it's certainly becoming one in the western world.

You seem to be misinformed. Kagi's privacy pass cryptographically proves that you're allowed to search, without having anything link back to your account. It doesn't get more anonymous than that.

Huh? How exactly do you package privacy? It’s something you can lose, but not something you can buy.

Kagi is selling search, same as Google. The difference is that you can only pay in dollars, not data.

I agree it’s overpriced, but this is where we are. The actual market for genuine web services is atrophied after 30 years of neckbeards naively insisting that web services should be free. Search should cost $5/year by now. But oh well, 30 years too late is better than never.

You are always paying for search. This is just directly and transparent.

Because kagi team is active on lemmy, same for proton and mullvad even apple employees were here reading and analyzing information from tech committees.

I hate the internet

If you use search many times a day, like for work, then it's a much more pleasant and efficient experience. Search results are customizeable, you have a personal blocklist, AI slop farms filtered out, etc. But yeah it's a hard sell for the casual user.

Yeah i thought they wrote this article ending with "contact us to get free education tier" but instead it's an ads for the paid education tier with free trial.

Yeah. They do offer Kagi free for libraries for a year, so I’m curious how much they actually charge for education plans

https://kagi.com/libraries

As far as public education, yeah Kagi doesn't have the legal and compliance framework to even attempt. You'd also need to provide an alternative to the whole docs/drive/etc ecosystem.

For like colleges though, I think there's a more viable path — I can't see their purely per-seat pricing model working though; and is also the problem I see with their "teams" plan. The better way there is to either provide a hybrid and/or totally ala carte pricing model, one where you pay per seat and also get a number of searches added to the whole plan ($3/seat + 250 searches); and another where you don't have seats and instead just accumulate searches and pay at the end of the month based on your search volume. Otherwise the upfront $10/user seat costs in their current billing are hard to justify.

Fourtunately there are free options that dont habe AI, ads, sponsored content, or steal your data.

SearXNG ftw!

They're paying for Google too, but they're using the credit card of their students' privacy.

As with some of the comments on that post, I don't find the author of your linked post, nor the 'lori' who wrote the post they refer to make a terribly compelling argument of why people should not use Kagi.

They afforded chrombooks for every individual student, I dont expect they couldnt afford it. It would be cool if Kagi could cut them a deal. I just started using Kagi last week, I really like it.

They're currently the best search engine - that's a fact.

Whether or not that's something worth paying for will really depend on what kind of searches you do. Personally, I have found that most of my searches were pretty basic and could easily be found by using something like DDG(Bing), and if unsuccessful, Ecosia(Google). On top of that, they use Yandex. So I didn't feel they are worth it for me.

I ended up paying 5 eur / month for Uruky. Cheaper, I really like the small team behind it and I'm supporting european, big-tech independent indexes, they're also really transparent.I wrote about them awhile back. One of the problems with Kagi is again you can never be sure where your money goes to, for all you know they might be using Bing and Google for 80% of your searches. They're no longer transparent and even removed all mentions of Yandex from their documentation.