For the people that use their search and trust the company - why? Not to say I don’t trust them or trust them less than any other company claiming to be privacy and security focused, just would like to know how others made their decision.
The obvious strawman argument seems to be that since they charge for search, their business model is based on subscriptions rather than monetizing search data. Nothing would stop a company from charging for search AND selling data
On top of that it's pretty fast and the price is right.
As to data collection, I appreciate their claims a lot, but "trust" is a relative term. I think it's very unlikely that they're less trustworthy than companies such as Google. It's likely that they're more so. But even if they aren't, I'm not in a worse position than I would be if I didn't use them.
There is no way of opting out for people who care.
[1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
I read that they added a privacy pass feature that supposedly makes the two unlinkable, so I'll take another look soon.
P.S. On the topic of search engines, Brave Search has improved a lot over the past 2 years. I still think it's lagging behind Google a bit, specifically when it comes to local results in non-English speaking countries, but back then I couldn't even reliably use it look up programming docs. Kudos.
I'd say I have faith that they're doing the right thing, but it's by no means the reason I use their platform. If privacy is your main goal, I understand the hesitancy. I'm not sure how one would prove privacy (maybe that new feature they had with tokens unassociated with an account), but that would be very interesting.
This is not because I have a reason to consider them untrustworthy; I work on the assumption that we have reached peak enshittification, and that everyone on the web is selling my data.
The quality of results is good and I can customise it more than any other search engine to suit my needs.
Second, Kagi has implemented privacy pass: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html. So there is actually a way to use Kagi in a way that they cannot track you. This is very neat.
The investors would want a return on their investment soon, so you should start questioning your honeymoon period with Kagi if you’re using it.
In the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy being able to actually find stuff on the web again.
Investors have no say on how the company is run at this stage and frankly no right to anything from Kagi until they get a company valuation from selling actual shares. That's how SAFE notes work. And the founder will probably still have more shares than all VC investors combined after that.
Also, literally everything you use in daily life is made by companies who have investor backing. They are people, just like you. Some are greedy without limit just like most people, some just want to invest in quality companies with healthy business models. That's a proven concept for long-term returns.
> Investors would want a return on their investment soon.
This doesn't change the fact that Kagi is funded by VCs and the product will become a victim to product decay or "enshittification".
> Also, literally everything you use in daily life is made by companies who have investor backing.
Uh, No?
There are many 100% bootstrapped companies that don't succumb to this and are funded by just making money, even I have one.
All initial investments into a new business are VC investments, so you're basically saying that any company who has taken investments is going to become a bad business. Which is just not reality. My local grocery store was built by venture investments from the local community. You have to learn and look up the word definitions. The people here on HN have no clue what venture capital is.
A 100% boot strapped company is common when it comes to smaller businesses, but any larger venture will have investor backing. I also have a 100% boot strapped business, but I'm not building factories or international brands.
