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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
yall really are making me want to massively overextend and start that federated search engine project based on human-driven indexing and whichever APIs each instance wants to query and cache. yes, like a fancy web directory
maybe this is a good idea for a FreeAssembly project once Philthy’s in a good state? it’s a better idea than starting a shitty Wikipedia clone at least
(feels quite fucky to type the following without coming across as a naysayer; not quite the intended meaning, but… I guess you’ll see)
it’d probably be cool if this could exist, but also there’s a couple of extremely hard problems in going for it, along with a couple of (to my current knowledge) entirely unsolved ones
one of the presently-unsolved things I know of is that we don’t yet have anything like scalable performant homomorphic encryption so there’s no way to do fully-private query operations on a dataset, which thus gives way to the operator snooping space combined with user privacy angles. there are some technical solutions to some aspects of this, and a number of social things that would apply too
Personally: I’d love to, but I have a conflicting non-compete so I’d definitely have to quit my job first and I’m not ready for that level of adulting. The good news is that if I ever do quit I’ll have a lot of relevant skills
Kagi basically admits they’re just piggybacking off of Google, Bing, et al, so getting into the space shouldn’t be a serious PITA.
yall really are making me want to massively overextend and start that federated search engine project based on human-driven indexing and whichever APIs each instance wants to query and cache. yes, like a fancy web directory
maybe this is a good idea for a FreeAssembly project once Philthy’s in a good state? it’s a better idea than starting a shitty Wikipedia clone at least
(feels quite fucky to type the following without coming across as a naysayer; not quite the intended meaning, but… I guess you’ll see)
it’d probably be cool if this could exist, but also there’s a couple of extremely hard problems in going for it, along with a couple of (to my current knowledge) entirely unsolved ones
one of the presently-unsolved things I know of is that we don’t yet have anything like scalable performant homomorphic encryption so there’s no way to do fully-private query operations on a dataset, which thus gives way to the operator snooping space combined with user privacy angles. there are some technical solutions to some aspects of this, and a number of social things that would apply too
might be interesting either way
definitely a hell of a big project.
Omg so much tech jargon in this comment
welcome to TechTakes!
no, welcome wasn’t the right word now was it
Personally: I’d love to, but I have a conflicting non-compete so I’d definitely have to quit my job first and I’m not ready for that level of adulting. The good news is that if I ever do quit I’ll have a lot of relevant skills
maybe this is something you’re looking for idk https://github.com/StractOrg/stract they have their own index and their own crawler
covered by 404media https://www.404media.co/this-guy-is-building-an-open-source-search-engine-in-real-time/