: “maybe you can disable Brave in your search results or we’ll try to make their services free or something” etc etc.
My deal-killing objection was not actually them using Brave’s services, but rather their •unwillingness to think• about the underlying issues in doing so. I can’t say that this “we’ll let you cover your eyes too” sort of response addresses my concerns at all.
ADDENDUM 2/2: A search engine is going to face some of the toughest ethical problems a tech company can face. And they’ll face most of those problems ••out of public sight••.
I’m interested in the people, their thought process, their temperament. How do they engage with ethical questions? Perfection is impossible, but will they at least •try•? Do they have the capacity to try? Do they even give a shit?
Or do they actively •refuse• to give a shit and call that a virtue? Apparently so for Kagi.
Thanks for this thoughtful post. Not familiar with Kagi, but the ethical dilemma is old as the ages. Something is developed with the best of intentions, or at least marketed as such. It gains traction, and the idealism of the founders is tested over and over again with progressively greater incentive to join the dark side. Eventually the magnitude of the payday is just too great, the deal is struck, and "don't be evil" goes out the window.
@mastodonmigration For me, the Brave question was only a question — but the ineptitude of this response suggests to me that either (1) the founder is not ready to play with the grown-ups or (2) the founder is secretly terrible. At this point, even if they pulled the Brave relationship, I’d still be out. This is not somebody ready for prime time.
Think you are right. No idea about this particular case, but imagine the founder(s) to be a technical sort, maybe kind of unsophisticated, perhaps young. Coded up a cool thing and got it going. Now, things change. They start to be approached by some real sharks who puff them up and tell them how big it could get. They are completely unprepared to play in this league, and boom it's done.
@mastodonmigration @inthehands young and privileged. I always cringe when I see phrases like this, especially as they're usually uttered by white able-bodied heterosexual cis-men. Someone for whom marginalization is an abstract idea rather than a lived reality.
To complain about politics "entering" tech and wishing for it to be "politics-free" is an obscene luxury. For someone marginalized that's in all likelihood not even an option, as our mere existence is already political.
Blergh
@alexocado @mastodonmigration QFT: “our mere existence is often already political”
Yup yup. And that’s why “I just stay out of politics” sounds to me like “I just don’t look at the road when I’m driving.”
Sigh.
@inthehands
“I don’t look at the road when I’m driving”
That’s a great phrase.
@mastodonmigration @inthehands He's not young. Based on his bio, he's in the 45-50 age range.
"I started my journey in tech in 1983 with C-64 and Elite"
https://vladimir.prelovac.com/
He's run several different businesses over the past couple of decades.
He is not young and unsophisticated.
@toolbear @mastodonmigration @inthehands huh? Are you implying that he's Russian or in the KGB? He's Serbian. What does the KGB or Russian oligarchs have to do with this? You're going to need to cite some sources
@inthehands
I run my own searXng to at least cut all search providers off my data.
On top of that I search with all of them simultaneously - ensuring the best of results.
It’s an old MacMini running docker and a free cloudflare tunnel to make it available outside of my home as well.
Works well!
@inthehands Thanks for the explanation. I was trialing Kagi, but not convinced of the balance between gains and extra effort. If now the gains vanish …
@doritc Yeah. I mean, even more than search quality, what I was paying for was trust. With that damaged, it’s not worth paying for.
@inthehands Same here …
I had been considering kagi very loosely but it sounds like another "pro status quo company pretending to be neutral".
Very informative thread! Thanks!
@inthehands I discovered kagi not too long ago, and was really happy.
Now I'm not, and wonder what I'm going to use for search now... :(
@jollyorc @inthehands Copilot????
@jollyorc Another ex-Kagi user here. I'm trying out Mojeek and also using DuckDuckGo at times. Not as nice an answer as Kagi was, but no affiliation with Brave.
@jeridansky @jollyorc I’m giving Mojeek a go too. Also trying out Startpage but not sure of their history/affiliations.
@jeridansky Thank you.
@inthehands thanks for that. I was already a little disappointed that they were engaging the current hype cycle with the AI answers thing, but this is a deal breaker.
@inthehands Weirdly enough, apropos Kagi affiliating with Brave, is that Kagi produces Orion for Mac, their WebKit browser which is basically Safari plus everything users want that Apple doesn't want, including built-in support for uBlock-syntax filter lists.
I have Orion running with the same suite of extensions I use on Firefox (Chrome extensions can also be used, it's a preferences setting). Even GreaseMonkey works!
All in all it's very nice. All features are available in the free and paid versions -- paying mostly allows you access to some shinies in the user forums. ...so hearing that Kagi may be a secret dumpster fire does not cheer me up one bit.
@inthehands Not Duck?
@wndlb @inthehands DDG is just Bing now, right?
@inthehands thoughtful and on target
Unfortunately I started using Kagi less than a week before learning of this. Sigh. Hadn't upgraded to paid, at least
@inthehands “Search is a wasteland right now.“
I’ve switched to perplexity. No idea if they’re ethical but in a set of poor choices they save me a bunch of time.
@inthehands any thoughts on searx or searxng? I'm looking at those as potential replacements.
@thunderfist No idea. I’m looking around too, same as you.
@inthehands
Search is pretty limited and the few independent players aren't as useful for a lot of things, but AI could level the playing field... ...By making the content of the big players so bad it doesn't matter what search engine you use, you'll still get rot! I guess we'll be going back to curated site directories for most things but that won't help for error messages...
In the meantime, what do you think of Mojeek? I've found them useful on occasion.
@ddlyh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm more or less at square one investigating search engines.
@inthehands
Oh.
Have you come across Marginalia (https://search.marginalia.nu/) and Wiby.me (https://wiby.me/)?
Maaaaan, what a disappointing thread to stumble across not an hour after I was just thinking, "Geeze I've been on Kagi for half a year and I don't miss google a bit! Totally worth the price!"
I'm conflicted; search being good is really important for me both personally and professionally, but...yeah that's a disappointing response. Heck, they could've probably come up with a technical solution like an opt-out or something that would've at least...mitigated, but they just doubled down.
I wish somebody would see this as a chance to swoop in and duplicate Kagi's business model / basic concept but with a bit of "don't be evil" principle mixed in. At least maybe they'd be good for 5-10 years before they turned to the dark side. :P
@inthehands What's most disappointing here is the lack of seeing how this clashes with #Kagi 's supposed mission of "humanizing the web".
You can't do that while pretending ethics aren't part of it. Or by defending your business relationship with someone who denies basic human rights to some.
I think it'd be recoverable for Kagi if they end up revisiting the issue, but right now, I'm disappointed a.f.
@larsmb @inthehands They've announced changes on their Discord, which are limited to: allow users to filter their result sources, potentially not pay Brave and instead ask for free API access.
@inthehands @larsmb me neither, but I suppose I'm not principalled enough because I did return to Kagi, because, for me, nothing competes. I've tried Searxng, Startpage, DDG. results are just worse.
@inthehands Kind of in agreement. However, I hope they are going to think about the issues now. It'd have been best if they had done so before, obviously ...
@larsmb @kzhe
What’s turned me off is the incapacity for thought. Whatever they decide about Brave now that they’re under pressure, I just don’t see a company that’s ready to play with the grown-ups.
Here’s the thing: the Brave issue is relatively minor compared to the ethical questions a search company is going to face. And they’ll often face those questions out of public sight, and free from public pressure.
@inthehands Yes
But I'm not sure I'm trusting others more either.
I do fully understand your points though and appreciate them. I'm just not yet sure what the truly better option is for me.
(I signed up very recently and am paid up for the month anyway, so I'll ponder until renewal)
@kzhe
@inthehands Thanks for this insightful thread. I’ve also been trying out Kagi this last couple of months, and been happy with it, but did not know about this thing with Brave. Disappointing to see them going down this path.
@inthehands I e-mailed him, said that I thought it was a bad decision, and that I was cancelling my subscription unless the cooperation with Brave was cancelled. The replies I got did not give me any hope that he would reverse course.
Part of why I have always been a (self-serving) proponent of humanities folks in tech - we deal with humans, not machines. I'm glad to have come to the career when it was simple to be a self-taught software person.
@grechaw Indeed. And I’m a complete weirdo who believes there is zero contradiction in being both a tech person and a humanities person.
(You might enjoy my pinned thread on taking a course about the letters of Paul.)
@inthehands
Thanks for this, I haven't given Kagi $$ yet, was just using them when DDG didn't come up with what I was looking for. Will discontinue using Kagi.
Let's see if you become the bad guy for "politicizing" it. It feels I've been waiting some time to hear this voice expressed, thank you. Even as I blundered through the right-adjacent valley, wondering how all the techies can be OK with this, my response has been typically Gen X, distancing, ironic, witnessing... our choices must lead to another way.
@inthehands
The notion that an independent search engine is supposed to be apolitical is so misguided I unsubscribed. Thanks for pointing this out to me.
@inthehands it's "i'm sorry you're upset"; they don't even understand why what they did was bad, just that people are mad at them
I've been using Qwant with good results. I've got no idea what their politics are, other than the hopeful sounds they make. They're French, so could cover the spectrum.
@inthehands how about a sidestep? For anything that requires breadth I use DevonAgent. Put enough effort for inclusions and exclusions it can be handy. The only problem is for deep searches (go five layers deep on links) it takes hours