Kagi is really shaping up to be a great search experience. The fact that it’s going to be a paid service is a killer feature. No ads is incredibly refreshing.
You sound like the type to also disable cookies and use an adblocker and not use Chrome, but there are many ways Google can collect your credit cards or associate your purchase history. From Google Analytics to remembering the card in Chrome and syncing Chrome browser history to having a Gmail record of your purchases or even adding a credit card to your phone to use with Google Pay on an Android device… or while we’re at it, using Android. Lots of spying there unless you run Blokada Proxy or equivalent. Not to mention, if cookies are disabled, but you click on a Google ad, Google will likely help track the purchase with the third-party advertiser’s site using some alternative identifier they could assign outside of a cookie. After all, if you control the URL, you can inject session tokens. Not saying they do, but they could, and they probably make the data available in Google Analytics somehow, even with cookies disabled.
I realized the other day that thanks to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, these big companies know a ton about you just because your employer uses them. For example you might not be signed in using that web browser, but your work account just leaked your IP address or device metadata to Google, so they know it’s you anyway. It’s almost impossible to stay completely private online, these days, and still participate in the economy or society.
I would, though, draw a line and say that just because it’s possible to trace doesn’t mean it should be allowed… but we’ve all seen how the most effective countermeasures isn’t legislation but instead clients that can outsmart the trackers - like adblockers, privacy VPN proxies, DNS black holes, and Apple’s iCloud Private Relay (or similar VPNs) which would anonymize your IP address, partially defeating the point made earlier. (I say partially because it’s not like every packet is going to get a new IP address, that would break TCP connections… they could associate your work profile with your anonymous traffic using the same relay IP, if both traffic sources hit the same Google server from the same device, say…)
And of course we have historically shown that almost any collection of data can reveal a lot about a person, from Netflix watch history to search terms. I’m ignoring the obvious - that searching Google gives it information about you with every search.
- Google cannot legally protect payment information in any 1st, 2nd, or 3rd world country without explicit permission. There isn't a single country they operate in that will let them 'scrape' payment information in the manner which you claim.
- Any decent adblocker blocks GA cookies. GA does NOT collect payment info. Period. If you actually bothered to read that legally binding language or if you sniffed what is passed to GA you would know that. Please head back to your conspiracy subreddit and try again.
- Many folks like myself have completely left the Google ecosystem. Our adblockers block Google. We don't use google.com or Youtube. When you hit a popular Google property and notice an uptick in ads that is why. I use duck duck go as a search engine, and I personally dislike watching videos, however if you are someone who likes videos, I hear TikTok is all the rage these days.
I need to be clear here. I am not saying that it is impossible to track you, but rather, it isn't realistic or scalable across billions of users. For starters, Google would have to figure out how to beat Firefox containers or uBlock origin, and that is the simplest of problems. Next, they have to figure out how to bypass your local hosts file for a long period of time, otherwise they will get piholed...
If you use Chrome and opt out of sharing data with Google, they can still pair the ID from origin trials with your IP address and have a very good idea of who you are - or what installation of Chrome you’re using, which is basically the same thing: https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#variat...
If you anonymize your IP, and turn off tracking, then yes, not much to say there until they start fingerprinting the fonts you have installed or something…
I don't understand why Kagi is appealing, tbh. It just gives you Google and Bing results. What type of censorship does Kagi really apply? It wasn't until just recently that DDG admitted to censorship. Not sure if I can trust Kagi's promises of privacy, etc since they don't open source it...the same problem I have with DDG.
It's worth paying for (maybe not at the rates they're planning to charge sadly) just for the fact that you can click a button and never see W3Schools results in your searches ever again. Or any other spammy domain that comes up top on every other search engine.
There are Chrome extensions to remove the ones you don't want so not sure why I'd pay a premium to remove them. w3schools is the first result when I search for "php loop" so Kagi seems to be full of the same spam you are trying to escape:
I'm not sure if you're deliberately missing the point or not, but a) A Chrome extension to remove all the spam means an empty front page of search results on Google which isn't very useful, and b) I literally just told you that there's a button you can click in Kagi to never see those again - pointing out that they appear in the search results for someone who hasn't clicked that button isn't quite the win that you seem to think it is.
We're talking about Kagi, not Google. I edited my answer yesterday shortly after posting so that might be the confusion. Why would I pay a premium for a search engine that returns a full page of spam?
There's a Chrome extension that removes spam results from Kagi? Are you sure?
And again, I'm not sure whether you're just pretending to not understand what I'm saying, but I've already explained (twice) that Kagi lets you choose which spammy results you don't want to see, so "Why would I pay a premium for a search engine that returns a full page of spam?" appears to be answering someone else's post entirely. The whole point of what I'm saying is that you don't get a page full of spam, which you do get on every single one of the big, free search engines. I think I've run out of different ways to explain the same thing now so I'm going to bow out here.
