Okay, but it doesn't know where I am. When I type 'dunkin', Google doesn't just know I want hours for a dunkin donuts, it knows which two or three stores I'm probably looking at hours for and it does it without me having to specify.
If I'm looking stuff up on my phone or just want a quick answer, I actually do want the context of all that data on me. I like that when I type the word 'glamour' it knows I'm probably thinking of the bard subclass, and that when I type 'Conan' it knows I probably mean Exiles, not O'Brien. I mean like, I know it doesn't know these things, but it fills in that gap much faster.
I do like the way their search is layed out for doing something more complex, though. It really is a better designed search engine, but I feel like a search engine is the one place I want data collection of some kind, literally because it benefits me.
Wow, it's been ages since I've used google without a layer of privacy in between and haven't realized how comfortable it would be with all its spying power enabled. But anyways, I find it scary that companies like google try to get so much information about you that they then sell to third parties. I'd rather have less comfortability if it means I have control over my own data. And I guess Kagi could be better in this regard if they value your privacy while still having some data on you.
Honestly, if I could get Kagi to slurp up all my Google data and use it without any extra clicks, I'd probably switch. I don't like having it sold to third parties, but it saves a ton of time when used for the actual reason they ought to have it in the first place.
I also don't imagine that stopping using google would have a tremendous effect on the amount of data gathered on me at this point. Like, I've taken my personal projects off of google so they won't scrape the data, but half the internet is gathering metadata. It's not going to stop all the sites I visit from gathering it all together. Admittedly, uBlock might in cases where tracking is built into ads.
But like, weighing it against making my ability to move through the world more functional, my spite for Google's information vacuum isn't so great that I can't just like, use the thing anyway. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and I'm not really sure there's such a thing as a moral or ethical human society. There's already a lot of other shit I'm forced to tolerate out of necessity just to be a human being, and while I don't love something else being added to the pile, at least it's not like tortured animals or intentionally bombing children.
To be clear, I would love an alternative and have actively sought one. Within the past 6 months I've tried both DuckDuckGo and Kagi. I stopped using both out of frustration with the need to constantly specify my location.
Yeah, I get that. While "no ethical consumption under capitalism" shouldn't be used to justify passivity, each individual person has their own limits to what they can reasonably achieve. Sometimes when I'm traveling and my anxiety peaks, I also eat dairy products/eggs because I cannot mentally afford to search for vegan alternatives. It's so hard to always keep the balance between doing what you can and trying to stay sane.
I've been using startpage for years and don't really miss the missing location features. But I hardly leave the house anyways.
No matter how many times people claim "X search engine" is universally better than Google, it has just never been true in my experience. And this is coming from someone who puts up with the frustrations of other search engines to avoid Google's data harvesting. Like Google's search engine can have rapidly deteriorated and still be miles better than the competition. Both can be true, but people always seem to act like the SEO spam has made it unusable and that is just not reality at all.
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
No, I'm not having that! That's rewriting of history. I remember when Google came out, it was pretty much as good as Altavista and no more. It had the additional appeal that it looked (for the time) unique and fresh and had a weird name, I remember getting my friends to try this "weird new search engine that might someday beat Altavista" but it never revolutionised anything in terms of search results at the time.
Also Altavista was not getting progressively worse, I still remember the days when you could type a simple dictionary word into a search engine and have it return 0 results. Altavista is what changed that, not Google.
I don't know. I find the underlying principle of kagi a bit problematic. For example, look at what they say in this piece here. I get that any search engine that is "free" but sponsored by ads is gonna be skewed towards the advertisers. But like kagi phrases their response, it sounds somewhat classist. If you can afford a good search engine, you deserve better search results. If you don't, well, your bad. I mean, it's OK if they finance themselves by being a paid service. But this should be only a necessary first step before finding other ways to finance themselves.