The biggest flaw I always saw in Kagi has now been addressed by this. Thank you for listening and working to make the product appealing to (almost) everyone!
That's a cool idea! Seeing the screenshot I almost immediately figured this would be related to Chaum's digital cash and blind signatures, and it seems to be cited in the linked paper. I had thought of using blind signatures for anonymous authorization, but I was not aware that there was an actual design for that application.
I think government issued digital identities should also use this.
What's to stop someone on the Kagi side from just adding a new column to the token table that has the user (with their SessionCookie) who generated the token next to it? I don't see how this can't be trivially connected to the original token generator.
I believe "Privacy Pass" uses blind signatures, so the token that the TokenResponse contains can't be correlated to the one provided in the search query, if I understand it correctly.
The tokens are "generated" on the client, and the server just gives the client enough information to make that locally generated token become "valid", without being able to link that token to a specific validation attempt
looking at it from a high level, it doesn't appear the final token ever leaves the client till it's being redeemed. There's a middle step that does get signed, but this part is not what is sent.
Implementor here. During the Privacy Pass "issuance" protocol, the client will generate a "message" that the server will process. The output from the server is returned to the client, that further modifies this output to produce the final tokens. The last client modification randomises these tokens in such a way that the server will be unable to identify to what issuance they belong.
The very cool thing is that this is the case even if the server tries to misbehave during their phase. This means that users only need to trust the client software, which we open sourced: https://github.com/kagisearch/privacypass-extension
Some posters are mentioning blind signatures, and indeed Privacy Pass can utilise these as a building block. To be precise, however, I should mention that for Kagi we use "Privately Verifiable Tokens" (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9578.html#name-issuance-pr...) based on "oblivious pseudorandom functions" (OPRFs), which in my personal view are even cooler than blind signatures
Oh, interesting. Maybe it's just on mobile, but no authors are rendering on the article for me.
Anywho, the person I replied to seemed to be willing and able to go a technical level deeper than the article, and that's something I'm also interested in reading. It sounds like they'd be allowed :)
Kagi accepts bitcoins but Vlad (the founder) mentioned on their forum that so few people use this option that it does not make sense to work on accepting Monero.
Kagi's privacy guarantee is more of a "trust me bro" and I say that as a Kagi subscriber. While they may claim that they preserve privacy or anonimity as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information nothing prevents them from associating searches with user. Even protonmail enabled logging for a particular user at one point. Their guarantee is on the same level.
At the same time, privacy pass is a very foreign concept to me. If they are transferable between devices, one could generate a couple and resell them over some other medium (even in person).
We implemented Privacy Pass exactly so that you do not need to trust any claims we make but as a user have a (provable, cryptographically) mechanism that guarantees this, with one click, whenever you need it.
the privacy pass extension is open source exactly because users can then verify the process. and yeah, to prevent reselling they've made it so you can't get infinite tokens.
(vlad here) Rather, we are opportunistic about it and we want to focus on things that make impact (which most of the time is search, not billing). If there is enough demand, we will work on Monero support - and yes I agree, buying privacy pass tokens, without even needing an account, is one of those super-cool use cases.
I'd love to pay for Kagi with crypto, the main thing for me is the steep transfer fees. Nevertheless those can be offset somewhat with bulk payments. How about ability to buy like 3 years of Kagi at a time with crypto?
When I try to go into billing in Kagi I just get forwarded to Stripe. Does Stripe process the crypto payments?
Lightning just isn't a good option as you first have to pay the expensive Bitcoin fees just to be able to use it... (And hope that you'll find a route otherwise you'll have to do it again.)
If $0.27 is an expensive fee then I don't have any answers to that.
Yeah routing can suck. First timers should use a lightning wallet with built in LSP support like ZEUS, BitKit, Phoenix, etc. Then routing is a non-issue.
People regularly overpay, so I'm not sure looking at average fees it the right lens. Monero is great, but it's trivial to get an excellent user experience with lightning nowadays that doesn't require custodians.
The reason people overpay is that it's impossible to foresee what fee will get you into the next block, so they overpay to not get stuck potentially for hours or more.
Not requiring custodians is just one part, having to rely on third-party services for basic functionality is another.
You can but its not only more effort and increases the price but also reduces privacy and anonymity because you introduce a possible point of tracking with most likely KYC exchanged BTC and a publicly viewable blockchain.
In addition to what u/akimbostrawman said, I feel like doing that would undermine long-term privacy by slowing adoption of a tool (monero in this case) in favor of something less private.
You can, but to retain anonymity you'll need to go through decentralized exchange (DEX). This is extra hassle, especially if you have never done this before.
Nobody wants to use BTC because of high fees and at this point its less a usable exchange of value than speculative asset. I personally would only ever use and trust a online service advertised as private/anonymous if it actually supported a private and anonymous currency (like some vpns do).
I agree that third party stores selling tokens without any account at all would be the ideal solution, but without an account you'd be missing out on many of the features that make kagi worth using like being able to remove certain domains from results or prioritizing types of results over others.
Add the ability to export your account config (yaml?) and use it with privacy pass. Maybe even sync it with git.
To avoid fingerprinting by config, have a page where the community can share and vote on best configs, then clone and use a popular one that suits your needs.
Their suggestion is that when using Privacy Pass you'd also send "&config=XX" where XX is an ID of a publicly shared config, so that you get the customisation of whatever config you choose without tying the config to yourself, just tying it to the searches you're doing with Privacy Pass.
So while it does add a data point that could help track you, it's not defeating the whole point.
Though the post doesn't touch on "community configs", it does touch on "the ten most popular configs", which would seem to be similar enough for this discussion.
But they still couldn't do accounting / query limiting for users on a limited queries per month plan. So you could do "yes you have assistant" or "no you don't" but their $5/month taster plan has a query limit.
Pretty cool feature. The unstated downside is that any personalization settings like dark mode, translation, and lens settings are still seemingly tied to account login.
Though those still get passed to the server, and your combination of personalization settings is likely to be globally unique, and it's almost certainly unique among the subset of users that are paranoid enough about their privacy not to store preferences in their session... But still.
We even considered variations of having some settings preserved in local storage and impact of that on anonymity. Ultimately decided that was not worth it.
Check the FAQ section (towards the end) for full details and analysis:
You could have a few built in options (like for domain filtering and customisation) for the privacy people. Could even be community sourced so there's no onus on Kagi itself.
So for example there could be a built in "developers" preset that might make domains useful to coding higher ranked (and down rank or block things like stack overflow clones). Etc etc.
Basically this could allow a smaller amount of customisation with less ability to identify a specific user.
I also use Orion and I do like the idea someone else had of integrating an option for Kagi Privacy mode into the "incognito" tabs specifically as an option!
Not only that but your searches themselves likely give Kagi more than enough information to identify you as an individual. We saw that nearly 20 years ago when AOL searches were published and people were able to track down specific individuals from their search terms. (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html)
This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient. Then $10/mo (or $108/yr) for unlimited.
I'm curious if anyone knows, are companies like Google and Microsoft making more than $10/mo/user? We often talk about paying with our data, but it is always unclear how much that data is worth. Kagi does include some numbers, over here[0], but they seem a tad suspicious. The claim is Google makes $23/mo/user, and this would make their service a good value, but the calculation of $76bn US ad revenue (2023) and $277 per user annually gives 274m users. It's close to 80% of the US population, but I though google search was about 90% of global. And I doubt that all ad revenue is coming from search. Does anyone know the real numbers? Googling I get inconsistent answers and also answers based on different conditions and aggregations. But what we'd be interested here is purely in Google /search/ and not anything else.
I don't have exact numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if 80-90% of google ad revenue comes from the ad prices they can charge for US users. I would be shocked if the percentage was less than 50-60% of revenue from US alone, which would put the value extraction per user for google at ~10$/month/user
Sorry, I mean that the revenue seems to not just be search ad revenue but ad revenue. Google's ad revenue comes from a lot of places, such as in your Android app. I assume it also includes adsense and other things.
I pay $10/month just to have search results that aren't littered with SEO spam. The time savings alone make it totally worth it for me. Everything else is a giant bonus.
$10 felt a bit steep until I realized there is probably the economies of scale at play here.
1) There is a marginal payment overhead. I'd assume $0.50-0.75, leaving their amount down to $9-ish.
2) It's a fairly niche product with a still-small userbase. ~40k users at ~$9/mo = $360k/mo (I know there's $5/mo users and $25/mo users but I'd assume there are far more $5/mo and $10/mo users than $25/mo users)
3) They have to keep the service running 24/7/365, so you have to hire devs either across multiple time-zones or compensate them enough to be OK fighting fires at 2am.
As the user of a service things like payment overhead, a small userbase, and dev salaries aren't my problem. My only concern is what I'm getting for what I'm paying.
$5 a month for fewer than 10 searches a day is clearly not a good deal. $10 a month might be worth it for some, but an extra $15 a month on top of that for AI results is kind of crazy.
For me, it's also about voting with my wallet. I'm not enthusiastic about invasive ad tech. As it stands, nobody else offers what Kagi offers at any price. If there were an equivalent service for $5/month, I'd give it a look, but there isn't.
That extra $15 a month is for access to LLMs. They currently support the Claudes, the GPTs (not o1), Mistral, Gemini, Llamma, Qwen QWQ, Nova, and DeepSeek. It's currently unlimited access in the standard chat format.
You can also choose if you want the chat to RAG search results into the context for additional info, and then cite those sources. To me, replacing a Claude/ChatGPT subscription with $15 on top of a company I already like, while also getting a bunch of other models was a no-brainer.
This. I used to host my private searxng service which is a bit like what Kagi is selling. Yes, Kagi offers site blocking, rewrites and pinning which is great. But the best part is the access to R1 combined with Kagi search which adds context.
You can just quickly write !ai to the toolbar and you have a deepseek chat open. Or !sum to summarize the current page or video.
The way I think about it is how much time do I save by having better search results. I'm on a family plan currently, but was on an unlimimited 10/month plan. At the rate I value my time, Kagi needs to save me well under an hour per month through better search results. I'm quite confident it reaches and exceeds that bar relative to google. And that's even before you get into any philosophical/moral preferences for being the direct customer rather than being the product (as in ad-supported services).
I don't know Kagi's financials, but this is usually the case for a lot of products with a smaller customer base. For example, a block of Kraft cheddar will be a lot cheaper than an equivalent-sized block from an organic local dairy. There's always a customer base that is willing to pay for a differentiating feature or value.
I'm satisfied paying for it because the product works well and saves me time. I can't say the same for a lot of the random $10 impulse buys I make in a month.
If you can pay $10/month for a better search experience, then Google's making way more than that much off your data.
Kagi saves me much more than $10 of time every month. I definitely don't regret the subscription cost. Their LLM thing (append "?" to your internet search query) is worth more than that on its own.
I’ve been paying for Kagi for a long time through all their pricing model changes and updates. I have never once hit the search limit. I know they base their tiers on market research of search volume balanced against cost of serving a query. If you’re looking for reasons not to pay for search, you’ll find them. But the pricing model is hardly one. If you want an amazing and respectful search experience, and want to back a company that’s truly doing right by users and innovating at the same time, give Kagi a try!
FWIW I signed up about 4 months ago on the starter plan and I'm definitely going to run over. I could be smarter about my searches though. I've switched to kagi on ALL of my devices, including work devices. And I could have searched to using google for most gifts/maps stuff instead.
some anecdotal data:
11/2024: 183 searches
12/2024: 360
1/2025: 376
2/2025: already at 222
Will definitely (happily) have to upgrade to the $10 plan. It's been great.
I subscribed to kagi's $5/m plan since last March, and my usage until now is around 3.3k searches, with the monthly distribution similar to yours. Some months it's more, some months it's fewer.
Currently I'm debating with myself if I should go for the $10 plan. I'm all down for supporting kagi, but surprisingly I didn't use as many searches as I thought.
One thing we noticed anecdotally (may not apply to your case) is that Kagi users search less when they switch to Kagi from other search engines, and the likely reason is that they just find things faster. Which is basically the main metric we are optimizing the product for - happy users, lower cost for us.
I thought this too but at this point I've been subscribed well over a year. On a typical workday I might use 20+ searches, but I frequently use little to no searches on weekends and holidays, etc. Ultimately I end up using right around 300 per month (averaged out across the year), so I think their pricing isn't as wild as it initially looks.
I don't know nor do I really care what other search companies are making. I pay $10/month for Kagi because it works for me and it's good. I don't even care about Kagi as a company (I don't care about any company); their search works. It's a good product, and I'm happy to keep paying for it as long as it keeps being useful while all the free competitors are still terrible. I use about 2k searches per month.
edit: Even just the ability to rank, pin, and block domains alone is crazy useful. I never need to see Pinterest in any image search results again. If I see a crappy blog spam site, I just block it and it never shows up again. It feels like these are basic, fundamental features that every search engine should have had a long time ago. It's pretty sad that Kagi is getting so much praise for doing things that really should have been standard for at least a decade (not sad in any negative way toward Kagi, but because our standards and expectations for search have dropped this low).
So funny that blocking Pinterest comes up in all discussions on Kagi (I've mentioned it myself in the past). I almost think people might pay $1 a month just to block Pinterest.
> This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient.
You can split your searches with search engine shortcuts on the desktop, and the search engine quickbar on mobile.
When I still was on the starter plan, I used Kagi whenever I had a search that if I use google, I know I will:
- get a bunch of listicles and AI slop (Kagi downranks and bundles these)
- get a buch of AI images (again, Kagi clearly labels and downranks these)
- have to do multiple google searches for, but can instead use Quick Answer for
- will get a bunch of Reddit pre-translated results for
- technical / scientific questions, because of the sites I can uprank/downrank/block
I used google for things like:
- highest building in the world
- $bandname Wikipedia / Discogs
- name of thing I can't remember but have the approximate word for
You can't expect world percentages to match US percentages. The US is only 5% of the world's population and has a very different relationship to search. Also, only 63% of the world is online, so what does "90% of global" even mean?
Back-of-the-envelope:
- 2tn searches per year.
- US is 20% of all searches.
- Us revenue is 76bn
$76bn / (2tn * 0.2) = $0.19 / search
So, getting 300 searches for less than $0.02 per search sounds like a pretty good deal.
I subscribe to an unlimited family plan. When considering how much cleaner my web experience is, it's a no-brainer. Default search engine on all our phones and devices.
They're my portal to the web. It's less like an optional web service (like a streaming service), and it feels more like I'm paying for them to be my ISP.
The reason why it's worth it is because its search works really well. I've tried DuckDuckGo, Bing and always subconsciously ended up back at Google. This is the only search service I've used that works better than Google search and I think it's a combination of them not putting ads on the search and the way they let you tweak the search to block poor quality sites. How much it costs them or how much google profits vs your payment is not really relevant to me. It's the best working search engine in my opinion.
Kagi Ultimate plan ($25/mo) includes Kagi Assistant with more than 15 different models (including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.0, ChatGPT 4o + o3 mini, DeepSeek R1 etc). That plan suddenly becomes the cheapest, IMHO. I know that paid versions of LLM services offer more advanced models, but you at least get ahead of the rate limits this way.
It's just about the best Internet-related money I spend. I get fast, quality results on a service that doesn't obviously bend over backwards to monetize me. Ironic, in a way. I thought it was spendy at first, and now I can't imagine cancelling my subscription.
Depends on how you use it. For non-developers, under 10 searches per day on average sounds right. Not everyone has a job where they sit on a computer all day.
For me, I use Kagi only at home for personal use. And most months, I don't exceed 300. Of course, if I included work related searches, then yes - 10 searches won't get me far.
I've been paying $5 a month for over a year and have hit the 300 search limit only once. I feel like I'm pretty active on the web, but perhaps I just have days where I don't search as often as others.
I assume Kagi's customers (of which I've been one since 5/22) are apt to value retaining their privacy more than Google values selling their data. That is to say, it's worth more than $10 (and more than $23 a month) for me to believe my data isn't being sold to advertisers. If you don't take that position, or set different values on it, I can certainly see why $5 or $10 a month wouldn't be worth it to you.
There's also the matter of Google search quality being increasingly bad, while Kagi's is consistently... okay. They also have a a lot of nice features, liking being able to change the weight of different sites in your list of results.
Neat! It's rare to see that a service you use actually does something that benefits the user rather that itself. An unexpected, but a really pleasant surprise.
I wish this extension would integrate better with the browser by automatically understanding the context. That is, if I'm in a "regular" mode it'll use my session, but if I'm in a "private browsing" mode (`browser.extension.inIncognitoContext`) it'll use Privacy Pass to authenticate me, without me having to explicitly do anything about it.
(I don't use Orion, as there's no GNU/Linux version.)
yeah, same. I would only use privacy pass for icognito searches COUGH P0RN COUGH mainly (let's be honest). Feel free to submit the idea on kagifeedback.org
> It's rare to see that a service you use actually does something that benefits the user rather that itself
The reason it's become so rare is most companies in this space (heck tons of tech companies period) have used a business model of offering a thing to one group of users and then turning around and selling the results of that thing to another group of users, where the latter group is the one actually driving your revenue. This by default almost assumes a hostility towards the former group because their interests will of course be at odds with the interests of the latter group.
What's refreshing about Kagi and other new tech companies is they have dumped this model in favor of having just one group that they serve and drive revenue from (ie. the 'old' model).
The other part to this is that the internet accelerates network-effects, which you can further supercharge by making your product as cheap as possible or free to the former group in your example.
It’s hard to make money by charging a lot to a small group of people since now you’re dealing with anti-network effects. Doubling the price of a product will likely more than halve your user base.
Yeah, the ad supported model has its problems, but it also makes the internet way more accessible. If we think about it, companies and people with more money are basically subsidizing these services for everyone else. They're the ones seeing the ads that keeps the lights on for users who can't afford to pay.
If everything was subscription only, a ton of people like students, low income families, people in developing countries would be shut out. "Free" services, even with their flaws, create a kind of digital subsidy. It's not perfect, but it means way more people can use these tools.
There's no reason why a subscription model could not also be used to subsidize people who can not pay, other than that companies are structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).
There are good network effect arguments about why this strategy can be effective, not simply 'altruistic.'
Ads simply make the extraction happen across the board, except that the ad model somewhat privileges technical users who know how to circumvent ads.
Think of Discord. Anyone can create and participate in a discord server. There are no ads. People with money pay for the premium features and perks and that is how the company makes money [1].
Not every product category is amenable to such business models but many are.
[1] To be fair, Discord likely sells user data to advertisers to make additional money.
> structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).
This is not true and it’s not what fiduciary duty means. Stop repeating it, it’s really dumb.
Companies very frequently do not monetize things that they could under the guise of “building brand recognition” or “establishing a user base”. It’s even as easy as “raising the price will alienate customers we think are important to long term revenue”.
It’s trivial to justify not extracting maximum price and public companies do it all of the time.
Look at Costco’s business model if you want an example
I mean, we could also just direct-pay websites (for example with Brave's Basic Attention Token model).
Imagine a utopian world where you just pay per site visit, and in return all companies selling stuff don't have an inflated advertising budget and free market effects force them to pass the savings on to you, meaning the net cost increase for you is zero. And as a side-effect, quality products float to the top, since you hear of them mostly by word-of-mouth, meaning products compete on value-per-dollar.
Sadly human psychology and economics does not work that way haha. We pay what the market will bear, and increasing sales via a torrent of ads is cheaper than increasing the value-per-dollar ratio of the product.
Our only recourse is that we punish them with our wallets, advice and habits and reward good actors.
I'm a firm believer of this but we need more people to join in.
And it already works to some degree.
I've now had a working search engine for almost 3 years.
My last 3 jobs (9 years) haven't forced me to use Windows.
I can chat and organize events without Facebook knowing.
And it is not like the quality has gone down either. My choices have mostly given me better experiences in a number of ways.
Edit:
If more people start
- advocating for better hardware and software,
- canceling subscriptions and memberships when it becomes clear they are reducing value or increasing price,
- building skills both to get independent from their current cloud (so you can move around or at least having a credibile possibility to do so)
- and for individuals to get better jobs
then I think things will change.
For inspiration: at least here in Norway, with several gym memberships, if you cancel they will quickly approach you with good offers, and they can get really good: I got several months free, a friend got offered free months and a sizable gift card.
Bonus: if more people join in this will get picked up by Wall Street and they will begin punishing this nonsense too ;-)
My base salary has doubled and I enjoy my work a lot more now that I don't have to accept all kinds of MS shenanigans to play a part in how I work.
Having a working search engine shouldn't be underestimated either: living from 2012 to 2022 knowing that search used to be a solved problem but wasn't anymore was really annoying.
Indirectly by pushing down the stock price. CEO compensation is usually tied to the stock price through options, bonuses, etc.
Directly through activist investors and shareholder groups (which nowadays usually are institutional investors) who vote to change company policies, fire the CEO, or in some cases fire the whole board.
> Yeah, the ad supported model has its problems, but it also makes the internet way more accessible. If we think about it, companies and people with more money are basically subsidizing these services for everyone else. They're the ones seeing the ads that keeps the lights on for users who can't afford to pay.
The problem (other than the obvious privacy and noise issues) is that it's not a neutral subsidy. It introduces a lot of biases.
Since advertisers are subsidizing the platform, they tilt the content toward things they want and away from messages they don't. Messages that criticize advertisers products (which include things like governments and political ideologies since they are advertisers) are de-emphasized and marginalized.
Since impressions / clicks / eyeballs are the goal, an inherent bias is introduced toward emotionally triggering and/or addictive or hypnotic content. The reason social media for example is so divisive and negative is that this keeps people engaged by triggering simple powerful emotions.
We can still provide subsidized services and media to people with low income via other means which don't have the negative consequences of ad-tech. This is why we have libraries rather than free textbooks with engagement optimizing short comics and full-page advertisements.
However, most of current fremium games are precisely based on this model (Fortnite, LoL, TF2, most of mobile games, etc...)
The service is subsidized by "whale players" that regularly spend a lot of cash, but they are a lot of freeloaders (to entertain the whales and to build brand popularity).
I think this supports my point and the OP’s example. Video game makers have figured out how to segment their customers into two groups (former and latter in the OP’s example), and this only works because they’ve made their games extremely cheap or free.
A cheap/free game supercharges network effects to amass players, each of which incrementally adds value to every other player. Most players will never directly pay enough to offset their own cost to the game maker. However, they will create a real community that draws in a small number of whale players who will directly pay for themselves and indirectly pay for all of the free players.
Not so different from the two-sided markets on Facebook and Instagram.
The main driver of hostility to users is due to ad-based business models. I think we would see a much more healthy internet if we had regulation which prohibited companies from choosing ads based on any information associated with the user that the ad is shown to. That is, any data collected in the past and any data associated with the session and request must not be taken into account when choosing the ad; two requests by different users in different locations should have the exact same ad probability distributions.
I know we are never getting this because it would kill or severely harm the business models of some of the most profitable businesses in the world.
> This by default almost assumes a hostility towards the former group because their interests will of course be at odds with the interests of the latter group.
I would generally agree that that's the "default".
However, there are cases where two sides of a market need an intermediary with which they can both independently transact, and a net benefit of that interaction is felt on both sides. The key is to construct the solution such that the intermediary depends on the goodwill of both sides of the market.
I think Kagi is somewhat flipping the script. By "taking" data from publishers for free, they are then selling it to readers at a cost. However, there is a trade off. Kagi needs to make sure publishers continue to make their content available so that it can be searchable, or used in their Assistant product. In order to do that, they need to do the opposite of what Google is doing by trying to sequester traffic on Google.com: Kagi's best interest is to make sure that they provide good value to both sides.
Indeed, using the Assistant product, the way it is structured, I very often find myself clicking through to the referenced original sources and not just consuming the summarized content.
How this evolves over time, from a product design standpoint, will be interesting to watch.
The downside of this is that if you are not on a larger network, the IP address will probably deanonymise you. Kagi knows you are logged in, and if you open a private browsing window to do a spicy search, they could link the searches. Fast switching between modes is undesirable.
Tor has its flaws and criticisms, but it's really not on Kagi to fix them. With the combination of tor and their privacy pass, Kagi has gone further in allowing their paid users access to their services than anyone else.
Disclaimer: Not associated with Kagi in anyway other than being a very happy user.
Tor has nothing to do with what GP said, which is, the flexibility offered by Kagi (to turn privacy pass on / off) is actually self defeating. If (even technical) users walk away thinking "why don't other platforms offer this", then that tells you all about the foot-gun that this flexibility brings.
(Privacy Pass in fact doesn't make sense outside of an anonymizing transport, which makes the current announcement an exercise in marketing, at best)
> Privacy Pass in fact doesn't make sense outside of an anonymizing transport
This kind of thinking is pervasive in the discussion of privacy enhancing technologies. It might not make sense against the most sophisticated attacker, but it lays the groundwork of a complex system that will be able to do so.
Allowing more users will provide herd privacy at the token generation phase. Searches being decoupled from user account primary key offers privacy in all kinds of scenario's, comparable with a browser private tab.
> > Privacy Pass in fact doesn't make sense outside of an anonymizing transport
> This kind of thinking is pervasive in the discussion of privacy enhancing technologies
It is in RFC.
Origin-Client, Issuer-Client, and Attester-Origin unlinkability requires that issuance and redemption events be separated over time, such as through the use of tokens that correspond to token challenges with an empty redemption context (see Section 3.4), or that they be separated over space, such as through the use of an anonymizing service when connecting to the Origin.
With kagi you'll get used to them making the correct choice. It's been stunning how they haven't really had any missteps
I wish my kagi t-shit could say the same. Bottom hem unraveled on the second wash, and so it's been consigned to the sleep and yard work shirts. They issued me a coupon for a free shirt as replacement, but it's yet to ship
Kagi has its share of issues. The whole shirt thing was a debacle and I wish they'd just sunk the absurd amount of money back into the product. I just often find the criticism from non-users to be disingenuous.
Just adding a $0.02 here - I placed an order for the free/gifted-with-subscription Kagi shirt and received it about a month later. Worn twice so far. Largest complaint? It shrank quite a bit in the dryer on medium heat.
The search engine works great for me. I will almost certainly renew my subscription when it's time to. Glad to see them continually delivering user-benefiting features.
I remember the announcement for Orion but I haven't followed closely at all - any support for container proxies like in Firefox? Can't lose that feature
I'd agree, at least partially in my case: Container Tabs is a killer feature for me with Firefox. Especially compared with the Temporary Containers extension on automatic mode, basically each new tab is like a fresh browser profile with zero cookies/local-storage.
I might consider demoing Orion on Linux even if it doesn't have container tabs, but at this time I wouldn't consider a full switch without that feature.
If you mean Firefox containers[0], the closest you'll get is Profiles[1] since Orion is based on WebKit. Its location in settings is different from the Safari docs, and that's the only difference in Orion's implementation as far as I can tell. You can't open a tab in a certain profile, instead each profile opens in its own window, which is a lot more cumbersome than Firefox containers.
Arc, another Webkit-based browser, has an interesting implementation combining Profiles and Arc Spaces[2]. Instead of switching between windows, you switch between "Spaces" in the sidebar that are linked to a profile.
I have been a Kagi subscriber for a while now, but this new addition finally convinced me to start using Kagi in incognito mode! Thank you very much for adding this!
I have built blind signature authentication stuff before (similar to privacy pass) and one thing I’m curious about is how you (will) handle multi device access?
I understand you probably launched with only unlimited search users in order to mitigate the same user losing access to their tokens on a different device. But any ideas for long term plans here? When I built these systems in the past, I always had to couple it with E2EE sync. Not only can that be a pain for end users, but you can also start to correlate storage updates with blind search requests.
Either case, this is amazing and I’m gonna be even more excited to not just trust Kagi, but verify that I don’t need to trust y’all. Congrats.
Yes, multi-device is definitely not easy. We've played with a few ideas, but it is definitely not a question with an obvious answer. For now, our rate-limiting allows you to use Privacy Pass on a few different devices by having each generate tokens independently. We will see how this goes and listen to user feedback before going back to the drawing board.
This should placate any potential subscribers who worry that their searches could be logged. Another great feature from a product which keeps getting better all the time.
A problem with "zero knowledge" proofs is that Kagi needs to verify that the user has paid for the service, which requires the server to have some knowledge about the client at some point.
Being able to use this feature while hiding my ip while I browse. It’s not that I want to hide my ip from Kagi it’s more that it’s not convenient to use Kagi for search on chrome while browsing in safari
Privacy Pass is great for reducing friction, but it still relies on trust in the issuer. A ZK-based approach (e.g., using zk-SNARKs or anonymous credentials) could let users prove they’re paid subscribers without revealing their identity or even interacting with Kagi’s servers beyond the initial proof. This would remove the need for trust while keeping the experience just as seamless. Would love to see more services explore this direction.
You have to generate the tokens while signed in, but once you have the tokens, you can use them without your searches being associated with your account (cryptographically provable).
I believe you should currently be able to
- create an account under a pseudonymous email address
- pay for a plan using a pseudonymous Bitcoin wallet
- use your login session to generate Privacy Pass tokens
- search with such tokens via the Tor browser on Kagi's .onion domain
This is very cool. I'm curious about why there is a limit on the number of tokens generated per month, when this is only currently offered to unlimited accounts. Since the tokens all expire at the end of the month, tokens can't be horded to use Kagi after a subscription ends. Perhaps it is instead a resource issue where token generation is expensive. In that case though, I would think limiting tokens/day would be more appropriate - there is already going to be a spike to generate new tokens on the first of the month, so if the server can handle that they can handle some users generating a batch of tokens each day.
This is not intended as criticism, just inquisitive.
Ah, that makes sense. It would be harder to detect sharing with this system than with account sharing. My thoughts went in a completely different direction when I read "abuse" the first time.
Since we have no idea who is issuing search requests in Privacy Pass mode, if there was no limits on token issuance, you could simply generate infinite tokens and give them out (or use them as part of some downstream service), and we'd have no other recourse for rate-limiting to prevent abuse.
Setting a high, but reasonable limit on issuance helps prevent abuse, and if you run out of tokens, you can reach out to support@kagi.com and we'll reset your quota.
I’m not insinuating for even a second that Kagi actually do this, but as a general rule, isn’t any privacy claim dubious at the moment given that more and more governments appear to be able to compel companies to identify their users (especially those searching for illegal content) and further forcefully insist they not disclose it?
It’s disheartening to think the great progress we’re making in this sector could be undermined in a few seconds against any companies efforts with a trivial backdoor.
It depends on how hard those companies work beforehand to prevent themselves from being able to comply with such requests beforehand. Signal is a good example of this, Kagi seems to be onboard also.
I haven't looked closely enough at this token thingy Kagi is doing but it seems on the surface like it might scratch the itch by letting them decouple the accepting-payment part of their service from the providing-results part such that they know that you've paid, but not which payer you are.
I think the idea here is that it literally can't be traced to the user – at no point is there anything passed that would allow Kagi to make the association between the user and the query.
Thanks, yes completely agree! I guess the part I’m concerned with is the politically side whereby they could be potentially compelled to change the method slightly after the fact and be forced to slip something in somewhere in a quite technical process now making it possible.
I’d love to assume this will never happen, I’m just concerned that even if it did I’d never find out - Because unfortunately the more popular this service gets for bad actors, the more of a target it becomes for the government with identification of users.
I guess as a search engine, we could assume the government may leave them well alone and still just focus on content creators.
The best that we can do is to continue working on FOSS solutions that make it technically impossible to backdoor. I haven't grok'd the protocol yet, but it seems to claim you only have to trust the client. The client is open source, so it would be hard for it to be backdoor'd without the community noticing.
Cryptography is a literal godsend for people living under oppressive regimes.
Definitely suggesting the method is secure, assuming the company does all the things they’ll say they do, which I also agree they’ll do. I’m just concerned the government can destroy this all, just by compelling them not to, and change a well intentioned method at any moment.
But what would the government compel them to do? If the method is secure, you don’t need to trust the server. And if they backdoor the open source client, people could notice it in an audit.
The method is secure until they change it. Their docs mention that generating a token is not anonymous, but using a token is. Considering they already know who generated it, it could be trivial for them (to change something server side where the validation occurs, if compelled) to link a particular search to a user.
You don’t get the token itself from the server though, you get something so you can make your own token for which the server doesn’t know who created it. So they can do whatever they like on the server, they can’t identify you.
I think you’re right, perhaps I’ll do some more reading about it - It seems like it all relies on what the extension does, and if this extension is open source someone will notice as you said. Thanks for the clarity!
Government's power over companies does not negate cryptographic privacy protections. For example, one criminal who used ProtonMail got caught because ProtonMail handed over their recovery GMail address to the law enforcement after they were compelled[1]. However, that means end-to-end encryption worked: that was the only thing they could hand over. I think the same principle applies here.
The government forces companies to backdoor their systems and use compromised implementations of what would otherwise be private and secure systems (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit). It's also worth noting that the only thing preventing your searches being linked to your account via IP address and browser fingerprinting is to use Tor which conveniently will also not protect your from the US government either. Account settings can also link a person's searches to their account.
The good news is that while the NSA will absolutely be tracking everything you search for while using Kagi they also do the exact same thing with every other search engine you use so what difference does it make.
The difference is cost. Pervasive and unhindered surveillance is way cheaper than coordinating an individual to be targeted through court orders and all the bureaucracy and potential legal battles that come with it. That’s why EU/UK is trying to coerce Apple to disable end to end encryption[1]. If it hadn’t made any difference, we wouldn’t be seeing any complaints from governments.
I don’t really understand how the protocol can ensure that the server can’t identify the client.
As far as I understand, the client sends some information A to the server, the server applies some private key X and returns the output B to the client, which then generates tokens C from the output.
If the server uses a different X for every user and then when verifying just checks the X of every user to see which one is valid, couldn’t the server know who created the token?
See section 5.5 of the linked paper https://petsymposium.org/popets/2018/popets-2018-0026.php. I'm not sure if/how Kagi implemented this, but the idea is that Kagi's "public" component can be committed to publicly (e.g., in the browser extension itself).
And you can validate this, if you try to issue a Privacy Pass search without a private token, you'll get a `WWW-Authenticate` header that kicks off the handshake, and that should be the same for all users for a given epoch (month). E.g.
But how do I validate that I’m actually getting the same value as everyone else? Is the value I should get published somewhere (in a verifiable and not editable way) so I can see that I’m not being tracked?
Or does the extension validate this and the correct value is hardcoded in the extension like stebalien suggested?
There's no auth required at this stage of the handshake, so you can test from any number of devices/locations/networks/etc and confirm you get the same value. We could publish it, but it will change every epoch/month. Plus, if you don't trust the service to not issue special key pairs to track you, you probably won't trust us to not do the same when publishing the key material. There are schemes involving third-parties we could employ, but it's trust and turtles all the way down.
A malicious server could maintain separate key pairs for users it wanted to track, but you can't do it for every user because 1) it'd be clear from the WWW-Authenticate header changing, and 2) you'd have to validate tokens against every key, which would quickly get too slow to work.
Makes sense in general, but to make sure I understand it:
> Plus, if you don't trust the service to not issue special key pairs to track you, you probably won't trust us to not do the same publishing the key material.
You could publish it on some sort of blockchain to make sure it can’t be changed and is public for everyone, right?
> A malicious server could maintain separate key pairs for users it wanted to track, but you can't do it for every user because 1) it'd be clear from the WWW-Authenticate header changing, and 2) you'd have to validate tokens against every key, which would quickly get too slow to work.
Here's a resource I found that walks through the ideas of the protocol, starting with simple implementations that have a problem, and then solving the problem one by one: https://privacypass.github.io/protocol/
I think that's the best conceptual overview of a crypto protocol I've ever seen.
In the simplest terms, the token generation process B->C is done with the user's private key. So even if the server knows A,X,B they can't link it to the token C.
But if the server is allowed to vary X, it can basically act like different servers to each client, and can then when given a token check for which server would have been valid. The solution I got from the other replies is to make sure that the server uses the same X for everyone by verifying it as a client.
It appears that the public side of X is sent as the first part of the handshake, without any login info yet, and can be verified as part of B, thus a varying X would be easy to detect... I think.
I love this company and product. I noticed another great feature today: the ability to filter AI slop in image search! It's the right-most filter: "AI Images".
One of the biggest complaints about Kagi from people who have not yet adopted it is their privacy concerns around having to login and have payment information.
I'm not one of the people that has been concerned about that, but I'm curious to what extent this alleviates those concerns among those that have had them.
> I'm not one of the people that has been concerned about that, but I'm curious to what extent this alleviates those concerns among those that have had them.
I am, it's mind-blowing to me that anyone would login to a search engine (yes, I know how many do it, now).
After a brief verification of the system, I'm pretty sure I'll sign up, now
Logging in to a search engine weirded me out at first, but after about a week I was so pleased with the results that I’ve been happily paying for almost a year now.
I honestly feel like any major free search engine is probably doing more to try to track you anyway.
And if you’re going to search something you want to be anonymous, you can just like use another search engine. I honestly haven’t run into the situation where I needed to.
I do worry that some day someone will be able to see how often I forget basic syntax for some JavaScript or Python method - or how often I can’t be bothered to type out a full domain and just search to navigate to it - but that’s a price I’m also willing to pay.
Assuming the cryptography does what they say it does (am not a cryptography expert, so I can't verify that part), this would completely disjoin a search request from any account info. The account generates several "search tokens", and for each search request, one of those tokens is spent. The tokens are generated on-device, and until spent, never leave the device, so in theory there's no way for Kagi to know which account generated the token just from the token alone. This doesn't fix fingerprinting or IP associations (though the plugin for Firefox and Chrome supposedly takes efforts to try and limit fingerprinting too), but this isn't any better/worse than simply using Google or Duckduckgo, and functions on Tor if you really want some privacy.
Again, not sure on how the tokens are proven legit without ever sharing them, but there's probably some ~~zero-knowledge proof~~ stuff going on that covers that.
Edit: Not zero-knowledge proof. Seems to be Blind Signature?
> This doesn't fix fingerprinting or IP associations
It solves the problem of using a paid service without compromising customer’s privacy which is a breakthrough. The rest are different problems and they are universal issues with various existing solutions as you already pointed out.
In general I am a very happy Kagi subscriber, but I have noticed in the past month or so that sometimes my searches (via the Safari extension) just hang. Navigating it kagi.com also hangs.
When I'm in a rush this forces me to fall back to Google which often doesn't provide good results for my queries, which is unfortunate
It generally resolves itself in under a minute, but it is still a mildly irritating availability issue that wasn't present earlier. Maybe something to do with load balancing? No clue.
358 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadI think government issued digital identities should also use this.
https://petsymposium.org/popets/2018/popets-2018-0026.php ("Privacy Pass: Bypassing Internet Challenges Anonymously")
I think Cloudflare implemented the same thing? At least the HN comments link to the same paper,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19623110 ("Privacy Pass (cloudflare.com)", 53 comments)
The very cool thing is that this is the case even if the server tries to misbehave during their phase. This means that users only need to trust the client software, which we open sourced: https://github.com/kagisearch/privacypass-extension
Some posters are mentioning blind signatures, and indeed Privacy Pass can utilise these as a building block. To be precise, however, I should mention that for Kagi we use "Privately Verifiable Tokens" (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9578.html#name-issuance-pr...) based on "oblivious pseudorandom functions" (OPRFs), which in my personal view are even cooler than blind signatures
Anywho, the person I replied to seemed to be willing and able to go a technical level deeper than the article, and that's something I'm also interested in reading. It sounds like they'd be allowed :)
P. S: I don't use the Kagi app in Android.
Should support some crypto currency (probably monero), and something like GNU Taler if that technology ever becomes usable.
At the same time, privacy pass is a very foreign concept to me. If they are transferable between devices, one could generate a couple and resell them over some other medium (even in person).
Privacy Pass unties the searches from the user account and payment information.
When I try to go into billing in Kagi I just get forwarded to Stripe. Does Stripe process the crypto payments?
edit: on desktop, on the page where you choose your plan, scroll to the bottom and look for the link to paying with OpenNode (btc lightning)
Yeah routing can suck. First timers should use a lightning wallet with built in LSP support like ZEUS, BitKit, Phoenix, etc. Then routing is a non-issue.
I think it's better to use another cryptocurrency like Monero than having to rely on a centralized service just to get a half-decent user experience.
Not requiring custodians is just one part, having to rely on third-party services for basic functionality is another.
It's almost only Bitcoin that has the absurdly expensive fees.
This feature looks like it narrows the gap a bit though.
Nice work
Are the conversion fees too high?
To avoid fingerprinting by config, have a page where the community can share and vote on best configs, then clone and use a popular one that suits your needs.
So while it does add a data point that could help track you, it's not defeating the whole point.
I don’t know the cost or liability of that at scale.
Though those still get passed to the server, and your combination of personalization settings is likely to be globally unique, and it's almost certainly unique among the subset of users that are paranoid enough about their privacy not to store preferences in their session... But still.
It is clearly stated in the blog post :)
We even considered variations of having some settings preserved in local storage and impact of that on anonymity. Ultimately decided that was not worth it.
Check the FAQ section (towards the end) for full details and analysis:
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#faq
So for example there could be a built in "developers" preset that might make domains useful to coding higher ranked (and down rank or block things like stack overflow clones). Etc etc.
Basically this could allow a smaller amount of customisation with less ability to identify a specific user.
I also use Orion and I do like the idea someone else had of integrating an option for Kagi Privacy mode into the "incognito" tabs specifically as an option!
I'm curious if anyone knows, are companies like Google and Microsoft making more than $10/mo/user? We often talk about paying with our data, but it is always unclear how much that data is worth. Kagi does include some numbers, over here[0], but they seem a tad suspicious. The claim is Google makes $23/mo/user, and this would make their service a good value, but the calculation of $76bn US ad revenue (2023) and $277 per user annually gives 274m users. It's close to 80% of the US population, but I though google search was about 90% of global. And I doubt that all ad revenue is coming from search. Does anyone know the real numbers? Googling I get inconsistent answers and also answers based on different conditions and aggregations. But what we'd be interested here is purely in Google /search/ and not anything else.
[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html
1) There is a marginal payment overhead. I'd assume $0.50-0.75, leaving their amount down to $9-ish.
2) It's a fairly niche product with a still-small userbase. ~40k users at ~$9/mo = $360k/mo (I know there's $5/mo users and $25/mo users but I'd assume there are far more $5/mo and $10/mo users than $25/mo users)
3) They have to keep the service running 24/7/365, so you have to hire devs either across multiple time-zones or compensate them enough to be OK fighting fires at 2am.
$5 a month for fewer than 10 searches a day is clearly not a good deal. $10 a month might be worth it for some, but an extra $15 a month on top of that for AI results is kind of crazy.
You can also choose if you want the chat to RAG search results into the context for additional info, and then cite those sources. To me, replacing a Claude/ChatGPT subscription with $15 on top of a company I already like, while also getting a bunch of other models was a no-brainer.
You can just quickly write !ai to the toolbar and you have a deepseek chat open. Or !sum to summarize the current page or video.
But kagi does a good job too, indeed.
I don't know Kagi's financials, but this is usually the case for a lot of products with a smaller customer base. For example, a block of Kraft cheddar will be a lot cheaper than an equivalent-sized block from an organic local dairy. There's always a customer base that is willing to pay for a differentiating feature or value.
I'm satisfied paying for it because the product works well and saves me time. I can't say the same for a lot of the random $10 impulse buys I make in a month.
Kagi saves me much more than $10 of time every month. I definitely don't regret the subscription cost. Their LLM thing (append "?" to your internet search query) is worth more than that on its own.
some anecdotal data:
11/2024: 183 searches
12/2024: 360
1/2025: 376
2/2025: already at 222
Will definitely (happily) have to upgrade to the $10 plan. It's been great.
Currently I'm debating with myself if I should go for the $10 plan. I'm all down for supporting kagi, but surprisingly I didn't use as many searches as I thought.
edit: Even just the ability to rank, pin, and block domains alone is crazy useful. I never need to see Pinterest in any image search results again. If I see a crappy blog spam site, I just block it and it never shows up again. It feels like these are basic, fundamental features that every search engine should have had a long time ago. It's pretty sad that Kagi is getting so much praise for doing things that really should have been standard for at least a decade (not sad in any negative way toward Kagi, but because our standards and expectations for search have dropped this low).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996
You can split your searches with search engine shortcuts on the desktop, and the search engine quickbar on mobile.
When I still was on the starter plan, I used Kagi whenever I had a search that if I use google, I know I will:
- get a bunch of listicles and AI slop (Kagi downranks and bundles these)
- get a buch of AI images (again, Kagi clearly labels and downranks these)
- have to do multiple google searches for, but can instead use Quick Answer for
- will get a bunch of Reddit pre-translated results for
- technical / scientific questions, because of the sites I can uprank/downrank/block
I used google for things like:
- highest building in the world
- $bandname Wikipedia / Discogs
- name of thing I can't remember but have the approximate word for
You get the idea.
Back-of-the-envelope:
- 2tn searches per year.
- US is 20% of all searches.
- Us revenue is 76bn
$76bn / (2tn * 0.2) = $0.19 / search
So, getting 300 searches for less than $0.02 per search sounds like a pretty good deal.
They're my portal to the web. It's less like an optional web service (like a streaming service), and it feels more like I'm paying for them to be my ISP.
For me, I use Kagi only at home for personal use. And most months, I don't exceed 300. Of course, if I included work related searches, then yes - 10 searches won't get me far.
There's also the matter of Google search quality being increasingly bad, while Kagi's is consistently... okay. They also have a a lot of nice features, liking being able to change the weight of different sites in your list of results.
I wish this extension would integrate better with the browser by automatically understanding the context. That is, if I'm in a "regular" mode it'll use my session, but if I'm in a "private browsing" mode (`browser.extension.inIncognitoContext`) it'll use Privacy Pass to authenticate me, without me having to explicitly do anything about it.
(I don't use Orion, as there's no GNU/Linux version.)
The reason it's become so rare is most companies in this space (heck tons of tech companies period) have used a business model of offering a thing to one group of users and then turning around and selling the results of that thing to another group of users, where the latter group is the one actually driving your revenue. This by default almost assumes a hostility towards the former group because their interests will of course be at odds with the interests of the latter group.
What's refreshing about Kagi and other new tech companies is they have dumped this model in favor of having just one group that they serve and drive revenue from (ie. the 'old' model).
It’s hard to make money by charging a lot to a small group of people since now you’re dealing with anti-network effects. Doubling the price of a product will likely more than halve your user base.
If you try to build a network of paid users, you lose because you'll be run over by 'free' competitors monetizing indirectly.
Yeah, the ad supported model has its problems, but it also makes the internet way more accessible. If we think about it, companies and people with more money are basically subsidizing these services for everyone else. They're the ones seeing the ads that keeps the lights on for users who can't afford to pay.
If everything was subscription only, a ton of people like students, low income families, people in developing countries would be shut out. "Free" services, even with their flaws, create a kind of digital subsidy. It's not perfect, but it means way more people can use these tools.
There's no reason why a subscription model could not also be used to subsidize people who can not pay, other than that companies are structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).
There are good network effect arguments about why this strategy can be effective, not simply 'altruistic.'
Ads simply make the extraction happen across the board, except that the ad model somewhat privileges technical users who know how to circumvent ads.
Or would the idea be to only subsidize students and not poor adults?
It would be one thing if we had like a national "verify I'm on SNAP or equivalent API"
Not every product category is amenable to such business models but many are.
[1] To be fair, Discord likely sells user data to advertisers to make additional money.
This is not true and it’s not what fiduciary duty means. Stop repeating it, it’s really dumb.
Companies very frequently do not monetize things that they could under the guise of “building brand recognition” or “establishing a user base”. It’s even as easy as “raising the price will alienate customers we think are important to long term revenue”.
It’s trivial to justify not extracting maximum price and public companies do it all of the time.
Look at Costco’s business model if you want an example
Imagine a utopian world where you just pay per site visit, and in return all companies selling stuff don't have an inflated advertising budget and free market effects force them to pass the savings on to you, meaning the net cost increase for you is zero. And as a side-effect, quality products float to the top, since you hear of them mostly by word-of-mouth, meaning products compete on value-per-dollar.
Sadly human psychology and economics does not work that way haha. We pay what the market will bear, and increasing sales via a torrent of ads is cheaper than increasing the value-per-dollar ratio of the product.
I'm a firm believer of this but we need more people to join in.
And it already works to some degree.
I've now had a working search engine for almost 3 years.
My last 3 jobs (9 years) haven't forced me to use Windows.
I can chat and organize events without Facebook knowing.
And it is not like the quality has gone down either. My choices have mostly given me better experiences in a number of ways.
Edit:
If more people start
- advocating for better hardware and software,
- canceling subscriptions and memberships when it becomes clear they are reducing value or increasing price,
- building skills both to get independent from their current cloud (so you can move around or at least having a credibile possibility to do so)
- and for individuals to get better jobs
then I think things will change.
For inspiration: at least here in Norway, with several gym memberships, if you cancel they will quickly approach you with good offers, and they can get really good: I got several months free, a friend got offered free months and a sizable gift card.
Bonus: if more people join in this will get picked up by Wall Street and they will begin punishing this nonsense too ;-)
My base salary has doubled and I enjoy my work a lot more now that I don't have to accept all kinds of MS shenanigans to play a part in how I work.
Having a working search engine shouldn't be underestimated either: living from 2012 to 2022 knowing that search used to be a solved problem but wasn't anymore was really annoying.
Directly through activist investors and shareholder groups (which nowadays usually are institutional investors) who vote to change company policies, fire the CEO, or in some cases fire the whole board.
The problem (other than the obvious privacy and noise issues) is that it's not a neutral subsidy. It introduces a lot of biases.
Since advertisers are subsidizing the platform, they tilt the content toward things they want and away from messages they don't. Messages that criticize advertisers products (which include things like governments and political ideologies since they are advertisers) are de-emphasized and marginalized.
Since impressions / clicks / eyeballs are the goal, an inherent bias is introduced toward emotionally triggering and/or addictive or hypnotic content. The reason social media for example is so divisive and negative is that this keeps people engaged by triggering simple powerful emotions.
HBO used this model way back when. It’s been a lasting business.
The service is subsidized by "whale players" that regularly spend a lot of cash, but they are a lot of freeloaders (to entertain the whales and to build brand popularity).
A cheap/free game supercharges network effects to amass players, each of which incrementally adds value to every other player. Most players will never directly pay enough to offset their own cost to the game maker. However, they will create a real community that draws in a small number of whale players who will directly pay for themselves and indirectly pay for all of the free players.
Not so different from the two-sided markets on Facebook and Instagram.
Incentives aligned. Happy customers. Good businesses. Maybe you only get 60% gross margins, or, gasp, 40% gross margins. But so much less toxic.
The main driver of hostility to users is due to ad-based business models. I think we would see a much more healthy internet if we had regulation which prohibited companies from choosing ads based on any information associated with the user that the ad is shown to. That is, any data collected in the past and any data associated with the session and request must not be taken into account when choosing the ad; two requests by different users in different locations should have the exact same ad probability distributions.
I know we are never getting this because it would kill or severely harm the business models of some of the most profitable businesses in the world.
I would generally agree that that's the "default".
However, there are cases where two sides of a market need an intermediary with which they can both independently transact, and a net benefit of that interaction is felt on both sides. The key is to construct the solution such that the intermediary depends on the goodwill of both sides of the market.
I think Kagi is somewhat flipping the script. By "taking" data from publishers for free, they are then selling it to readers at a cost. However, there is a trade off. Kagi needs to make sure publishers continue to make their content available so that it can be searchable, or used in their Assistant product. In order to do that, they need to do the opposite of what Google is doing by trying to sequester traffic on Google.com: Kagi's best interest is to make sure that they provide good value to both sides.
Indeed, using the Assistant product, the way it is structured, I very often find myself clicking through to the referenced original sources and not just consuming the summarized content.
How this evolves over time, from a product design standpoint, will be interesting to watch.
Tor has its flaws and criticisms, but it's really not on Kagi to fix them. With the combination of tor and their privacy pass, Kagi has gone further in allowing their paid users access to their services than anyone else.
Disclaimer: Not associated with Kagi in anyway other than being a very happy user.
(Privacy Pass in fact doesn't make sense outside of an anonymizing transport, which makes the current announcement an exercise in marketing, at best)
This kind of thinking is pervasive in the discussion of privacy enhancing technologies. It might not make sense against the most sophisticated attacker, but it lays the groundwork of a complex system that will be able to do so.
Allowing more users will provide herd privacy at the token generation phase. Searches being decoupled from user account primary key offers privacy in all kinds of scenario's, comparable with a browser private tab.
> This kind of thinking is pervasive in the discussion of privacy enhancing technologies
It is in RFC.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9576I wish my kagi t-shit could say the same. Bottom hem unraveled on the second wash, and so it's been consigned to the sleep and yard work shirts. They issued me a coupon for a free shirt as replacement, but it's yet to ship
The search engine works great for me. I will almost certainly renew my subscription when it's time to. Glad to see them continually delivering user-benefiting features.
We commenced work on Orion for Linux yesterday.
I might consider demoing Orion on Linux even if it doesn't have container tabs, but at this time I wouldn't consider a full switch without that feature.
Arc, another Webkit-based browser, has an interesting implementation combining Profiles and Arc Spaces[2]. Instead of switching between windows, you switch between "Spaces" in the sidebar that are linked to a profile.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/105100
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5BzkowY_B8
I have built blind signature authentication stuff before (similar to privacy pass) and one thing I’m curious about is how you (will) handle multi device access?
I understand you probably launched with only unlimited search users in order to mitigate the same user losing access to their tokens on a different device. But any ideas for long term plans here? When I built these systems in the past, I always had to couple it with E2EE sync. Not only can that be a pain for end users, but you can also start to correlate storage updates with blind search requests.
Either case, this is amazing and I’m gonna be even more excited to not just trust Kagi, but verify that I don’t need to trust y’all. Congrats.
Lovely!
What are you hoping to gain with that?
Your claim is a bit like saying „it’s impossible to encrypt mail, the government wouldn’t allow it“. But PGP still exists.
This is not intended as criticism, just inquisitive.
It feels like they picked a number no user should hit, while keeping it low enough to not pass Kagi out “free” to all their friends.
Since we have no idea who is issuing search requests in Privacy Pass mode, if there was no limits on token issuance, you could simply generate infinite tokens and give them out (or use them as part of some downstream service), and we'd have no other recourse for rate-limiting to prevent abuse.
Setting a high, but reasonable limit on issuance helps prevent abuse, and if you run out of tokens, you can reach out to support@kagi.com and we'll reset your quota.
It’s disheartening to think the great progress we’re making in this sector could be undermined in a few seconds against any companies efforts with a trivial backdoor.
I haven't looked closely enough at this token thingy Kagi is doing but it seems on the surface like it might scratch the itch by letting them decouple the accepting-payment part of their service from the providing-results part such that they know that you've paid, but not which payer you are.
I’d love to assume this will never happen, I’m just concerned that even if it did I’d never find out - Because unfortunately the more popular this service gets for bad actors, the more of a target it becomes for the government with identification of users.
I guess as a search engine, we could assume the government may leave them well alone and still just focus on content creators.
Cryptography is a literal godsend for people living under oppressive regimes.
I don't think, however, that this means we need to give up on crypto entirely. Just... be aware of the threat model for what you're encrypting.
Or are you saying the method is designed to look secure but there’s an intentional weakness that makes tracking possible?
[1] https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/proton-ma...
The good news is that while the NSA will absolutely be tracking everything you search for while using Kagi they also do the exact same thing with every other search engine you use so what difference does it make.
[1] https://techinformed.com/uk-government-orders-apple-to-hand-...
As far as I understand, the client sends some information A to the server, the server applies some private key X and returns the output B to the client, which then generates tokens C from the output.
If the server uses a different X for every user and then when verifying just checks the X of every user to see which one is valid, couldn’t the server know who created the token?
And you can validate this, if you try to issue a Privacy Pass search without a private token, you'll get a `WWW-Authenticate` header that kicks off the handshake, and that should be the same for all users for a given epoch (month). E.g.
Or does the extension validate this and the correct value is hardcoded in the extension like stebalien suggested?
A malicious server could maintain separate key pairs for users it wanted to track, but you can't do it for every user because 1) it'd be clear from the WWW-Authenticate header changing, and 2) you'd have to validate tokens against every key, which would quickly get too slow to work.
> Plus, if you don't trust the service to not issue special key pairs to track you, you probably won't trust us to not do the same publishing the key material.
You could publish it on some sort of blockchain to make sure it can’t be changed and is public for everyone, right?
> A malicious server could maintain separate key pairs for users it wanted to track, but you can't do it for every user because 1) it'd be clear from the WWW-Authenticate header changing, and 2) you'd have to validate tokens against every key, which would quickly get too slow to work.
Makes sense, thanks for explaining!
Your understanding is correct, that's definitely something we could do. It is also something anyone else could do to keep us honest :)
And you answered someone else:
> It is also something anyone else could do to keep us honest :)
While true I believe for such a feature making it as easy as possible for your users to check independently is just better.
I think that's the best conceptual overview of a crypto protocol I've ever seen.
I'm not one of the people that has been concerned about that, but I'm curious to what extent this alleviates those concerns among those that have had them.
I am, it's mind-blowing to me that anyone would login to a search engine (yes, I know how many do it, now).
After a brief verification of the system, I'm pretty sure I'll sign up, now
I honestly feel like any major free search engine is probably doing more to try to track you anyway.
And if you’re going to search something you want to be anonymous, you can just like use another search engine. I honestly haven’t run into the situation where I needed to.
I do worry that some day someone will be able to see how often I forget basic syntax for some JavaScript or Python method - or how often I can’t be bothered to type out a full domain and just search to navigate to it - but that’s a price I’m also willing to pay.
Again, not sure on how the tokens are proven legit without ever sharing them, but there's probably some ~~zero-knowledge proof~~ stuff going on that covers that.
Edit: Not zero-knowledge proof. Seems to be Blind Signature?
It solves the problem of using a paid service without compromising customer’s privacy which is a breakthrough. The rest are different problems and they are universal issues with various existing solutions as you already pointed out.
When I'm in a rush this forces me to fall back to Google which often doesn't provide good results for my queries, which is unfortunate
It generally resolves itself in under a minute, but it is still a mildly irritating availability issue that wasn't present earlier. Maybe something to do with load balancing? No clue.