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Honest questions: 1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network? 2)

by Yhippa 4y ago

Honest questions: 1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network? 2) Does personalized weighting lead to echo chambers like, say, Reddit? I need to try this out but I'm curious about how they will defeat SEO. To me, that is what has made Google search results less helpful to me the past several years and would lead me to look elsewhere.

vlmutolo 4y ago
> 1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network? Lots of people value privacy in and of itself. If you don’t care about Google recording and mining your search history, then a core value proposition of Kagi doesn’t apply to you. Kagi is targeting the subset of the market that cares enough about privacy to pay for it.
gamegoblin 4y ago
1. It disaligns the incentives. As the customer, I want the best search results. As the provider, google wants me to click ads. These are not always compatible. 2. Personalized weighting just means I can downweight websites I know to be not what I'm looking for, like Pinterest, and I can upweight websites that probably are more like what I want -- stackoverflow, wikipedia, etc.
- poszlem 4y ago
  > It disaligns the incentives. This is the best, and frankly the only good argument I know. The privacy concerns are IMO overblown, but the skewed incentives are the main reason why we ended up with internet that is toxic and miserable.
Nextgrid 4y ago
> What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating, it really depends how it is monetised - is it only used to target ads on other products or does the search engine itself have ads? The former option is potentially fine as long as you're happy with the privacy concerns. The latter option (which is what Google is) directly incentivises them to degrade search quality so that you spend more time on the search engine and potentially click an ad. Furthermore, when it comes to a large company such as Google that also happens to control ads/analytics on many other sites, it incentivises them to preserve ad/analytics-infested sites in search results (since they make money and/or collect data off it) despite those being very good signals a site is spammy and should be downranked. (for antitrust reasons they will never explicitly talk about prioritising sites with their own ads or explicitly degrading search experience - however the unspoken rule is that projects/ideas that might improve the experience and lead to less ad impressions overall might not succeed for various innocent-looking reasons, giving them a layer of plausible deniability) A user-funded search engine doesn't have those misaligned incentives and can beat SEO by using common hallmarks of spammy content such as presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links and other marketing tools (used to measure the effectiveness of the spam) as negative ranking signals. This will be difficult to evade by the spam sites because the same techniques they'd need to evade search engine detection (such as self-hosting and proxying the ads) are common in ad-fraud and would be prohibited by their advertisers, thus cornering the spammers in a game where the only winning move is not to play.
- philwelch 4y ago
  > Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating I guess it depends on your threat model, but there are also privacy concerns with a search engine you have to make a paid account for.
  - g_p 4y ago
    This is a good point as well. Ultimately any search engine has user IP address though, modulo VPN and similar technologies. For a regular user who signs into Google to use Gmail, they'll be searching while signed in anyway - no real loss of privacy, and arguably much gained by not broadcasting anything into the adtech data pools. For a very privacy conscious user who wants to be anonymous and is already taking steps like using VPNs, there is a loss in privacy due to payment info being attached. (You could argue Google accounts could be pseudo anonymous, but for most users they're anything but - location data, history, emails and search queries make them totally identified). There are technical solutions to avoid the payment linking issue (cash in envelope, selling gift cards via retail, etc), or through using blind signature schemes to separate payment from usage. The user experience of these options is likely to be far more complex, with people losing access and customer service fiascos with people being unable to prove they signed up before etc.
    - philwelch 4y ago
      > modulo VPN and similar technologies Which is an option with Brave and DDG, but obviously not Kagi. Yes, obviously, this is only going to be a relatively fringe use-case that depends on the user having generally decent opsec.
  - brookst 4y ago
    I don’t think the argument is that “paid” is more private than “free” in a general sense, just that Kagi specifically can allow you more privacy than Google because Kati’s business model is direct monetization. No need to argue the abstract; all that matters is the specific. If Kagi specifically is abusing trust, I’d love to hear it.
shepherdjerred 4y ago
Monetization of my history just feels gross to me. If it were a smaller company I wouldn't care as much, but Google as about as big as it gets. One of the main reasons I use Kagi is similar to why I use Firefox & Brave. I want to encourage competitors so that innovation continues to happen.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  This is truth. Monipolies are anti competitive.
nprateem 4y ago
Basically none if you use an extension to auto delete your cookies and ad blockers. You have more potential privacy issues by paying for a search engine.
- freediver 4y ago
  Maybe less anonymity, although you can use anonymous email and credit cards - there are many providers out there. But a search business where you pay for search is more likely to be privacy-respecting than a search business where a 3rd party (advertiser) is paying for your searches, just because the business model aligns incentives.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
1) I often search for things I’m curious about but find repulsive at a moral or ethical level. I don’t want the assumption of “searched for = agrees with/motivated by/associated with” indelibly hashed against my identity then sold to anyone and everyone for any purpose. If I lived in areas where thought is a crime, the ability for a company to assemble a complex personality profile is even more concerning as it’s discoverable and could be used to screen people against an ideology. While I don’t worry about that today, I don’t know who holds the guns tomorrow. 2) or HN? :-) I also just don’t want to see tons of advertisements pretending to be results and figuring out which is which. Google also seems to be particularly susceptible to SEO garbage. Between their own ads pretending to be relevant and SEO garbage pretending to be relevant, I find myself scrolling through pages upon pages of advertisements hoping to find some signal. With Kagi I spend much less time discerning between garbage trying to capture my attention and something about what I’m looking for. (I’d note here, as a bit of a non sequitur, that if/when something like chatgpt becomes more accurate and can provide references and do information retrieval better, I’ll be happier to use that at an even higher price point than Kagi. I find the ability to ask a question and get an answer even better than searching for documents that contain symbols in my term and personally assessing the contents for clues about an answer to my actual question. ChatGPT reminds me of the moment I clicked “I’m feeling lucky” on some webpage someone sent me in 1998 - the tedium of answering questions had reduced dramatically. That said, I think the semantic understanding required to answer questions in the ChatGPT way will allow for even more nuanced personalization, and I’m afraid even more insidious (1)’s.)

by Yhippa 4y ago

vlmutolo 4y ago

> 1) What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Is it the ads served to you across websites that use the same network? Lots of people value privacy in and of itself. If you don’t care about Google recording and mining your search history, then a core value proposition of Kagi doesn’t apply to you. Kagi is targeting the subset of the market that cares enough about privacy to pay for it.

gamegoblin 4y ago

1. It disaligns the incentives. As the customer, I want the best search results. As the provider, google wants me to click ads. These are not always compatible. 2. Personalized weighting just means I can downweight websites I know to be not what I'm looking for, like Pinterest, and I can upweight websites that probably are more like what I want -- stackoverflow, wikipedia, etc.

poszlem 4y ago
> It disaligns the incentives. This is the best, and frankly the only good argument I know. The privacy concerns are IMO overblown, but the skewed incentives are the main reason why we ended up with internet that is toxic and miserable.

Nextgrid 4y ago

> What are the downsides to having your search history monetized? Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating, it really depends how it is monetised - is it only used to target ads on other products or does the search engine itself have ads? The former option is potentially fine as long as you're happy with the privacy concerns. The latter option (which is what Google is) directly incentivises them to degrade search quality so that you spend more time on the search engine and potentially click an ad. Furthermore, when it comes to a large company such as Google that also happens to control ads/analytics on many other sites, it incentivises them to preserve ad/analytics-infested sites in search results (since they make money and/or collect data off it) despite those being very good signals a site is spammy and should be downranked. (for antitrust reasons they will never explicitly talk about prioritising sites with their own ads or explicitly degrading search experience - however the unspoken rule is that projects/ideas that might improve the experience and lead to less ad impressions overall might not succeed for various innocent-looking reasons, giving them a layer of plausible deniability) A user-funded search engine doesn't have those misaligned incentives and can beat SEO by using common hallmarks of spammy content such as presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links and other marketing tools (used to measure the effectiveness of the spam) as negative ranking signals. This will be difficult to evade by the spam sites because the same techniques they'd need to evade search engine detection (such as self-hosting and proxying the ads) are common in ad-fraud and would be prohibited by their advertisers, thus cornering the spammers in a game where the only winning move is not to play.

philwelch 4y ago
> Beyond the obvious privacy concerns I'm not going to bother repeating I guess it depends on your threat model, but there are also privacy concerns with a search engine you have to make a paid account for.
- g_p 4y ago
  This is a good point as well. Ultimately any search engine has user IP address though, modulo VPN and similar technologies. For a regular user who signs into Google to use Gmail, they'll be searching while signed in anyway - no real loss of privacy, and arguably much gained by not broadcasting anything into the adtech data pools. For a very privacy conscious user who wants to be anonymous and is already taking steps like using VPNs, there is a loss in privacy due to payment info being attached. (You could argue Google accounts could be pseudo anonymous, but for most users they're anything but - location data, history, emails and search queries make them totally identified). There are technical solutions to avoid the payment linking issue (cash in envelope, selling gift cards via retail, etc), or through using blind signature schemes to separate payment from usage. The user experience of these options is likely to be far more complex, with people losing access and customer service fiascos with people being unable to prove they signed up before etc.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    > modulo VPN and similar technologies Which is an option with Brave and DDG, but obviously not Kagi. Yes, obviously, this is only going to be a relatively fringe use-case that depends on the user having generally decent opsec.
- brookst 4y ago
  I don’t think the argument is that “paid” is more private than “free” in a general sense, just that Kagi specifically can allow you more privacy than Google because Kati’s business model is direct monetization. No need to argue the abstract; all that matters is the specific. If Kagi specifically is abusing trust, I’d love to hear it.

shepherdjerred 4y ago

Monetization of my history just feels gross to me. If it were a smaller company I wouldn't care as much, but Google as about as big as it gets. One of the main reasons I use Kagi is similar to why I use Firefox & Brave. I want to encourage competitors so that innovation continues to happen.

qualudeheart 4y ago
This is truth. Monipolies are anti competitive.

nprateem 4y ago

Basically none if you use an extension to auto delete your cookies and ad blockers. You have more potential privacy issues by paying for a search engine.

freediver 4y ago
Maybe less anonymity, although you can use anonymous email and credit cards - there are many providers out there. But a search business where you pay for search is more likely to be privacy-respecting than a search business where a 3rd party (advertiser) is paying for your searches, just because the business model aligns incentives.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

1) I often search for things I’m curious about but find repulsive at a moral or ethical level. I don’t want the assumption of “searched for = agrees with/motivated by/associated with” indelibly hashed against my identity then sold to anyone and everyone for any purpose. If I lived in areas where thought is a crime, the ability for a company to assemble a complex personality profile is even more concerning as it’s discoverable and could be used to screen people against an ideology. While I don’t worry about that today, I don’t know who holds the guns tomorrow. 2) or HN? :-) I also just don’t want to see tons of advertisements pretending to be results and figuring out which is which. Google also seems to be particularly susceptible to SEO garbage. Between their own ads pretending to be relevant and SEO garbage pretending to be relevant, I find myself scrolling through pages upon pages of advertisements hoping to find some signal. With Kagi I spend much less time discerning between garbage trying to capture my attention and something about what I’m looking for. (I’d note here, as a bit of a non sequitur, that if/when something like chatgpt becomes more accurate and can provide references and do information retrieval better, I’ll be happier to use that at an even higher price point than Kagi. I find the ability to ask a question and get an answer even better than searching for documents that contain symbols in my term and personally assessing the contents for clues about an answer to my actual question. ChatGPT reminds me of the moment I clicked “I’m feeling lucky” on some webpage someone sent me in 1998 - the tedium of answering questions had reduced dramatically. That said, I think the semantic understanding required to answer questions in the ChatGPT way will allow for even more nuanced personalization, and I’m afraid even more insidious (1)’s.)