this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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My comment says search engines. I specifically said that because I was not including Google. I know you specifically mentioned Google because other privacy search engines prove what you say as false. By that logic literally everything with consumers is a product, that's such a vague statement.
You are also DuckDuckGo's, StartPage's and Qwant's products. They sell your space on screen for ads. Now, they haven't enshittificatied to nearly the same degree as Google and full enshittification happening is of course not a given but making the user a product is basically step #1 to enshittification.
With Kagi, the product is the search engine service. You pay money and in return you get search results, lenses, bangs and all those neat little features. You are not being sold to 3rd parties. (At least not right now but I honestly don't see that happening any time soon.)
I'll just use AdBlock and get best of both worlds. You also have no idea what kagi is doing with your data, it's inherently eventually unprivate since it relies on a login. There is nothing wrong with ads, and they keep the service free and able to use it anonymously. The search results on free search engines are also the product here, since they only get paid from using them for results. All products require a userbase so that doesn't even make sense.
We in fact do have an idea what they do and don't do:
https://kagi.com/privacy
These terms are legally binding. If they did log searches despite these terms, that could end their business.
Not anonymous != unprivate.
Even if it was, I don't think it's different for all of the other search engines. For example: I do not believe for one second that Google can't identify you without being logged into your account; even with all the blocklisting your typical ad-blocker does.
Go try and fool https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/ if you want to go try how little even things like incognito mode help against identification on the web and this is all just relatively simple client-side analysis without behaviour tracking.
I disagree that there is nothing wrong with modern propaganda but that's a topic for another discussion.
No. That's the thing, they're not. Search results only serve to attract users. They only need to be good enough to be acceptable to users; everything beyond that is a waste of time and money from a business perspective.
They receive exactly $0 from you as a user. There is no sale contract between you. Therefore, you are not their customer, you are the product they sell to their actual customers.