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As many of you know, I posted recently about my experiences and outlook on Kagi, the paid search engine. It's gotten some positive press recently, ironically right after I made my blog post about why I no longer liked or trusted it. This blog post was called "Why I Lost Faith In Kagi" and was a pretty simple quick collection of my thoughts that I primarily wrote so it'd be easier to find again later to link to people when discussing Kagi versus making it a fedi thread I couldn't search for easily later. Across the four social media platforms I linked this blog post on, I'd say it got a total of about 40 likes and few reblogs.
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
I say this because this morning I woke up to an email from Kagi's CEO, Vlad, who had seen the post and was upset about it. I have an email address listed on my blog (which is why I didn't bother removing it from these logs), which is what he sent his emails to. I am posting this entire email chain in this thread and will briefly post my thoughts about it, but I feel like it's something that needs to be seen. Please take note of the subject of the email as well (EDIT: It got cropped out sorry, the subject is "Fatih [sic] can not be lost"). Also, since the alt text would get extremely long with some of the transcripts, I've provided a text dump of the emails here for screen reader users and will offer a more abridged description in the alt text: https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
@shadow@V0ldek > What I’d really like to find is something like a pihole for search, where you have your blocklist, cache of things you’ve searched already (your own mini search engine?), and then a fallback engine (DDG, bing, Google, whatever) for things it doesn’t already know.
I think SearXNG sort of fulfills this, from what I’ve heard? It’s more or less a self-hosted search engine that can combine indexes from various other engines, and I presume that means you can set your own rules and filters and such. There are public instances as well.
@shadow @V0ldek > What I’d really like to find is something like a pihole for search, where you have your blocklist, cache of things you’ve searched already (your own mini search engine?), and then a fallback engine (DDG, bing, Google, whatever) for things it doesn’t already know.
I think SearXNG sort of fulfills this, from what I’ve heard? It’s more or less a self-hosted search engine that can combine indexes from various other engines, and I presume that means you can set your own rules and filters and such. There are public instances as well.
The searxng public instances tend to be a bit shit.
They’re slow. Maybe only several seconds but that feels like an eternity in 2024.
They also frequently seem to be blocked by the services they’re scraping.
I will check out self hosting searxng