I’m extremely impressed with Kagi’s new implementation of Privacy Pass, allowing your searches to not be tied to your account. That solves the main issues I had with Kagi before, but our current criteria forbids collecting PII (which payment info undoubtedly is) or requiring an account. I think what Kagi has done here mostly nullifies the issues with an account. I think we could separate the search engine page into two sections: one for ad-supported search engines like DDG and one for search engines that don’t show ads and are supported some other way but still preserve the privacy of their users. They accept Bitcoin and while the sign up page says you need to enter your email, they don’t verify it so you can just put in a fake email and use the service anyway (I wish this was communicated on the sign up page).
I really hope to see more companies using privacy-preserving standards like privacy pass in the future, and I want to make room on PG for it.
It would still be ad supported since that’s their business model.
Reading at the bottom of Kagi’s blog post, I see
Do you plan to allow purchasing privacy pass tokens without having an account?
Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It just needs to be ‘loaded’ with valid tokens. And you can imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at Kagi. Let us know here if you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize it.
If this were implemented I think Kagi would meet all of our current requirements. So it might make sense to hold off and see what they do.
This is a nice feature to have, and I respect DDG for consistently offering that option. But it’s also the sort of thing that would render their current business model unsustainable if everyone were to take advantage of that toggle.
It also represents at least a small conflict of interest (for DDG it has mostly been theoretical, but Brave has made self-serving decisions due to that conflict of interest in the past, such as making it intentionally difficult and convoluted to block their own 1st party ads with their adblcoker, even for users who explicitly go out of their way to blacklist those domains or add blocklists which block Brave ads. Fortunately this practice has been discontinued for now iirc)
As long as the sections are being divided by “Ad-Supported” and “Ad-Free”, I would like to advocate for identifying which advertising networks each service uses.