this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Why not run an SearXNG instance and help everyone instead? Y'know, Kagi is pretty expensive and they are also getting into AI shit.
I'm hoping just as Proton do good free stuff using money I pay them (Visionary account) Kagi does/will do the same. The Internet as a whole needs to stop being ad-supported.
I refuse to believe Proton when they do advertisements lol. They also are being pretty suspicious with ignoring XMR support since years of people requesting it. If they ever even considered it a bit, their new shit Proton Wallet wouldn't allow you to store (or only store) bitcoin, which we all know has nothing that protects your privacy.
Monero support is a massive red flag for criminal activity, even by the very low standards of crypto.
No. It's for privacy. If they don't support anonymous payments, there's literally no reason to host a .onion site just to fool people. I'd say that's a big red flag from a "privacy respecting" company.
There are pros/cons to anonymous payments. It's a bit sophomoric to claim privacy is impossible without anonymous payments.
There are most definitely many use cases for .onion sites without any sort of payments ("anonymous" or otherwise).
Yeah, tell them that when they were trying to deanonymize tor users
I'm with you to an extent but it also makes me consider what my online experience would have been if I needed money to do anything online. The internet was a huge part of my childhood and I definitely didn't have money to spend on it.
We barely had enough to get internet when I was ~10yrs old and it was much later when we got something better than dial up.
There will always be those who offer things for free, always has been. Granted, we might've gotten used to higher quality (paid for by ads) and will need to "settle" for lower quality if we don't pay with money - but I think for humanity's sake this is something that needs to be done.
I've signed up for the €5 a month subscription at kagi and I've never used my whole quota.
Granted I expect it's overly expensive if you live in a developing country like Eritrea or the United States
5 euros a month for 300 searches. Definitely not worth it. I live in germany.
Like I say, I've never used all 300 because most of it is inane stuff that can still be googled
Though aye, if you're rabidly searching for really specific furry porn, I can see it running out
I pay 25EUR for a family subscription. Unlimited queries. Also means the risk of family members downloading malware (through paid ad results) is a lot lower.
Can you expand on how running your own SearXNG helps others? Does it contribute to some shared index or something?
SearXNG is a meta search engine, which means it gets the search results from other search engines (Google, Bing, Qwant, etc.) and show them to you. It acts a proxy, thus hiding the users IP. This means Google can't target ads based on your IP and also can't make a profile about you.
What IP is Google getting if I self host the instance?
The instance's IP
Right. So, my IP. Which is the same (IP-wise) as if I'd just searched Google directly, leaving aside the benefits of searching other engines simultaneously.
I've also seen people suggest we should open our self-hosted SearXNG instances to others and let random people submit searches to it thereby causing searches to appear to come from my home IP address. That strikes me as a terrible idea given what some people search on the web. I have also never run a TOR exit node.
I use Kagi myself and I was hooked after using their free trial so I'm comparing to that.
When I submit a search to Kagi, Google (and their other downstream search engines) gets the search from Kagi. Yes, that means I have to trust Kagi to some extent but as we can see, there are obvious problems with SearXNG whether using it myself or opening it to others.
The AI features are mentioned further up the thread as a negative but I disagree. I recently cancelled my subscription to ChatGPT ($20/mo) and upgraded my Kagi subscription ($25/mo) which gives me searching and access to all the most popular LLMs which I do use from time to time, mostly for code help. Personally, it's a great value.
I didn't even know about the AI features when I started paying for it. That "side" of Kagi is fully optional and very unobtrusive.
It is somewhat like a TOR exit node indeed. Though you can easily prove your innocence by saying that you did not make these searches but that you merely run a meta search engine that helps others protect their privacy. Even the TOR project has templates for exit nodes to submit them to the government or whoever is contacting them in those cases.
https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/tor-abuse-templates/
Yeah, I'm not out to complicate my life in that way.
Alright. You do you, pal.