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/motiva

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.)