cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
The huge benefit of Kagi is that they allow you to customize results and blacklist SEO spam or deprioritize sites you don’t care about in your results. Out of the box, I’ve had a similar experience with the results being very similar to DDG, though. Over time, I suspect it’d be a better overall experience, but that’s hard to judge in 100 searches.
I’ve been on the fence whether that’s worth the cost to me, but I’ve been increasingly leaning toward biting the bullet.
I’ve been giving it a go, too. It does seem to be a bit better overall, with customized site priorities being the coolest part.
I think I could get on board for 5 bucks, but a tenskee a month is something I’ll look at twice whenever I take a critical look at the subscriptions.
I’m test driving it right now too. The subscription cost is easier to spend when you envision taking that $10 away from Google and giving it to kagi.
But google doesn’t cost 10 dollars a month to search…
You’re saying search infrastructure and hardware is free like air?
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It’s not what it costs them, it’s what they make off you. Your search traffic is their revenue stream. Remember- If a service is free, you are the product
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Fair enough, though they still serve ads, and even if you block them they still get referral fees (that bezos tried to dodge with smile)
I’d actually gotten in the habit of only using Google search incognito, I had to enable kagi in private tabs.
Thanks for your comment. Those are some useful features that I would not have known about otherwise. I’ll give it another try.
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