this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
219 points (94.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35806 readers
1948 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.

Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.

If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?

EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

same. specially considering how privacy invasive kagi is.

[–] jcrabapple@infosec.pub 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] TheMinions@lemmy.world -2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

~~I know nothing about Kagi, except that it requires an account and is paid. So I assume all searches are tied to that account and there is no way to do an anonymous search.~~

Disregard I’m a fool

[–] Rexios@lemm.ee 4 points 9 months ago (4 children)

We care about data protection: We will be good stewards of any personal information you share with us. We do not log or associate searches with an account. More at our privacy policy.

Literally the first paragraph on their website

[–] cll7793@lemmy.world 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The Patriot Act and Snowden's leaks have shown companies will go against their privacy policy to appease governments. Search engines especially are targeted by five eyes with the PRISM program where copies of all your data, linked to your payment, are sent to Five Eyes and stored. Gag orders and legal threats prevent disclosure, as has been done with prior tech companies who have tried to push back against this.

Be wary of trusting corporations with your data as monetization is a powerful incentive.

[–] SuckMyWang@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy is different though right?… right?

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

With lemmy you are trusting whatever instance your account is on, and really any federated instances since they could choose to hold onto your posts and comments

[–] asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I don't know if I believe that. It's a paid service, so the only way to enforce that unpaid users cannot search is to take a search request and check if it is coming from your account. Same with basic things like rate limiting requests. You literally need to associate your requests to an account to make basic functionality like this work.

If they do this but just don't log it, then that means there is no way for their devs to ever debug issues users have or to monitor their services. I'm highly skeptical.

Also, "trust us" is something I've heard too many times.

[–] random8847@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's a paid service, so the only way to enforce that unpaid users cannot search is to take a search request and check if it is coming from your account

That's not the same as logging.

You literally need to associate your requests to an account to make basic functionality like this work.

They just need to check the session of the user on the fly during the search operation. Once the search is done they don't need to persist any record linking the search and the user.

[–] ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 6 points 9 months ago

They don't need to tie the searches to an account. They log them anonymously. From their privacy policy:

Absent from our logs are any identifying information about your client. As such, any query or traffic logging that we do cannot be tied back to your account, ensuring that Kagi developers are the only people that the logs will ever be useful to.

[–] TheMinions@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Thanks, edited the comment!

[–] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

and am I supposed to believe such a bold claim? the only reason they give is "trust me, bro. I pinky promise I'm not logging anything".

You have one account, every search query you make is associated with that account. And even if they aren't selling that ultra sensitive data, I'm sure they are keeping logs to prevent abuse and fix bugs which could be used when a third party gains access to their servers (malicious actors, law enforcement, etc).

And that's assuming that Kagi is not mining and or selling any data themselves, which is a bold assumption given how little we know about their proprietary product. If at least they published the source code, but no. I'm supposed to trust a proprietary black box which could potentially be linking every search query back to me.

[–] moon@lemmy.cafe 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't trust or ever plan on getting Kagi, but in their defense, the "trust me bro" is a large portion of privacy services. I use Mullvad VPN and think they have a great reputation that have proved themselves. I have no however, personally checked the servers to verify myself what's running, so I am trusting then. Even when running open source software, I know none of us here have actually looked into every line of code of our browsers or our phones to see what's all running. It's simply unfeasible, so trust and reputation is still required at the end of the day.

[–] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That's absolutely true. The problem is that, to make use of VPN services, it's required to have an account or other identifier.

But that's no true for search engines. If I wanted to, I could make completely anonymous searches using SearXNG or DDG from different IPs and they would not have any way to correlate the search queries.

That's not true with Kagi and it's a completely unnecessary privacy risk you're taking when using it.

[–] ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

How is it privacy invasive? For example, compared to competition like Google?

[–] dwalin@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

Not op, nor i have any experience with kagi, but i suspect there is no way to do an Anonymous search with kagi.

[–] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

copypasting the other comment I made in this thread:

and am I supposed to believe such a bold claim? the only reason they give is "trust me, bro. I pinky promise I'm not logging anything".

You have one account, every search query you make is associated with that account. And even if they aren't selling that ultra sensitive data, I'm sure they are keeping logs to prevent abuse and fix bugs which could be used when a third party gains access to their servers (malicious actors, law enforcement, etc).

And that's assuming that Kagi is not mining and or selling any data themselves, which is a bold assumption given how little we know about their proprietary product. If at least they published the source code, but no. I'm supposed to trust a proprietary black box which could potentially be linking every search query back to me.

[–] DeadlineX@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago

I don’t have any skin in this game. I just wanted to point out that you went from “given how privacy invasive this particular entity is”

To

“… assuming… how little we know… could potentially”

That’s a pretty big leap from a bold and confident assertion that an entity is doing something all the way to saying that entity maybe could be doing something but we don’t know. It’s just a weird logical leap to me, and I felt compelled to mention it.