@kagihq is the very interesting project for a paid search engine, without tracers and with an accuracy in identifying results such as to exclude all Google spam.
Those who believe that #Kagi's costs are too high, should reflect on a small detail: if Google lets all those searches be done "for free", who pays those costs? The answer might seem simple: "advertisers".
Yet this would be an incomplete answer: like saying that rain is caused by clouds!
In reality, those costs are paid by users, by being milked and letting Google extract their "value", a bit like in the human farm in Matrix...
We first heard about Kagi on the @lealternativewebsite (unfortunately, since then the prices have increased a lot, raising many doubts about the sustainability of the project) and recently Cory Doctorow also talked about it on@pluralistic
In any case, we are really happy that a service like Kagi's, effective and respectful of users' privacy, has landed here in the #Fediverse.
I can only speak for myself, but I like to keep posted when important people and organizations are opening accounts on the Fediverse. :)
It's funny that Kagi included "fediverse forums" functionality in their search before they decided to join Mastodon - one would think the search functionality required a bit more.
I think I stopped paying for Kagi at the third or fourth controversy I heard about, I can't remember which one. I wasn't exactly happy about the implication that paying for Kagi means giving money to the bigot founder of Brave.
Every complaint I’ve heard about the owner has been ridiculous. I don’t know about the bigotry though. It’s better and has been since it wasn’t hip if it’s actually hip now. I’m swapping between it and my own searxng instance.