Image search was already good and hugely improved - and the native reverse image search is also pretty cool!

I really hope they improve their pricing/usage plan. I wasn't that impressed with the results when I first tried Kagi out, but was planning on giving it some more chances down the line. Sometimes it takes a few tries before a new tool really sticks for me.

Unfortunately they ended that sort of trial usage with the new payment plans. I'm already wary of starting any new saas payments, and one where I need to worry about how many searches I'm doing per month is a non-starter.

It's definitely worth a month, just to see what your search baseline is at. I was worried i'd be on an expensive tier but i am far lower on average than i thought. And they increased the quota by 50% recently.

I'm really surprised how tech savy HN users easily tight their search queries to credit card. Isn't that worry you in terms of privacy?

I never heard of Kagi before. I'm always looking for ways to increase my privacy, so I study the site a little bit and I find this:

"Next, your request will find its way to our servers hosted on Google Cloud platform, where our main application is running [...]"

I stopped there. I'm not going to subscribe. But I appreciate that at least they were honest.

Honest question, but is there something specific you're concerned about? Do you expect Google spies on Containers running on their servers, such as decoding RAM or decoding Network Traffic (that isn't ssl encrypted, at least)?

I get the paranoia, but honestly i'm more paranoid of Kagi themselves than i am of processes running on AWS or GCP.

The percentage of the internet you'd be unable to use if you couldn't use any cloud provider for fears of 5 Eyes-like monitoring is kinda intense for me. So i'm not sure where realistic and excessive paranoia meet with respect to AWS or GCP infra.

Thoughts?

It's not very hard to spy inside a container, or even a bare-metal server if you have hardware access and the network is yours, but why would they even do that when there are a lot of very easy methods of profiling users available to them?

I didn't mention but they also use search results from google.

1) A direct contract with Kagi: Pay less for our services in exchange for user's data ("anonymized"). And google has a lot of services that Kagi may benefit greatly: servers, low latency to google search results, "personalized" google search results without ads and the various sheganigans google uses to promote websites, up to the point where all searches actually comes directly from google.

2) No contract, just get my IP and the search string the Kagi server asks of google at the same time. I don't think there are enough simultaneous searches on Kagi to actually prevent IP-to-search-string pairing. Then do the google-ad-to-IP match on the target sites that I visit.

> but why would they even do that when there are a lot of very easy methods of profiling users available to them?

That's fair, but the GCP was mostly what i was relying to.

Fundamentally do you dislike Kagi's offering more than Mulvad (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402162) on the privacy front? Clearly the two companies have different goals, so i'm not trying to equate them. Just curious.

Also what search engine _do_ you use then? I feel like all of them would be disqualified?

> I feel like all of them would be disqualified?

Yes, they are. Until I find a better one, I use DDG.

I might try Mulvad next. I didn't use VPN before, except to access my own LAN.