But if you truly care about privacy or any kind of control, just don’t use kagi

why would you say that?

Giving them your browsing history, attached to an account, for what? To store and remember a URL?

You can ask claude to write you a 10 lines userscript that integrates with google/ddg/kagi/whatever is your search engine, and hides the websites from the result page.

Generally, you shouldn't do server side what you can do on client side

Say more, or say less.

Uh, what? Wanna explain why?

How does one make a comment like this, I wonder, and not substantiate.

I assume you mean because you have to be logged in in order to use kagi?

They do have anonimised logins for this though: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass which is a pretty good mitigation IMO. As it's a paid service of course proving you paid is a must.

And as for control, I can't agree there. Kagi offers more control than any other search engine through its lenses and the ability to influence the ranking of search results from specific sites.

I don't use their service at the moment, I'm pretty ok with my self hosted SearXNG and I like being able to customise the look and feel there too. But Kagi is excellent as search engines go.

Appreciate the SearXNG mention. Learned something new, thank you!

Note that if you are using the same instance of SearXNG every time and it is not shared with many others you haven't gained anything in term of privacy. You'd need to auto shut down and spin up new instances on others servers/ip/providers on regular short intervals to do so or use a constellation of hundreds of instanced served randomly from the same fqdn.

True but I'm not doing it for privacy.

I'm doing it for having a clean adfree experience, having multi-engine searches and having control over which engine and features it uses. And it also helps really well against search engine enshittification by raising search results higher when they're received from multiple engines so you have less of the clickbait crap that search engines promote these days.

It has some amazing features where it can search much more specific sites if you search for things like books, movies etc instead of treating everything like a general search. And everything can be tailored and tweaked.

sadly sometimes it's e-commerce websites where you actually want to buy their product and they interrupt you three times with "sign up to our newsletter and get 5% off with the code" modals, like they're actively trying to frustrate me into not giving them my money

It's infuriating when you click on the search box, start typing, and the modal pops up disrupting your attempt to give them money.

Back in the ‘90s and early aughts, there was a well-known book called Web Pages That Suck.

One of their biggest refrains, was “Stop interfering with your user, when they are giving you money.”

They used to regularly hold up Amazon as the platonic ideal of an e-commerce site, but even Amazon has devolved into mis-click hell. Nowadays, I often click a button that takes me to some useless page, instead of the cart.

They usually succeed with me. Or if I really plan on purchasing I sign up to get the discount only to immediately opt out, so what’s the point? We’ve been furnishing a new house and so getting usually ~15% off a high ticket purchase I’m already decided on buying just for giving them my email which I also already will be giving them when I purchase is a good enough deal that I’ll do it temporarily. So much so, I can only think about how is this a good ROI for them.

That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.

The ROI is you’re more likely to buy thinking you get a discount, and especially after doing the work to get the discount code.

The trick is it’s priced assuming that discount will be taken off.

It is an allusion of discount if they run those and opting out never works hr information is now stored on god knows how many servers.

They do it though because it works. Spin to win too is a total fabrication but gambling works. Just because something works doesnt mean there shouldnt be regulations against it.

> opting out never works hr information is now stored on god knows how many servers.

Just sign up for the newsletter with a disposable email to use the code. Or search for "<website name> promo codes" and the newsletter one will usually be the first result.

Burner emails work but they usually send it so you need to receive it. Assuming they use a generic code searching works but often they generate the code for single use at the time the email is sent. Promo code logic can get complex.

Best way i found is to buy when there is some xyz site wide sale but even then they can be sketch and jack up prices. Philips does this with their hue lights every time. Hilarious in how obvious it is.

Burner email services like AnonAddy, iCloud "Hide my email", et al work well for actual receipt but also provide isolation.

> That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.

I get the impression that that stupid wheel is some kind of feature of one or several large e-commerce platforms shops can enable. If the shop is genuinely stocking useful products in some niche I make it a point to e-mail them and tell them how scammy it makes their site look.

DuckDuckGo has that feature, too.

They have it hidden behind a … menu though which is unfortunate because it’s a great feature to have.

That is a decent feature.

Edit: if it influences their search ranking it may be able to be gamed though.

Many people forget — Google once used to penalise sites with some abusive behaviours, so webmasters had a vested interest in having decent web pages if they wanted good rankings.

Somewhere along the line (when Prabhakar Raghavan was running search maybe?) that seems to have changed. Part of it might be cookie popups (thanks EU*). Part of it might be giving networks using Google’s own ad networks a free pass. In any case, webmasters had no reason to stop abusive/dark UX any more.

*This is not an anti-EU jab. It’s a jab at an inadequate technical measure. Given how many sites people visit, cookie consent popups do not provide informed consent, and further legitimise popups.

Paywalls used to get you deranked, too. Serving different content to Googlebot than what a user would see was considered an attempt to game it, and the domain would be penalized.

the point of the EU law wasnt to get everyone to plaster banners saying they're selling or giving away your personal info, the point was to make websites stop doing it by shaming them with the banner if they chose to continue anti-privacy behaviors.

the problem isnt the EU, it's the websites

Well if the solution doesn't work in real world, it is EU's problem

Some have done it (repo includes links to main articles covering the process): https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-watchdog

Note: I work for sentry.

~Dont be evil~

During Sunday Pichai, google has become a S*t hole. He sucked up all goodwill