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[00:00:02]
Unknown:
Hello, and welcome back to Freedom Tech Friday. For those of you that are new here, allow me to quickly explain what this is all about and why they are here. Freedom Tech Friday is a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the Ingoverable Misfits, X, Nosta, Yup, sometimes Rumble, and Twitch feeds. We go live for one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern or 2PM in The UK, but you can also catch up later on the Ingoverable Misfits podcast feed. On Freedom Set Friday, we like to cover the latest news trends for anything relating to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero to encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between. Essentially, if there is a tool or topic.
Excuse me. Sorry. Something glitched there. If there is a tool or topic or news item, that can help you take back some control in today's digital panopticon, we wanna talk about it. My name is q and a. I'm head of customer experience at Foundation, where we build Bitcoin focused sovereignty tools. And as always, I am joined or more often than not, I'm joined by my good friends, Max, who is, phone sick, unfortunately, today. We have a poly soldier amongst the ranks. But I am joined by Seth, who is VP at Cape Wallet. As I mentioned, the show is live and interactive, and we rely on you guys to steer us the topics that you want us to cover or to send us your Freedom Tech related questions.
Loads of ways you can get involved with the show, all of which really helps spread awareness for the show. Commenting, asking questions in the live chat, submitting your topics or questions ahead of time on, boosting the show on Fountain or other podcasting two point o apps, sending your questions or tips in via XMR chat, or just sharing the show on X or NoStar with your friends. Top support from last week's show, about spread, I still need still haven't updated that bit, sir. That's two weeks on the bounce. Apologies, people. Top four for last week's show where we did not talk about spending your sats.
We come from Ape Mithrandir who sent 7,777 sats. And he said, I wish I could have attached one live, but I was dealing with the kids. How ironic as we were talking freedom set for families and kids. Thank you for the support. And also a special shout out to Late Stage Huddle and Bon who boosted 6,006 sats and 2,200 and 22 sats respectively. Thank you guys for your support. So without further ado, just you, Seth. How's it going, mate?
[00:02:28] Unknown:
It is going well. I'm, I'm a little, you know, pissed at Max, bailing on us. Sick in quotes, but we all we all know. Yeah. He's out there. He's out there partying, enjoying some sunshine.
[00:02:41] Unknown:
He's out there hefty Thursday evening, hasn't he?
[00:02:44] Unknown:
And he's woke up and thought, ugh. It explains it. Your classic Thursday night party.
[00:02:49] Unknown:
Yeah. In indeed. But, all I think I think good, all all otherwise, busy week.
[00:02:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. This was a a nice relatively slow week. This is my only podcast this week, which is I can't remember last time that happened. So it's it's nice. I'm coming in fresh. I've had, like, four meetings all week. Vic's been busy at a conference, so no boss pestering me all week. Vic, if you're listening, hi. Yeah. It's been good. It's been good. I'm feeling I'm feeling free. I'm feeling free. And this topic also is just near and dear to my heart, so it's gonna be a good one.
[00:03:24] Unknown:
Indeed. Indeed it is. Just quick hello to to everybody in the live chat. We've got the usual suspects. Jordan's here moaning about rumble. Maybe one day we'll get that fixed, Jordan. Hi to to Mia Herbert, who they say, hey, sir, if you know them. We've also got Nosta gang, Yippa Huddle, and Observer in the Nosta live chat as well. Thank you everybody for stopping by, and get your your questions and comments ready. Yeah. This week, we are going to be talking about paid private search, specifically doing a deep dive on Kagi. In fact, before we dive in, sir, Kagi, Kagi, what's what's what's the correct terminology here? I know you're a k a kagi OG. What's the what's your take on this?
[00:04:06] Unknown:
I believe it is kagi.
[00:04:08] Unknown:
Kagi?
[00:04:09] Unknown:
Yeah. It is kagi. Yeah. It's Japanese. It means key in Japanese.
[00:04:13] Unknown:
Oh, there you go. See see everybody had told you he was an OG. He's got all the lingo already.
[00:04:19] Unknown:
I've been practicing for years.
[00:04:23] Unknown:
So, for those that don't know, Kagi is a a paid search engine that, they have a saying that says, you are the customer, not the product, which I kinda like. We're gonna discuss as always, you know, why in the fur would you wanna pay search in the first place? We're gonna deep dive on Kagi's privacy model, different features they offer, why they're any better or different from, you know, from the the the existing tech conglomerate like Google, DuckDuckGo, and all of the other alternatives that we have. Also do another deep dive on the features like lenses, blocks, boosts, assistant, news. It seems, very much more than, just a a search engine. So we wanna kinda spell that out today.
And, yeah, they just have a a new approach to transparent, human curated discovery. So, hopefully, we'll we'll get to grips with what that actually means and as we go through the show. So I guess let's, as always, try and try and set the scene before we we go into, you know, a bit more of a Kagi deep dive. Google's free. Duck Duck Go is free. You know, loads of there's loads of free search engines out there, Seth. Like, why on earth would I want to part with my hard earned Fiat or or Sats or Monero to pay for search?
[00:05:38] Unknown:
It's a great question, and it's it's really the only one that I think is the the reasonable pushback to Kagi as someone who is a a hardcore Kagi stan. And I found out this morning have been a user for three and a half years. Didn't even know that this was live in March 2022, but I I must have gotten in, on the Ground Floor there because I've been using it for a long, long time. But, ultimately, it comes down to whatever you use on the Internet, you are paying with something. Either, especially if it's a service, I should say. There are some free things that are just truly free. But any service like this, you're paying with something. It's either going to be your time and that it takes more time to set up and use something like circs that you could self host yourself to get some privacy and some some, cleaning up of the brokenness of Google and other search engines.
It could be paying with your data, which is the norm with Google and many of the other search engines being being as well. Or it can be paying with your your eyeballs, paying with the the things that you see first, which is true of pretty much every search engine except for Kagi, where even the the good ones that I would still recommend and think are great solutions, like DuckDuckGo, like BraveSearch, they are essentially just saying we can do ads better than Google, and we won't be as sketchy as they will. We'll sell other services alongside of it to maybe monetize it, and we'll just try to do things a little bit better than Google.
Most of them don't have their own search index, which is another thing we can get to on, like, the the specifics of what makes Kagi special to me. But, a lot of them are just using something like Google or, Bing upstream, and are giving you some improvements on top of that. But, ultimately, the last thing you can pay for when you're using a service online is instead of paying with your time, not self hosting, instead of paying with your eyeballs, not dealing with ads and dealing with someone else's search rankings that they have, financial incentive to prioritize a certain way. You can just pay with your money. And by doing that, you can get away from all of the and this is a technical term. I'm not cursing here. Insheetification is, like, the term that's used to describe, like, what has happened to the the Internet, specifically to search and specifically to Google search, which is the underlying index for many of these search engines, is things have just gotten absolutely horrible. So you end up paying with a lot of your time and a lot of your eyeballs, to just be able to find the results that you need. So instead, by using something like Coggy or specifically by using Coggy, you can opt in to paying a small amount to save yourself a ton of time, to save your eyeballs a ton of time looking at things that are not helpful, and, ultimately, I think get way more value back than you're putting in in terms of the the cost that you're spending.
[00:08:30] Unknown:
Nice nicely put. I I wanna just kind of double click on a a couple of things that you said there. You mentioned around, like, your your pain with your eyes and seeing ads and things like that. I'm gonna, you know, say maybe not the audience that we have here, you know, on on the Uncoverable feed that tends to be more privacy focused, but there's gonna be a wide range of the population that are so used to seeing ads in literally every single app that they have on their phone or anytime they interact with the Internet. They're probably just gonna be completely ambivalent to the fact of whether they see ads or some people might you know, some weird people do actually like being sold to every, click.
What would you say to those people that are like, you know, I don't really care that there's, like, three rows of ads on the top of my Google search. Like, what else is in it for me? Why why outside of that, what what can can Kagi or or an alternative a similar alternative do for me?
[00:09:25] Unknown:
Man, it's honestly it's hard to relate to that view of the Internet. Like, I've been blocking ads one way or another or paying to avoid ads for so long that I, like, I forget what the norm is. And then, like, I'll be helping someone fix an issue with their computer or something and just do a search and not think about what the default search engine is. And it'll be like Google, and there'll be, like, 17 ads on the side. And the first 12 results are all sponsored. And, like, I forget how actually broken it is and how how much worse it's gotten even since I started opting out of this. Like, when I opted out, it was like, okay. I think things are getting kinda bad. Like, I should find another solution. Now it's like, I don't understand how anyone can use the Internet like this and specifically can use search like this. Because, like, if if you let's say, like, you are listening.
You you haven't been dealing with ad blockers. You're just using the default Google search in your browser. You're probably using Google Chrome. Google's the default on your I your iPhone. Like, it's just what you're used to. It may feel really normal because it's, like, I think Google understands this, like, slowly boiling the frog thing where, like, they didn't go from, like, fantastic search engine to awful overnight. They slowly, slowly, slowly built in these, like, continually just just terrible things into the system. So you kind of you kind of got used to it over time. But the way I think about it is is, again, like, it ultimately to me comes down to time. And maybe this is just, like, we were talking about last week. Like, we're we're coming from the perspective. We have kids. We have very demanding, high paced jobs that we love.
Like, I have no I have negative time. Like like, I don't have I don't have spare time. I don't know what that is. I have negative time. So even if you think about, like let's say you search for something 20 times a day, which is probably a quite tame number. Like, you you may think that sounds like a lot, but that's probably less than most people do. Let's say you search for something 20 times a day, and you have to spend at least five seconds getting past the sponsored results just getting to the first real results. Think about how much time that is in and of itself, much less the fact that that there's the double whammy in in Google specifically, but in some other search engines, where not only are you getting the sponsored results, but they're also changing the rest of the results that you get to prioritize sites that are either paying them in some way or sites that are specifically targeting SEO for that specific search engine. So you're not necessarily getting results that are actually good for you. You're getting results that are good for the advertiser and that are good for Google. And then maybe somewhere in there, there's a result that's good for you. So, again, it comes down to, like, you may be used to the ads. You may be used to the visual clutter. You may be used to this, like, this, honestly, like, awful reality that is Google search and much of the search engines we use. But it doesn't have to stay like that, and your time is more valuable than the amount of money that something like Kagi would cost.
[00:12:19] Unknown:
Yeah. Very well said. I, it's funny. As I brought question up, somebody in the Nostra chat literally literally commented saying, meh. I quit ads. So it's not just a fake person that they made up. There are other people out there that that appear to be fine with it, albeit, like, you just, honestly, you know, laid out. But, you know, it's it's not always a a a kind of a surface level thing. There is, some trade offs, particularly with your time when you're you're having to mentally sift through or scroll past those ads. Alright.
Before we, go into the details, Kagi can't be the only player here. I've seen a couple of, comments here around, Brave Search. We also have C Rex. I'm sure there's probably well, we've got DuckDuckGo, which I believe is is kind of just a wrapper around I forget what it is now. But there there are alternatives that it's a wrap around thing. Right? There's alternatives that claim to be better than than Google or more private than Google. Like, where do these sit for you on the kind of spectrum of, you know, if you've got Google on one end and Kagi on the other, where where do the rest of them sit? Are any of them viable?
Do they have paid services? Like, what you know, have you have you tested any of these?
[00:13:35] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I've I've used essentially everything. So I've I've tried all of the options. And for a long time before Kagi and even after starting using Kagi, I've continued to use off and on the other more privacy preserving search engines. So there really are, like there's only three real options outside of Google and Kagi, in my opinion. And Google, I just I don't consider an option. So, like, if you're using Google, stop. Use one of these other options. We'll talk about your life will be better. No matter what other option you choose from these four, basically, it will improve your life.
But the like, real quick before I get to the options, something that's really important to understand, and he touched on it, is a search engine is only as good as the actual index of results, how they're sorted, how they're managed. And so even if you use, like, something like a more privacy preserving front end, but you're still getting Google's results, they're still going to be profiled and handled in a way that benefits Google and the ad monopolies and the websites that that, are monetized through Google. Like, those are the the people who are gonna benefit more than you. Even if you can get some of the privacy back, the index itself is still broken. And this is something that's not like, I'm not the only one saying this. This is very broad outside of the FreedomTech, outside of the privacy space.
It is commonly very well understood that Google search index index is just totally broken, and it it has fallen to pieces and is not nearly as good as it used to be. And when you look at many of the privacy preserving options, they really are just a better wrapper on top of a a broken index. So like you said, DuckDuckGo, that's essentially wrapping Bing index, results. So you're getting the same, roughly, search results from Bing. Maybe they're not as manipulated as they would be if you go to Bing, but you are still having some of the problems there. Same with Startpage, who, if I remember correctly, they're using Google, as their search index.
Again, more privacy preserving, but still a broken index under the hood. Brave search is really the only one that is outside of the the rest of these where Brave is actually it's a combination. They're building their own index, and I believe they also fall back on Google search results. That may have changed. I haven't haven't looked into if they ever, like, fully switched to their own index. But they are trying to actually build their own search index from scratch, which is a huge undertaking, but it's really what you have to do to be able to get more useful search. So if you wanna get past just the privacy preserving, just the ad removal, but to get to this actual search results being more useful and giving you what you need faster, you really have to move away from Google, Bing, etcetera. So that that is one reason why, like, I think DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Brave Search are all good options. They're gonna give you better privacy.
They're gonna do ads differently. They don't get away from ads. They just do their own ads. But they're gonna be better than Google. The Brave Search, and Expatriotic, mentioned this on the x chat. It's it's fantastic. I think if you're going to use a free search engine, I don't think anything compares with Brave right now, in terms of privacy, in terms of search index results. And they they have some of their own features you can build on top of that, like their AI products and stuff too. So that one is really good. But I definitely tend to like, if you're going to switch from Google, why switch to something that's just a privacy preserving wrapper on Google?
Get something that's actually going to have a better search index that gives you more useful results. And and, again, that gives you more value back for the time it takes to switch or the the the money it costs to to switch to something like that. But that is something that makes Coggy very unique is that they are using their own, in house built index from the ground up. And it's one that has no ads, that has no monetization for websites or anything like that. So there's no perverse incentive for them to change the index to financially benefit themselves. They benefit by you paying to use their service. And from what I found and what many, many others has have found, you can find writings about Coggy in pretty much all of the main tech blogs and websites and social media platforms where people are comparing them with other search results, and they're just destroying Google, Bing, and others.
In terms of how quickly can you find the thing you're actually searching for versus how many pages do you have to go through to get to that that search result that's actually useful. And that comes really from that index that's built from the ground up to be neutral, to be useful to you, the customer, rather than to them or to the the advertising agency. And that's one of the biggest thing that sets it apart sets it apart. Like, there are other features on top of it that I think make it even better. But, like, even just that base level, like, before they introduced a lot of the more advanced tooling when I was first using it, even just the fact that I could search and, like, actually get what I want on the first page pretty much every time was, like, a life changing thing that was very odd compared to what Google had become where, normally, you're going through multiple pages to get anything useful.
[00:18:28] Unknown:
Nicely put. Okay. Great. The final piece on this. I know, I've actually played around with self hosting,
[00:18:35] Unknown:
a search before called Seerx. I think you I think I might be saying that wrong, but it's s e a r with an x at the end. Yes. Seer search, I think. I'm gonna I'm gonna do my best to to fix all your pronunciation today. Yeah. Nice. Thank you. I appreciate it. They're all my feet to the fire there. Man, just like everything in the FreedomTech or privacy space, all the names are are janky. So we'll we'll figure them out. But Yeah. Cirques, I think.
[00:18:57] Unknown:
So that is that just a front end for Google that I'm hosting myself? Is Is that essentially the benefit there, or is there more to it than that?
[00:19:04] Unknown:
Yeah. So there's there's basically two options that you can self host that are essentially just front ends for other things. So Google is one that is a front end for Google only. Privacy preserving, you could do it over a tour. Like, there's a lot of functionality there. I've hosted an instance of Google for people to use for for many years. And, again, that's a good option if you if you actually like Google results. And I think when I first started using Google, it made sense to do that because Google was still the best. There were no really competing search indexes. So you were either using Google or Bing. So why not use Google? At that time, they were the best. Cirques is unique in that, it is something you can self host or you can use someone else's instance. But you can actually, SERCS can pull from lots of different search engines and mix essentially the results together. You can customize what search engines what search indexes do you want to actually provide it be provided through it. It has a ton of customization. Like, maybe too much customization.
You can get lost in the menus for hours. But you have, like, complete control over how results are being served, from what sources, what you prioritize. And so it's it's essentially a front end for almost every free search engine out there, and lets you customize how you're gonna see everything. So in some ways, that can be even more powerful than something like Coggy. I don't necessarily think better, but it can be more powerful, especially if you really know what you're doing and you have the ability to fine tune what it gives you, and you know reasons why you need to use cert certain search indexes and not others. It can be a really cool, tool for that. But, yeah, search space basically lets you be the a privacy preserving front end for a bunch of different search indexes, And Google lets you do it for only Google.
[00:20:45] Unknown:
Okay. Cool. And, obviously, it comes with the trade off that you you you're responsible for the the infrastructure of the front end. And if that goes down, you're not gonna be able to search. So, worth bearing in mind, as promising and exciting as, what Seth just explained might might might appear to be. Just take that, with a pinch of salt. Trade offs all the way down. Alright. Kagi, it's a paid service. How what we're looking at set up like? Is it it do they have different tiers? What which one would you recommend? You've been a user for three years. As an individual user, as I'm sure most people, listen to this are going to be, like, which is the appropriate one before we dive into, you know, what you get for your money aside from some of the benefits that you've already talked about?
[00:21:28] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, the like like any service like this, they do have tiers. So they have a a starter professional and an ultimate tier. Full disclosure, I I'm using ultimate and happened since they announced it both because I just want to support them. Like, I think it's it's worth supporting companies that are actually doing things the right way. But, also and I know we'll dig into this a bit more. They have a really powerful pairing of AI and search that is unique because you're combining good AI models with privacy preserving practices. Now they're not, like, on the AI side. They're not as privacy preserving as something like Maple is, but they do have a no logging policy kind of like a VPN.
But combining their really good AI tools with, by far, the best search in the industry is an immensely powerful tool, for research, for deep research, for even just search, like, just getting info that's useful. When you're using many of the other AIs, it's falling back to Google search results, if anything. And so, again, you're, like, you're feeding bad data into the AI, and AIs are already a little bit awful at knowing what's real and what's fake and knowing what's useful. And so if you're feeding bad data in, you you shouldn't expect to get that good of a result out. But with Kagi, I think you have this fantastic pairing. So I use the ultimate that's the one that gives you, like, their top tier AI. All of the premium models, supports everything they do. There there are some other benefits that come with that, just because you're essentially helping to helping to fund and and support the company.
But they have a starter plan, which I think would be good enough for the vast majority of people who are just trying to use a search engine. Like, you don't need fancy stuff. You just wanna use a search engine, some very basic AI stuff, and that's $5 a month. Very straightforward, I think, would be enough for the vast majority of people. If you are more of an advanced user, for most people, professional, month, is gonna be more than enough, and that that has no search limits, that has, full AI, unlimited AI usage as well with their basic models. And that's gonna cover the vast majority of people. But you do get, like we've only really touched on the search and the AI, and I do wanna touch on both of those more, but there's also a lot of other things that come bundled.
One is that you get, obviously, just the privacy preserving search aspect. Like, they they're not logging. They don't do any analytics. They anonymize queries. They don't link things to accounts, even though technically they could, but there are ways to work around that, which we can touch on as well. And they have things like lenses, which let you basically craft your own search index. So you can you can basically specify, I really like these sources, or I want these very specific sources to never be returned, that sort of thing. You have a lot more functionality behind the scenes there. But ultimately, again, like we talked about, you're paying so you're paying with money so that you can avoid paying with your time or paying with your eyeballs.
And you're getting an absolutely fantastic service as a result of that.
[00:24:29] Unknown:
Yeah. I, so you said you were using the the ultimate one. Right?
[00:24:34] Unknown:
Yeah. I am.
[00:24:36] Unknown:
The actual I think it's worth spelling out that they do have a free tier that you can just sign up with, I believe, with just an email just to get a feel for features that we're talking about and the the upcoming features as well. So I always like it when when when companies do that so that you don't have to, you know, stump up the money first. You can you can try it out. I think the starter, also is is a very compelling use case for for most people. It's a bit vague on on the, homepage or the sorry. The pricing page. It just says enough searches to get you going, which is why I've brought up this screen share here that it's, if you actually double click on the details, it says 300 searches per month and 300 a which probably is gonna suit me, I would say. I can't see me doing more than that.
My main usage would be, obviously, search, AI summarization. So here's a link. Summarize it for me. Give me all the key talking points and things like that. And I think that, you know, that would be the one that I would start with. I guess that's why they call it the starter plan before, and I'd see whether or not I'd hit the hit the limits. But in terms of the the search and the AI interactions that you use when you're interacting with this service, Seth, is is there anything over and above the basic usage that I've done in terms of search and, you know, quick summarization where you think, the the listeners might benefit from from knowing about?
[00:25:55] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, like I mentioned, I think the perf like, the professional is gonna be the one for, like, the power user because you do get a little bit more. But I I was just checking my stats, and it looks like in roughly eight months, I've done about 1,800 searches. So I'm I'm under that 300 searches, and I think I'm I'm I'm using it quite a lot on all my devices. So if that gives you any kind of rough idea of is 300 searches per month enough for you, it probably is. Like, I'm I'm doing a lot with it, and I'm sticking under usually that 300 searches per month. I mean yeah. The nice thing with them is, like, the going up in tiers, you're not getting, like, better search.
You're getting more expanded functionality on the AI side generally, and you're getting, higher limits. So it's not like if you use the free plan or use the starter plan, your search is gonna suck. You're gonna get the same search functionality at its core that I am at the ultimate. Like, it it's not something where you have to pay to get the most out of this. It just really depends on what your specific usages. That's another thing I really appreciate with how they approach it is they're not, like, watering down the free or the starter tiers and making them awful to force you to upgrade. Like, I I really think, especially for the average, like, not super techie user, the starter is more than enough to to roll with, which is is great and is a a good place to get people started and get them used to it. But I I think for me, the main reason why I've leaned into the the more advanced ones is really the AI usage. Part of that is because I I want to use a privacy preserving AI anyways, so I'd be paying for something like Venice or paying for something like Maple, either way. And those would come at the downside if they wouldn't have the clean integration with Coggy search. In theory, I think I could get it to work, but, again, they'll just take more time.
And I I primarily use AI, and I'm very much like a an AI doomer. I don't think it's nearly as good as people say it is, especially for things like like coding and other things. I think there are a lot of places where AI is touted to be great and is really awful. But the the core place where it is absolutely fantastic is deep research when you wanna go deep into a topic and have something to summarize and to make sense of sources that would take you hours to read through on your own and if you just wanna use it for better search. Like, one of the the huge benefits to AI within Kagi, like I mentioned, is, like, you're you're feeding it good data. You already have what I think is by far the best search index in the world.
Now you're feeding that fantastic data into all of the main popular models, that Kagi runs. And so you're feeding the data into a system that then just has to summarize good data, and you'll get much, much better results, as a part of that. And, like, this is calling back a little bit to to last week, but something that I found extremely useful for that pairing is, like, my son is super curious. Like, he wants to learn about everything, constantly asking questions. And, like, thankfully, I'm super curious too, so I dig into a lot of things that are not freedom tech that are just regular things, and can answer some of those. But we always hit the limits of how much I know, and he wants to learn more. An awesome thing that I've been able to do with Kagi and with their AI is, like, I'll I'll use the AI and Kagi results to pull up more information to help it it'll actually help distill it down into something that's more approachable for for something like a a young kid to understand, and that helps me to be able to better answer his questions as well. And, again, that like, I could do that other ways, but it's that unique pairing for me of the AI AI and search, to to greatly improve the quality of results that I'm getting out of that.
[00:29:35] Unknown:
Okay. Cool. I've got a couple of, quick fire questions that have popped into my head and also some from the listeners while we've just been chatting. First one, does it have a mobile application?
[00:29:47] Unknown:
So they they do on Android. I can't remember if they do on iOS or not. The nice thing is you don't normally need one. So if you're using the search, you would just change the search in your your browser to use Kagi. They have an extension that you can use that does that for you, or you can just do it the the normal way you would within your browser. So on the search side, you don't really need an app. They do have one that you can use, but normally not necessary there. The assistant, I don't think they have an app for that, at least not that I've seen, but I've just been using it as a progressive web app, on on Mac, on iOS.
Any platform, you can easily just open the assistant, save to desktop. You have the app there. You don't you don't really need an app to be able to use that. It's all happening in the web anyways. Got it. Got it. So yeah. Not not a huge need. But they do to to to add, though, they do have two apps that are free to use that you don't need a Kagi account for that are really good. They have the Kagi's summarizer app. I can't read the exact name. But you can essentially just share links to it, and it will summarize it for you and give you a summary. You don't have to pay anything for that. You don't have to create an account. And then Kagi News as well is an app that they just released that I have found to be absolutely fantastic and I'm using every day, at this point. But I don't wanna jump too far ahead. But that's the those are the main apps that they actually have are are not for their paid service. It's for free services that they put out.
[00:31:08] Unknown:
Very cool. Yeah. I I've certainly been using the summarizer in the in the last couple of days. It's been very useful. Does the assistant have voice support, or is it text based only?
[00:31:19] Unknown:
It does have voice support, but my, disdain for sending my voice to anything has persisted from when I first abandoned, my Google Homes way back in the day. So I have not tried it. It does have it, and I've heard that it works well, but I I can't speak to it specifically because I do I do type out everything.
[00:31:38] Unknown:
Fair enough. Question from Vibrance. I'm just gonna bring that up on screen. He mentions, is it a concern to have your searches potentially tied together with one account or identity within Kagi? That's a good question.
[00:31:52] Unknown:
Yes. So it it definitely is, and this has been the the longest running thing that people push back on originally, and I say originally because it solved. We'll get to that. Was that okay. One of the nice things about using a free no account search is that there's no account that ties everything back. In theory, your IP or browser fingerprint or other things could be used to tie those back to you, but, there was no account that you were logged into. Like, if you got away from Google, generally, you weren't using an account with any of these other search engines, which is a a a good advantage to those. I I will just continue to put the huge caveat that if those services wanted to profile you and figure out who you who like, to figure out what entity is making these searches, they have many ways to do that. Even if you're using a VPN, just with the nature of search and how much information you're giving it, it's very possible to do that.
But there was no account that necessarily tied everything together. Now Coggy, while they've had accounts since day one because you'd have to pay, you need some way to to prove that you're a paying member to use their service, they have not associated queries with accounts. So they intentionally anonymize those, but that doesn't require trust. You're essentially trusting that they are not tying together searches and accounts, which is isn't ideal. It's good enough for me when a company's entire, modernization strategy relies on that trust.
So, like, they they have no reason to break that. But, obviously, if you can go a step further, that's great. And, thankfully, Kagi have gone way more than a step further by introducing what they call privacy pass. And this is something I I talked with Vlad on on opt out about, probably couple years ago. Has been long a long time coming. But, essentially, what this is is that you can pay for an account, and then instead of logging into your account to use Coggy, you install their privacy pass extension. Basically, how it works is it's e cash for search.
It it sounds weird as someone who hates e cash, but it's very similar concept where you can, in a privacy preserving way, prove that this token is legitimate without actually revealing which account funded this token. So it's it's a similar concept. And, basically, by using this, by using this browser extension, every time you search, it basically just provides a search token, which is you don't feel like buy it separately. It just is funded from your account. And that search token basically authenticates you without revealing anything about you, which is really, really powerful, and it uses a new token and a new authentication every time you search. So there is no way even to tie those back to a specific, like, token account or something. It it's completely anonymous per search. Everyone is cryptographically, unlinked or unlinkable.
So it's a really like, it's very well thought out. It is not just a simple, like, just trust us, bro, privacy approach. It's actually really cool from the ground up, cutting edge cryptography to make sure that there's actually a cryptographic proof that you are not being surveilled, which is really fantastic. Cool. Yeah. It it works really well. Like, there it'll depend on what browser you're using exactly how you actually use it. They've got a guide on it. But it you basically just install the extension auth with the extension, which then, like, quote, unquote, buys these tokens in a way that's privacy preserving.
And then you just search, and you don't do anything extra. There's no account associated with those searches, and cryptographically, it's impossible for them to associate those with your searches. So for the more hardcore, or the ones who don't need some of the other services, there are some limitations. This only applies to search. It doesn't apply to AI and other features. But, for those who need better privacy, this works really, really well and is extremely well thought out.
[00:35:43] Unknown:
Yeah. That's, something I I I saw the the title on their docs about privacy pass, and I didn't have any clue that it was gonna be anything there as cool as that. I thought it was gonna be like a a login solution or something like that, which I guess it kind of is, but, like, the way no knowing learning about how it works under the hood is very cool. So, thank you for that one. Question from our our producer, Overlord, Jordan. The biggest thing that Google has, the market on is local business cards that provide address addresses, hours, etcetera. Does Kagi have these? That's a good question.
[00:36:16] Unknown:
So kind of. This is the one shortcoming that I found in pretty much in every other Maps app and every other search app is just the the Google Maps data specifically around reviews and hours, etcetera, is just miles ahead of everything else. And the the network effect there is very hard to beat. You you can, I think, even look at, like, Apple Maps and see how abysmal their business data is compared to Google Maps and see that even a company as big as Apple struggles to get anywhere close to as good as them? So Kagi does have their own maps, and they I should know this off the top of my head, but I don't, where they pull the data from.
So they they will have some of that data. And then, obviously, if, like, the businesses' websites have that data, they can be pulled out through the the AI short answer that pops up, if you if you so choose to use that in the search. Or if you use the AI tool itself, it could pull that from the website, and give you all that info. So, like, you you can get it, but it's not gonna be as straightforward as, like, the the Google Maps, find a thing, see all the reviews, all that fun stuff. That is unfortunately one of the few things that I do just still have to use from Google is Google Maps just specifically to find points of interest and see reviews and see hours that I know are, like, 99% going to be accurate.
[00:37:40] Unknown:
Okay. Very good. Thanks for the question, Jordan. We mentioned about paid plans. We haven't, talked about how how to pay for it. Obviously, I'm sure they take credit card, but presumably, there's, at the very least, a Bitcoin option. What's what's available there on the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency side for payments?
[00:37:59] Unknown:
Yeah. So they've accepted Bitcoin and Lightning for a while. It has been a very long time since I paid because I paid way up front. I'm trying to pull up their billing right now, actually, to just confirm what their options look like right now. Yeah. Last I checked, they had Bitcoin and Lightning, also just regular credit card stuff. The Bitcoin and Lightning works a little bit similar to Proton where you're adding basically, credit to your account. You're not, like, paying for a thing specifically, but you add those credits kind of like a gift card in a sense. And then you pay out of that when you go ahead and, pay for subscription or upgrade or whatever.
So, yeah, they they have Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning right now. They are adding Monero. I've already gotten connected connected with, their guy within Coggy who's working on it, who's a huge Monero fan. So I know that that is a work in progress. I don't have a a firm ETA, but I know that that's that was being worked on over the summer. So, hopefully, that will be out soon to have Monero support as well. But right now, they do support PayPal, normal debit and credit cards, Apple, Google Pay, and then Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning via OpenNode at the moment, but adding Monero as well.
[00:39:10] Unknown:
Awesome. I I knew you'd be in their DMs asking for Monero support. I, I shouldn't be surprised. Yeah. Yeah. Nicely done. Nicely done. I'm sure it'll, get a quick uptake when, when they do add it. Okay. Great. Just a reminder, guys, if you have any Kagi, or search based related questions, please do drop them in the chat. And, as I say that, John, dad has just dropped into the chat. Welcome, John. Nice to have you with us. Seth, when I was doing some research for this, I kept stumbling across, a concept or a feature for Kagi called lenses. Could you outline what those are and kind of how you use them, if you do use them, and why they could be useful to to the listeners?
[00:39:52] Unknown:
Yeah. So when when we get into the more advanced search functionality, I'll be quite honest. I'm a bit of a a plebe when it comes to the, like, fancy things like bangs or lenses, where I I do use them some, but I am absolutely not the the most power user out there. So there are gonna be some people who have some more advanced usage. And the nice thing with Kagi is I can already guarantee you that the things you're used to in other search engines like Bangs are already there, work really well, very customizable. When it comes to lenses, the real benefit to me and the main thing that I use it for is limiting results to, like journal articles, academic papers.
Because a lot of the, like, the technical research that I do, I want to actually make sure I'm getting it from good sources. And, specifically, again, I'll call back to the AI side of things. Specifically, using Kage Assistant with lenses for academic papers and focusing it on actual, like, published scientific research is really, really useful for getting answers to questions where you don't wanna just rely on, like, Reddit user one three five for your, your medical question or something like that. Like, he he wanna make sure that there's there's something behind it. And so that is really, really useful.
The other one that I have used before is they have a small web, which is kind of like lenses. But, basically, they they can limit search results to only, like, regular personal blogs, which may sound really weird. But there's actually just a lot of absolutely fantastic stuff out there from people who just like writing, and they have a blog. And it's hard to find their search results, Usually, if you're using something like Google or others, and Kagi has a deep love for the kind of the small web like it used to be where people just had blogs and they publish random things. And there was a lot of value there. And so you can limit it to things like that, which is really good. But there's also I mean, there's you can make it developer centric, so you can, like, limit it to things like GitHub, Stack Overflow.
There's a lot of, like, a lot of advanced functionality. You can go very deep in that. You can create your own lenses and get very specific with what you want to be returned. So, again, it's really about you making the most out of your search results. I generally just rely on copy results as they are. I don't go into the more advanced stuff usually. I know I should. I kinda just need to figure out how they work. I haven't really spent the time on that, but I use just kind of the default lenses every now and then. But there's a lot of functionality there that I think people who are a little bit more in the weeds of search engines could could make the most of.
[00:42:27] Unknown:
Nice. Okay. Cool. Nosta Gang has, made a great comment over on the Nosta chat and, that says that Kagi is in the notes note note circle that you get if you're a paid, subscriber of notes note, you also get three months of, Kagi, presumably the the pet the minimum paid search, paid tier for free. So if you are a Notesnook paid user, make make sure that you check that out. And Bon is also asking, Seth, he wants to know if you've used the Kagi browser at all. I didn't even know there was one. Apparently, it's available on macOS and iOS.
[00:43:03] Unknown:
Yes. So first on the the Notesnook circle thing, I I was in the worst of all worlds where Notesnook, Entei, and Kagi all kind of have started partnering together to build this this cool web of, like, actually good FreedomTech services, and providing benefits, but only if you're a new user. And I'm already a paid user of all of them. So I get no benefits, unfortunately. But if you're using any of those three, I believe they all have deals to use the other, if you're already a paid subscriber of those. So, yeah, definitely check it out if you haven't. It's a fantastic way to to try three of, like, the best privacy preserving services out there, with discounts. Definitely check that out.
When it comes to I'm totally blanking. What was the question about? About the have you used the browser? Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So Kagi does have their own browser, and it is it's built from the ground up. It's called Orion. I'll be completely honest. I haven't used it in about a year. I tried to use it basically for six months straight last year, and it was okay, but there were a lot of growing pains. Building a browser is incredibly difficult, and they're trying to do it in a way that's not just, like, Chromium under the hood, slap a fancy wrapper on it, and pretend it's a better browser. Like, they're actually doing it from the ground up, building the the engine itself, having extension support for both Safari and the Chrome Firefox stores.
So they're they're doing a lot of very advanced stuff under the hood. It wasn't quite there for me in terms of daily driving, but that was probably nine to twelve months ago that I stopped using it. And I know they've been very rapidly making progress on that front. So I I think it's definitely worth a try. Again, they're trying to do that in a privacy preserving way. It obviously is gonna have first class integration with all of Coggy's stuff, but is is a cool idea and a cool approach. Practically, I'm not sure that it will pan out just because browsers are so freaking difficult to do, especially when you're doing them right from the ground up.
And so I'm I'm a little hesitant that it will actually work out in the long run, but it is very much worth trying. And that's another thing that I gladly supported them with because I I wanted to have more browsers that aren't just built on Chrome, and and have used off and on. But it it wasn't quite there when I used it before, but it's a it's a cool concept. It when it worked well, it was very fast, like, noticeably faster than I'd had with something like Brave or Firefox. But, yeah, definitely definitely worth trying out if you are on macOS or on iOS.
[00:45:45] Unknown:
Alright. Cool. Yeah. I I'd also not stumbled, stumbled across that one. Orion browser. Cool. Maybe I'll check that one out. Alright. We we're coming in, very close to time already. We haven't even got to any of the pre I do wanna let you talk about any of the additional features that we haven't already covered off. We've already covered off, obviously, no ads, better search index, AI assistant, general AI usage, the summarizer. What else is in the Kagi, toolbox that you use? I know they have a news, a news feature. Do you use that one?
[00:46:19] Unknown:
Yeah. So, I mentioned that before that the news is actually, like, you don't need to be a paid Coggy user. Like, you should just go check out the Coggy news app. It's a really cool concept where, basically, Coggy users or community members can help to craft the categories and tweak the sources that are used there to try and and make, like, a really high quality feed of sources. And then Kagi news, you just basically choose the categories you want to see news about, choose how many articles max you want it to show you, and it'll combine the sources that Kagi community members have come up with for those categories, with their AI summarizations and essentially give you, like, customized news feeds where AI summarizes and creates the, like, quote, unquote news article for you with all of the links very clear to to where the links are coming from, where the data is coming from.
And the goal is really to let you get news, but not have to doom scroll to get it, which is exactly the reason why I just haven't really consumed any news other than what I happen to see when I'm, like, browsing x for work or something like that. I haven't really done news in years because, like, all of the ways to get it have just been so awful. And I have started using Cognos since they announced it, pretty much every day. Because, again, I can choose which categories I actually wanna learn about. I strictly limit it to 15 articles no more because I don't wanna get stuck in it. I just wanna quickly see if there's anything that pops out. If there is, I get the quick, good quality AI summary with all the links out if I wanna learn more.
And then once I go through my categories, I'm done. And they they refresh once a day, very intentionally, not all the time. So you're not gonna get any news new any news news. Wow. That's a tongue twister. Any new news articles until twenty four hours later from the last time it refreshed, which, again, feels weird in the the current environment where we expect our news to be, like, up to the second, but it's actually really refreshing. Like, I'll I'll find myself opening it just kind of out of habit of expecting that when I open an app, there's a ton of new stuff waiting for me, and then there's not. And it's actually like a breath of fresh air. I can just close the app and move on. It's it's nice.
[00:48:31] Unknown:
Nice. Okay. Cool. We've had, blister four in the Nostra chat says, no account is better than a private account, which I would agree, but, obviously, no account is gonna limit your usage. No trust needed. Maple AI has an has anonymous accounts. Does Kagi?
[00:48:50] Unknown:
Yeah. I so I just saw the announcement from Maple's anonymous accounts. I need to see exactly how they work. I in my very basic understanding after reading their tweets, it's gonna work actually very similar to privacy pass, where you have an account, but you actually you disassociate the proof of account from the account info itself. And so I think it's a a very similar concept. I I haven't dug deeply into how Maple's doing it, but it's a very similar concept with privacy pass for Kagi. And while I agree, like, the general concept, yes, I would love to not have an account. To me, it is very, very, very much worth the minor downside of having an account, especially if you're using privacy pass for the massive upside in terms of the quality of what you're getting, in terms of supporting a good service and a company that's actually building and prioritizing the customer and not sucking your data and not acting as a giant surveillance machine, not prioritizing ad monopolies over you, it's very worth it to me. And, especially, like, I think everyone kind of assumes their threat model is this, like, crazy. The FBI is out to get you. But you're probably if you're listening to this, you're just a regular dude. You have limited time. You wanna use the best stuff available. You want to get good quality results. You want to fund companies that are actually doing things the right way. And Kagi is that. Like, it's it's just fantastic. But, obviously, if you do have the I can't have an account no matter what. I can't even pay in Bitcoin or Lightning for some reason.
Brave Search is still fantastic, and Kagi's free tier is still pretty good too.
[00:50:20] Unknown:
Okay. Yeah. That was a great question, actually. Thank you for that, blister four. Something has popped into my mind as we've been talking through. With the whole integration with, the AI assistant and things like that, is is there a compelling use case here for the average Joe that has a ChatGPT paid subscription or similar to switch over to Kagi to get all of the additional benefits and still have all of that AI interaction, so that, you know, they're not knee capping themselves in terms of, like, going to a substandard model, but they're also gaining all of that privacy benefit for, you know, especially if they take the $5 a month, no extra cost. Does that seem reasonable, or is there is there a hole in my thinking there?
[00:51:01] Unknown:
I think it is. I I the only caution I would add is that I would expect the AI to be a little bit slower, because you are obviously getting the privacy benefits, but also because you're not relying on, like, the AI company to actually run the model itself, but it is a smaller company. From what I can tell, the actual AI results, like, the tokens per second kind of stuff, is a little bit slower than you would get when you're using these natively. To me, that's fine, especially with my use cases. I'm not just sitting there chatting with an AI all day long. Like, I'm very intentionally using it for deep research. If it's something that I know is gonna take a while, I'll start it and just go do something else, go to the bathroom, make a cup of coffee or something. It's never that slow. Like, just to be clear, it's not, like, minutes, but it just isn't gonna be quite as blazing fast as those. But, again, to me, the trade off or the benefit of having better privacy, all of my searches and prompts and results not being used for training in an AI that I have no control over, and being able to pair it with Coggy search, I I think it would be a much better solution for most people. It very much does depend on your your specific needs, though.
But, yeah, I mean, for a lot of people, just if you use it for the AI, I think probably you'd need the premium tier. If you're, like, a heavy chat GPT user or something, you'd probably need the premium tier so you don't have any limitations on the AI usage. And so you can use more premium models. Yep. But I would think that would be a fantastic swap over, and then you get all of the other amazing coffee services as part of that.
[00:52:34] Unknown:
Alright. Awesome. We've got a presubmitted question from DrinkCore. It says, I'm already a de googled de googled and use Brave, mobile browser, or dot dot go instead, which I believe don't promote certain search results or slow show me with ads. Why should I add Kagi to my arsenal and pay for what I'm already getting for free? I think we've kind of already, you know, answered this with the wealth of additional features that that Kagi offers as well as the the whole index piece where we're not relying on Google. It's it's very much more than just, you know, you don't see ads. You've got the AI summarization. You've got the news, well, which is part of the free tier, the the the privacy option with the privacy pass.
So I think we've probably already covered this offset, but is is there anything else that we haven't covered off that would be specific to this question where you'd be like you know, that would answer the short question of why why pay for it. I think we've probably covered it, though.
[00:53:27] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I think we've covered everything. I would just say try it. Like, the try the free tier. Like, again, you're not locked into anything. Give it a go. See if you like the search results. See if you like the the additional features that you get out of it. And if you do, it's something you can pay for it. If not, I I think I'm I'm thankful there are really good options like Brave Search, specifically. DuckDuckGo is reasonably good even though I I definitely prefer Brave Search. So it's nice that there are really good options out there. You don't you don't have to use Coggy, but I do think, at least in my in my usage and in many others, it's much better than any of the others.
[00:54:02] Unknown:
Alright. Great. We do have another presubmitted question. If I can just find it, where has it gone? It was from Black Coffee. It was more of a of a comment actually that I just wanted to ask a question off the back of. He said that, referring to Kagi, obviously, I liked it and used it for a while a few months ago, but couldn't keep paying for it as I was spending a lot of money using it. Now that seems to me like it could be like he was on the the wrong tier potentially. And but but the re the question that I wanna ask off the back of this is, like, let's say I go for the the the the basic tier, the $5 per month. Do I get to a point where it just stops working, or are they gonna continue to charge me for, like, an over usage type thing?
Whether with you being on the ultimate is something that you've ever experienced or have any knowledge of.
[00:54:56] Unknown:
So that is a good question. I since I have just been on higher tier plans from before day one, I don't specifically know. My understanding is that it it just stops at that point. But like we talked about, 300 searches a month may not sound like a lot, but I think for many people, that would be enough. But I I don't think that they charge, like, overage charges or anything like that. That doesn't wouldn't seem like them.
[00:55:23] Unknown:
Yeah. It it doesn't seem like it. I mean, obviously, we're probably missing a bit of context from Black Coffee there, and it might just be a tier. Like, he was on the wrong tier or something, but who knows? Yeah. Quick reminder, we've got a couple of minutes left, guys. If you have any any final, questions that we've got three minutes ago, so get your questions in quickly. Seth, and any we can cover off that you use that we haven't covered yet?
[00:55:47] Unknown:
I think that that's the vast majority. I'm just double checking to make sure there's nothing that I'm I'm forgetting here, but those are definitely the the primary ones. Oh, the the one that I would add that we haven't touched on at all, is just quite simply, when you're searching, you can actually, like, blacklist sites that you don't like getting results from. Quote Quora was my instant one because I feel like anytime you search for anything, you get these poor results, and they're, like, absolute garbage, even if there is an answer.
Things like that. If you if you are getting them in your search results and you know, like, man, this site is never useful or, like, I hate Reddit. Like, I don't like the way that they do things. I wanna just not see Reddit results. You can easily tune your search as well. And those kinds of things are really simple. Like, you can you can go deep into the coggy side of things. They have very advanced choices. You can do, like, super advanced things if you want. But I think for most people, there's, like, that ability to realize, like, oh, I'm really like, don't give me Facebook results. Like, I don't have a Facebook account, or I really don't like this specific site, or I love this one, so prioritize this result is really, really useful. Like, I've also done that with some blogs of people that I really like in the space is I've, essentially pinned their results. So if I do a search and their blog mentions that at all and comes up in the results, instead of being somewhere down in the ranking based on what Kagi thinks, it'll just pin that to the top and immediately show me that result, which is super, super useful if I know that I have some high quality sources where if they've written on it, I want to read that first.
It's a it's a killer feature. So just that simple tuning of, like, I love this or I hate this and being able to have some control over the results that you get and that being honored from then on is really, really powerful, and doesn't take any, like, fancy functionality. You just click next to the result, choose to hide that source, or prioritize that source, and just move on with your life.
[00:57:42] Unknown:
Very cool. Okay. That brought us beautifully up to time. I don't know about you listeners, but I am going straight after this to go and get the the paid tier. Seth, you've you've Kagi pilled me. I've been using the free tier this week and and had great experience, but, knowing you know, doing a bit more of a deep dive of all of the all of the more advanced features has definitely tipped me over the edge. So in fact, no. I'm not gonna pay for it. I'm gonna go to my notes and I can get my three months free first, and then I'm gonna pay for it. So, but, yeah, this has been very, very useful, and it's definitely something that I'm gonna add into my toolbox. I I I quite like the basic usage with the search and the AI summarization. That's a big part of my kind of web based usage these days, quite similar to yourself when doing research for for shows like this, basically.
So definitely adding that one into my arsenal, and I appreciate your insights as, as a Kagi OG. Max, if you listen to this, get well soon. We hope to have you back next week. Thank you to everybody that has been, asking their questions, send this into the chat. CU Barminer, Bon, the usual suspects. We, we appreciate your support. And Saswal just, coming in clutch with the the final boost of the day, 2,100 sats, and says come to Milwaukee, Max. It's not gay. Well, hopefully, he's listening. He'll pick up that message afterwards. And, yeah. Get back to you, Max. And thank you all for stopping by. We will see you at the exact same time next week.
[00:59:35] Unknown:
Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London. Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet, Foundation, and my NIM box for keeping the Ungovernable Misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and artwork. Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills.
Thanks to Expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news or continuing to grow the mesh to Dell. Finally, a big thanks to the unsung hero, our Canadian overlord, Short, for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the scenes. We love you all. Stay ungovernable.
Hello, and welcome back to Freedom Tech Friday. For those of you that are new here, allow me to quickly explain what this is all about and why they are here. Freedom Tech Friday is a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the Ingoverable Misfits, X, Nosta, Yup, sometimes Rumble, and Twitch feeds. We go live for one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern or 2PM in The UK, but you can also catch up later on the Ingoverable Misfits podcast feed. On Freedom Set Friday, we like to cover the latest news trends for anything relating to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero to encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between. Essentially, if there is a tool or topic.
Excuse me. Sorry. Something glitched there. If there is a tool or topic or news item, that can help you take back some control in today's digital panopticon, we wanna talk about it. My name is q and a. I'm head of customer experience at Foundation, where we build Bitcoin focused sovereignty tools. And as always, I am joined or more often than not, I'm joined by my good friends, Max, who is, phone sick, unfortunately, today. We have a poly soldier amongst the ranks. But I am joined by Seth, who is VP at Cape Wallet. As I mentioned, the show is live and interactive, and we rely on you guys to steer us the topics that you want us to cover or to send us your Freedom Tech related questions.
Loads of ways you can get involved with the show, all of which really helps spread awareness for the show. Commenting, asking questions in the live chat, submitting your topics or questions ahead of time on, boosting the show on Fountain or other podcasting two point o apps, sending your questions or tips in via XMR chat, or just sharing the show on X or NoStar with your friends. Top support from last week's show, about spread, I still need still haven't updated that bit, sir. That's two weeks on the bounce. Apologies, people. Top four for last week's show where we did not talk about spending your sats.
We come from Ape Mithrandir who sent 7,777 sats. And he said, I wish I could have attached one live, but I was dealing with the kids. How ironic as we were talking freedom set for families and kids. Thank you for the support. And also a special shout out to Late Stage Huddle and Bon who boosted 6,006 sats and 2,200 and 22 sats respectively. Thank you guys for your support. So without further ado, just you, Seth. How's it going, mate?
[00:02:28] Unknown:
It is going well. I'm, I'm a little, you know, pissed at Max, bailing on us. Sick in quotes, but we all we all know. Yeah. He's out there. He's out there partying, enjoying some sunshine.
[00:02:41] Unknown:
He's out there hefty Thursday evening, hasn't he?
[00:02:44] Unknown:
And he's woke up and thought, ugh. It explains it. Your classic Thursday night party.
[00:02:49] Unknown:
Yeah. In indeed. But, all I think I think good, all all otherwise, busy week.
[00:02:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. This was a a nice relatively slow week. This is my only podcast this week, which is I can't remember last time that happened. So it's it's nice. I'm coming in fresh. I've had, like, four meetings all week. Vic's been busy at a conference, so no boss pestering me all week. Vic, if you're listening, hi. Yeah. It's been good. It's been good. I'm feeling I'm feeling free. I'm feeling free. And this topic also is just near and dear to my heart, so it's gonna be a good one.
[00:03:24] Unknown:
Indeed. Indeed it is. Just quick hello to to everybody in the live chat. We've got the usual suspects. Jordan's here moaning about rumble. Maybe one day we'll get that fixed, Jordan. Hi to to Mia Herbert, who they say, hey, sir, if you know them. We've also got Nosta gang, Yippa Huddle, and Observer in the Nosta live chat as well. Thank you everybody for stopping by, and get your your questions and comments ready. Yeah. This week, we are going to be talking about paid private search, specifically doing a deep dive on Kagi. In fact, before we dive in, sir, Kagi, Kagi, what's what's what's the correct terminology here? I know you're a k a kagi OG. What's the what's your take on this?
[00:04:06] Unknown:
I believe it is kagi.
[00:04:08] Unknown:
Kagi?
[00:04:09] Unknown:
Yeah. It is kagi. Yeah. It's Japanese. It means key in Japanese.
[00:04:13] Unknown:
Oh, there you go. See see everybody had told you he was an OG. He's got all the lingo already.
[00:04:19] Unknown:
I've been practicing for years.
[00:04:23] Unknown:
So, for those that don't know, Kagi is a a paid search engine that, they have a saying that says, you are the customer, not the product, which I kinda like. We're gonna discuss as always, you know, why in the fur would you wanna pay search in the first place? We're gonna deep dive on Kagi's privacy model, different features they offer, why they're any better or different from, you know, from the the the existing tech conglomerate like Google, DuckDuckGo, and all of the other alternatives that we have. Also do another deep dive on the features like lenses, blocks, boosts, assistant, news. It seems, very much more than, just a a search engine. So we wanna kinda spell that out today.
And, yeah, they just have a a new approach to transparent, human curated discovery. So, hopefully, we'll we'll get to grips with what that actually means and as we go through the show. So I guess let's, as always, try and try and set the scene before we we go into, you know, a bit more of a Kagi deep dive. Google's free. Duck Duck Go is free. You know, loads of there's loads of free search engines out there, Seth. Like, why on earth would I want to part with my hard earned Fiat or or Sats or Monero to pay for search?
[00:05:38] Unknown:
It's a great question, and it's it's really the only one that I think is the the reasonable pushback to Kagi as someone who is a a hardcore Kagi stan. And I found out this morning have been a user for three and a half years. Didn't even know that this was live in March 2022, but I I must have gotten in, on the Ground Floor there because I've been using it for a long, long time. But, ultimately, it comes down to whatever you use on the Internet, you are paying with something. Either, especially if it's a service, I should say. There are some free things that are just truly free. But any service like this, you're paying with something. It's either going to be your time and that it takes more time to set up and use something like circs that you could self host yourself to get some privacy and some some, cleaning up of the brokenness of Google and other search engines.
It could be paying with your data, which is the norm with Google and many of the other search engines being being as well. Or it can be paying with your your eyeballs, paying with the the things that you see first, which is true of pretty much every search engine except for Kagi, where even the the good ones that I would still recommend and think are great solutions, like DuckDuckGo, like BraveSearch, they are essentially just saying we can do ads better than Google, and we won't be as sketchy as they will. We'll sell other services alongside of it to maybe monetize it, and we'll just try to do things a little bit better than Google.
Most of them don't have their own search index, which is another thing we can get to on, like, the the specifics of what makes Kagi special to me. But, a lot of them are just using something like Google or, Bing upstream, and are giving you some improvements on top of that. But, ultimately, the last thing you can pay for when you're using a service online is instead of paying with your time, not self hosting, instead of paying with your eyeballs, not dealing with ads and dealing with someone else's search rankings that they have, financial incentive to prioritize a certain way. You can just pay with your money. And by doing that, you can get away from all of the and this is a technical term. I'm not cursing here. Insheetification is, like, the term that's used to describe, like, what has happened to the the Internet, specifically to search and specifically to Google search, which is the underlying index for many of these search engines, is things have just gotten absolutely horrible. So you end up paying with a lot of your time and a lot of your eyeballs, to just be able to find the results that you need. So instead, by using something like Coggy or specifically by using Coggy, you can opt in to paying a small amount to save yourself a ton of time, to save your eyeballs a ton of time looking at things that are not helpful, and, ultimately, I think get way more value back than you're putting in in terms of the the cost that you're spending.
[00:08:30] Unknown:
Nice nicely put. I I wanna just kind of double click on a a couple of things that you said there. You mentioned around, like, your your pain with your eyes and seeing ads and things like that. I'm gonna, you know, say maybe not the audience that we have here, you know, on on the Uncoverable feed that tends to be more privacy focused, but there's gonna be a wide range of the population that are so used to seeing ads in literally every single app that they have on their phone or anytime they interact with the Internet. They're probably just gonna be completely ambivalent to the fact of whether they see ads or some people might you know, some weird people do actually like being sold to every, click.
What would you say to those people that are like, you know, I don't really care that there's, like, three rows of ads on the top of my Google search. Like, what else is in it for me? Why why outside of that, what what can can Kagi or or an alternative a similar alternative do for me?
[00:09:25] Unknown:
Man, it's honestly it's hard to relate to that view of the Internet. Like, I've been blocking ads one way or another or paying to avoid ads for so long that I, like, I forget what the norm is. And then, like, I'll be helping someone fix an issue with their computer or something and just do a search and not think about what the default search engine is. And it'll be like Google, and there'll be, like, 17 ads on the side. And the first 12 results are all sponsored. And, like, I forget how actually broken it is and how how much worse it's gotten even since I started opting out of this. Like, when I opted out, it was like, okay. I think things are getting kinda bad. Like, I should find another solution. Now it's like, I don't understand how anyone can use the Internet like this and specifically can use search like this. Because, like, if if you let's say, like, you are listening.
You you haven't been dealing with ad blockers. You're just using the default Google search in your browser. You're probably using Google Chrome. Google's the default on your I your iPhone. Like, it's just what you're used to. It may feel really normal because it's, like, I think Google understands this, like, slowly boiling the frog thing where, like, they didn't go from, like, fantastic search engine to awful overnight. They slowly, slowly, slowly built in these, like, continually just just terrible things into the system. So you kind of you kind of got used to it over time. But the way I think about it is is, again, like, it ultimately to me comes down to time. And maybe this is just, like, we were talking about last week. Like, we're we're coming from the perspective. We have kids. We have very demanding, high paced jobs that we love.
Like, I have no I have negative time. Like like, I don't have I don't have spare time. I don't know what that is. I have negative time. So even if you think about, like let's say you search for something 20 times a day, which is probably a quite tame number. Like, you you may think that sounds like a lot, but that's probably less than most people do. Let's say you search for something 20 times a day, and you have to spend at least five seconds getting past the sponsored results just getting to the first real results. Think about how much time that is in and of itself, much less the fact that that there's the double whammy in in Google specifically, but in some other search engines, where not only are you getting the sponsored results, but they're also changing the rest of the results that you get to prioritize sites that are either paying them in some way or sites that are specifically targeting SEO for that specific search engine. So you're not necessarily getting results that are actually good for you. You're getting results that are good for the advertiser and that are good for Google. And then maybe somewhere in there, there's a result that's good for you. So, again, it comes down to, like, you may be used to the ads. You may be used to the visual clutter. You may be used to this, like, this, honestly, like, awful reality that is Google search and much of the search engines we use. But it doesn't have to stay like that, and your time is more valuable than the amount of money that something like Kagi would cost.
[00:12:19] Unknown:
Yeah. Very well said. I, it's funny. As I brought question up, somebody in the Nostra chat literally literally commented saying, meh. I quit ads. So it's not just a fake person that they made up. There are other people out there that that appear to be fine with it, albeit, like, you just, honestly, you know, laid out. But, you know, it's it's not always a a a kind of a surface level thing. There is, some trade offs, particularly with your time when you're you're having to mentally sift through or scroll past those ads. Alright.
Before we, go into the details, Kagi can't be the only player here. I've seen a couple of, comments here around, Brave Search. We also have C Rex. I'm sure there's probably well, we've got DuckDuckGo, which I believe is is kind of just a wrapper around I forget what it is now. But there there are alternatives that it's a wrap around thing. Right? There's alternatives that claim to be better than than Google or more private than Google. Like, where do these sit for you on the kind of spectrum of, you know, if you've got Google on one end and Kagi on the other, where where do the rest of them sit? Are any of them viable?
Do they have paid services? Like, what you know, have you have you tested any of these?
[00:13:35] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I've I've used essentially everything. So I've I've tried all of the options. And for a long time before Kagi and even after starting using Kagi, I've continued to use off and on the other more privacy preserving search engines. So there really are, like there's only three real options outside of Google and Kagi, in my opinion. And Google, I just I don't consider an option. So, like, if you're using Google, stop. Use one of these other options. We'll talk about your life will be better. No matter what other option you choose from these four, basically, it will improve your life.
But the like, real quick before I get to the options, something that's really important to understand, and he touched on it, is a search engine is only as good as the actual index of results, how they're sorted, how they're managed. And so even if you use, like, something like a more privacy preserving front end, but you're still getting Google's results, they're still going to be profiled and handled in a way that benefits Google and the ad monopolies and the websites that that, are monetized through Google. Like, those are the the people who are gonna benefit more than you. Even if you can get some of the privacy back, the index itself is still broken. And this is something that's not like, I'm not the only one saying this. This is very broad outside of the FreedomTech, outside of the privacy space.
It is commonly very well understood that Google search index index is just totally broken, and it it has fallen to pieces and is not nearly as good as it used to be. And when you look at many of the privacy preserving options, they really are just a better wrapper on top of a a broken index. So like you said, DuckDuckGo, that's essentially wrapping Bing index, results. So you're getting the same, roughly, search results from Bing. Maybe they're not as manipulated as they would be if you go to Bing, but you are still having some of the problems there. Same with Startpage, who, if I remember correctly, they're using Google, as their search index.
Again, more privacy preserving, but still a broken index under the hood. Brave search is really the only one that is outside of the the rest of these where Brave is actually it's a combination. They're building their own index, and I believe they also fall back on Google search results. That may have changed. I haven't haven't looked into if they ever, like, fully switched to their own index. But they are trying to actually build their own search index from scratch, which is a huge undertaking, but it's really what you have to do to be able to get more useful search. So if you wanna get past just the privacy preserving, just the ad removal, but to get to this actual search results being more useful and giving you what you need faster, you really have to move away from Google, Bing, etcetera. So that that is one reason why, like, I think DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Brave Search are all good options. They're gonna give you better privacy.
They're gonna do ads differently. They don't get away from ads. They just do their own ads. But they're gonna be better than Google. The Brave Search, and Expatriotic, mentioned this on the x chat. It's it's fantastic. I think if you're going to use a free search engine, I don't think anything compares with Brave right now, in terms of privacy, in terms of search index results. And they they have some of their own features you can build on top of that, like their AI products and stuff too. So that one is really good. But I definitely tend to like, if you're going to switch from Google, why switch to something that's just a privacy preserving wrapper on Google?
Get something that's actually going to have a better search index that gives you more useful results. And and, again, that gives you more value back for the time it takes to switch or the the the money it costs to to switch to something like that. But that is something that makes Coggy very unique is that they are using their own, in house built index from the ground up. And it's one that has no ads, that has no monetization for websites or anything like that. So there's no perverse incentive for them to change the index to financially benefit themselves. They benefit by you paying to use their service. And from what I found and what many, many others has have found, you can find writings about Coggy in pretty much all of the main tech blogs and websites and social media platforms where people are comparing them with other search results, and they're just destroying Google, Bing, and others.
In terms of how quickly can you find the thing you're actually searching for versus how many pages do you have to go through to get to that that search result that's actually useful. And that comes really from that index that's built from the ground up to be neutral, to be useful to you, the customer, rather than to them or to the the advertising agency. And that's one of the biggest thing that sets it apart sets it apart. Like, there are other features on top of it that I think make it even better. But, like, even just that base level, like, before they introduced a lot of the more advanced tooling when I was first using it, even just the fact that I could search and, like, actually get what I want on the first page pretty much every time was, like, a life changing thing that was very odd compared to what Google had become where, normally, you're going through multiple pages to get anything useful.
[00:18:28] Unknown:
Nicely put. Okay. Great. The final piece on this. I know, I've actually played around with self hosting,
[00:18:35] Unknown:
a search before called Seerx. I think you I think I might be saying that wrong, but it's s e a r with an x at the end. Yes. Seer search, I think. I'm gonna I'm gonna do my best to to fix all your pronunciation today. Yeah. Nice. Thank you. I appreciate it. They're all my feet to the fire there. Man, just like everything in the FreedomTech or privacy space, all the names are are janky. So we'll we'll figure them out. But Yeah. Cirques, I think.
[00:18:57] Unknown:
So that is that just a front end for Google that I'm hosting myself? Is Is that essentially the benefit there, or is there more to it than that?
[00:19:04] Unknown:
Yeah. So there's there's basically two options that you can self host that are essentially just front ends for other things. So Google is one that is a front end for Google only. Privacy preserving, you could do it over a tour. Like, there's a lot of functionality there. I've hosted an instance of Google for people to use for for many years. And, again, that's a good option if you if you actually like Google results. And I think when I first started using Google, it made sense to do that because Google was still the best. There were no really competing search indexes. So you were either using Google or Bing. So why not use Google? At that time, they were the best. Cirques is unique in that, it is something you can self host or you can use someone else's instance. But you can actually, SERCS can pull from lots of different search engines and mix essentially the results together. You can customize what search engines what search indexes do you want to actually provide it be provided through it. It has a ton of customization. Like, maybe too much customization.
You can get lost in the menus for hours. But you have, like, complete control over how results are being served, from what sources, what you prioritize. And so it's it's essentially a front end for almost every free search engine out there, and lets you customize how you're gonna see everything. So in some ways, that can be even more powerful than something like Coggy. I don't necessarily think better, but it can be more powerful, especially if you really know what you're doing and you have the ability to fine tune what it gives you, and you know reasons why you need to use cert certain search indexes and not others. It can be a really cool, tool for that. But, yeah, search space basically lets you be the a privacy preserving front end for a bunch of different search indexes, And Google lets you do it for only Google.
[00:20:45] Unknown:
Okay. Cool. And, obviously, it comes with the trade off that you you you're responsible for the the infrastructure of the front end. And if that goes down, you're not gonna be able to search. So, worth bearing in mind, as promising and exciting as, what Seth just explained might might might appear to be. Just take that, with a pinch of salt. Trade offs all the way down. Alright. Kagi, it's a paid service. How what we're looking at set up like? Is it it do they have different tiers? What which one would you recommend? You've been a user for three years. As an individual user, as I'm sure most people, listen to this are going to be, like, which is the appropriate one before we dive into, you know, what you get for your money aside from some of the benefits that you've already talked about?
[00:21:28] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, the like like any service like this, they do have tiers. So they have a a starter professional and an ultimate tier. Full disclosure, I I'm using ultimate and happened since they announced it both because I just want to support them. Like, I think it's it's worth supporting companies that are actually doing things the right way. But, also and I know we'll dig into this a bit more. They have a really powerful pairing of AI and search that is unique because you're combining good AI models with privacy preserving practices. Now they're not, like, on the AI side. They're not as privacy preserving as something like Maple is, but they do have a no logging policy kind of like a VPN.
But combining their really good AI tools with, by far, the best search in the industry is an immensely powerful tool, for research, for deep research, for even just search, like, just getting info that's useful. When you're using many of the other AIs, it's falling back to Google search results, if anything. And so, again, you're, like, you're feeding bad data into the AI, and AIs are already a little bit awful at knowing what's real and what's fake and knowing what's useful. And so if you're feeding bad data in, you you shouldn't expect to get that good of a result out. But with Kagi, I think you have this fantastic pairing. So I use the ultimate that's the one that gives you, like, their top tier AI. All of the premium models, supports everything they do. There there are some other benefits that come with that, just because you're essentially helping to helping to fund and and support the company.
But they have a starter plan, which I think would be good enough for the vast majority of people who are just trying to use a search engine. Like, you don't need fancy stuff. You just wanna use a search engine, some very basic AI stuff, and that's $5 a month. Very straightforward, I think, would be enough for the vast majority of people. If you are more of an advanced user, for most people, professional, month, is gonna be more than enough, and that that has no search limits, that has, full AI, unlimited AI usage as well with their basic models. And that's gonna cover the vast majority of people. But you do get, like we've only really touched on the search and the AI, and I do wanna touch on both of those more, but there's also a lot of other things that come bundled.
One is that you get, obviously, just the privacy preserving search aspect. Like, they they're not logging. They don't do any analytics. They anonymize queries. They don't link things to accounts, even though technically they could, but there are ways to work around that, which we can touch on as well. And they have things like lenses, which let you basically craft your own search index. So you can you can basically specify, I really like these sources, or I want these very specific sources to never be returned, that sort of thing. You have a lot more functionality behind the scenes there. But ultimately, again, like we talked about, you're paying so you're paying with money so that you can avoid paying with your time or paying with your eyeballs.
And you're getting an absolutely fantastic service as a result of that.
[00:24:29] Unknown:
Yeah. I, so you said you were using the the ultimate one. Right?
[00:24:34] Unknown:
Yeah. I am.
[00:24:36] Unknown:
The actual I think it's worth spelling out that they do have a free tier that you can just sign up with, I believe, with just an email just to get a feel for features that we're talking about and the the upcoming features as well. So I always like it when when when companies do that so that you don't have to, you know, stump up the money first. You can you can try it out. I think the starter, also is is a very compelling use case for for most people. It's a bit vague on on the, homepage or the sorry. The pricing page. It just says enough searches to get you going, which is why I've brought up this screen share here that it's, if you actually double click on the details, it says 300 searches per month and 300 a which probably is gonna suit me, I would say. I can't see me doing more than that.
My main usage would be, obviously, search, AI summarization. So here's a link. Summarize it for me. Give me all the key talking points and things like that. And I think that, you know, that would be the one that I would start with. I guess that's why they call it the starter plan before, and I'd see whether or not I'd hit the hit the limits. But in terms of the the search and the AI interactions that you use when you're interacting with this service, Seth, is is there anything over and above the basic usage that I've done in terms of search and, you know, quick summarization where you think, the the listeners might benefit from from knowing about?
[00:25:55] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, like I mentioned, I think the perf like, the professional is gonna be the one for, like, the power user because you do get a little bit more. But I I was just checking my stats, and it looks like in roughly eight months, I've done about 1,800 searches. So I'm I'm under that 300 searches, and I think I'm I'm I'm using it quite a lot on all my devices. So if that gives you any kind of rough idea of is 300 searches per month enough for you, it probably is. Like, I'm I'm doing a lot with it, and I'm sticking under usually that 300 searches per month. I mean yeah. The nice thing with them is, like, the going up in tiers, you're not getting, like, better search.
You're getting more expanded functionality on the AI side generally, and you're getting, higher limits. So it's not like if you use the free plan or use the starter plan, your search is gonna suck. You're gonna get the same search functionality at its core that I am at the ultimate. Like, it it's not something where you have to pay to get the most out of this. It just really depends on what your specific usages. That's another thing I really appreciate with how they approach it is they're not, like, watering down the free or the starter tiers and making them awful to force you to upgrade. Like, I I really think, especially for the average, like, not super techie user, the starter is more than enough to to roll with, which is is great and is a a good place to get people started and get them used to it. But I I think for me, the main reason why I've leaned into the the more advanced ones is really the AI usage. Part of that is because I I want to use a privacy preserving AI anyways, so I'd be paying for something like Venice or paying for something like Maple, either way. And those would come at the downside if they wouldn't have the clean integration with Coggy search. In theory, I think I could get it to work, but, again, they'll just take more time.
And I I primarily use AI, and I'm very much like a an AI doomer. I don't think it's nearly as good as people say it is, especially for things like like coding and other things. I think there are a lot of places where AI is touted to be great and is really awful. But the the core place where it is absolutely fantastic is deep research when you wanna go deep into a topic and have something to summarize and to make sense of sources that would take you hours to read through on your own and if you just wanna use it for better search. Like, one of the the huge benefits to AI within Kagi, like I mentioned, is, like, you're you're feeding it good data. You already have what I think is by far the best search index in the world.
Now you're feeding that fantastic data into all of the main popular models, that Kagi runs. And so you're feeding the data into a system that then just has to summarize good data, and you'll get much, much better results, as a part of that. And, like, this is calling back a little bit to to last week, but something that I found extremely useful for that pairing is, like, my son is super curious. Like, he wants to learn about everything, constantly asking questions. And, like, thankfully, I'm super curious too, so I dig into a lot of things that are not freedom tech that are just regular things, and can answer some of those. But we always hit the limits of how much I know, and he wants to learn more. An awesome thing that I've been able to do with Kagi and with their AI is, like, I'll I'll use the AI and Kagi results to pull up more information to help it it'll actually help distill it down into something that's more approachable for for something like a a young kid to understand, and that helps me to be able to better answer his questions as well. And, again, that like, I could do that other ways, but it's that unique pairing for me of the AI AI and search, to to greatly improve the quality of results that I'm getting out of that.
[00:29:35] Unknown:
Okay. Cool. I've got a couple of, quick fire questions that have popped into my head and also some from the listeners while we've just been chatting. First one, does it have a mobile application?
[00:29:47] Unknown:
So they they do on Android. I can't remember if they do on iOS or not. The nice thing is you don't normally need one. So if you're using the search, you would just change the search in your your browser to use Kagi. They have an extension that you can use that does that for you, or you can just do it the the normal way you would within your browser. So on the search side, you don't really need an app. They do have one that you can use, but normally not necessary there. The assistant, I don't think they have an app for that, at least not that I've seen, but I've just been using it as a progressive web app, on on Mac, on iOS.
Any platform, you can easily just open the assistant, save to desktop. You have the app there. You don't you don't really need an app to be able to use that. It's all happening in the web anyways. Got it. Got it. So yeah. Not not a huge need. But they do to to to add, though, they do have two apps that are free to use that you don't need a Kagi account for that are really good. They have the Kagi's summarizer app. I can't read the exact name. But you can essentially just share links to it, and it will summarize it for you and give you a summary. You don't have to pay anything for that. You don't have to create an account. And then Kagi News as well is an app that they just released that I have found to be absolutely fantastic and I'm using every day, at this point. But I don't wanna jump too far ahead. But that's the those are the main apps that they actually have are are not for their paid service. It's for free services that they put out.
[00:31:08] Unknown:
Very cool. Yeah. I I've certainly been using the summarizer in the in the last couple of days. It's been very useful. Does the assistant have voice support, or is it text based only?
[00:31:19] Unknown:
It does have voice support, but my, disdain for sending my voice to anything has persisted from when I first abandoned, my Google Homes way back in the day. So I have not tried it. It does have it, and I've heard that it works well, but I I can't speak to it specifically because I do I do type out everything.
[00:31:38] Unknown:
Fair enough. Question from Vibrance. I'm just gonna bring that up on screen. He mentions, is it a concern to have your searches potentially tied together with one account or identity within Kagi? That's a good question.
[00:31:52] Unknown:
Yes. So it it definitely is, and this has been the the longest running thing that people push back on originally, and I say originally because it solved. We'll get to that. Was that okay. One of the nice things about using a free no account search is that there's no account that ties everything back. In theory, your IP or browser fingerprint or other things could be used to tie those back to you, but, there was no account that you were logged into. Like, if you got away from Google, generally, you weren't using an account with any of these other search engines, which is a a a good advantage to those. I I will just continue to put the huge caveat that if those services wanted to profile you and figure out who you who like, to figure out what entity is making these searches, they have many ways to do that. Even if you're using a VPN, just with the nature of search and how much information you're giving it, it's very possible to do that.
But there was no account that necessarily tied everything together. Now Coggy, while they've had accounts since day one because you'd have to pay, you need some way to to prove that you're a paying member to use their service, they have not associated queries with accounts. So they intentionally anonymize those, but that doesn't require trust. You're essentially trusting that they are not tying together searches and accounts, which is isn't ideal. It's good enough for me when a company's entire, modernization strategy relies on that trust.
So, like, they they have no reason to break that. But, obviously, if you can go a step further, that's great. And, thankfully, Kagi have gone way more than a step further by introducing what they call privacy pass. And this is something I I talked with Vlad on on opt out about, probably couple years ago. Has been long a long time coming. But, essentially, what this is is that you can pay for an account, and then instead of logging into your account to use Coggy, you install their privacy pass extension. Basically, how it works is it's e cash for search.
It it sounds weird as someone who hates e cash, but it's very similar concept where you can, in a privacy preserving way, prove that this token is legitimate without actually revealing which account funded this token. So it's it's a similar concept. And, basically, by using this, by using this browser extension, every time you search, it basically just provides a search token, which is you don't feel like buy it separately. It just is funded from your account. And that search token basically authenticates you without revealing anything about you, which is really, really powerful, and it uses a new token and a new authentication every time you search. So there is no way even to tie those back to a specific, like, token account or something. It it's completely anonymous per search. Everyone is cryptographically, unlinked or unlinkable.
So it's a really like, it's very well thought out. It is not just a simple, like, just trust us, bro, privacy approach. It's actually really cool from the ground up, cutting edge cryptography to make sure that there's actually a cryptographic proof that you are not being surveilled, which is really fantastic. Cool. Yeah. It it works really well. Like, there it'll depend on what browser you're using exactly how you actually use it. They've got a guide on it. But it you basically just install the extension auth with the extension, which then, like, quote, unquote, buys these tokens in a way that's privacy preserving.
And then you just search, and you don't do anything extra. There's no account associated with those searches, and cryptographically, it's impossible for them to associate those with your searches. So for the more hardcore, or the ones who don't need some of the other services, there are some limitations. This only applies to search. It doesn't apply to AI and other features. But, for those who need better privacy, this works really, really well and is extremely well thought out.
[00:35:43] Unknown:
Yeah. That's, something I I I saw the the title on their docs about privacy pass, and I didn't have any clue that it was gonna be anything there as cool as that. I thought it was gonna be like a a login solution or something like that, which I guess it kind of is, but, like, the way no knowing learning about how it works under the hood is very cool. So, thank you for that one. Question from our our producer, Overlord, Jordan. The biggest thing that Google has, the market on is local business cards that provide address addresses, hours, etcetera. Does Kagi have these? That's a good question.
[00:36:16] Unknown:
So kind of. This is the one shortcoming that I found in pretty much in every other Maps app and every other search app is just the the Google Maps data specifically around reviews and hours, etcetera, is just miles ahead of everything else. And the the network effect there is very hard to beat. You you can, I think, even look at, like, Apple Maps and see how abysmal their business data is compared to Google Maps and see that even a company as big as Apple struggles to get anywhere close to as good as them? So Kagi does have their own maps, and they I should know this off the top of my head, but I don't, where they pull the data from.
So they they will have some of that data. And then, obviously, if, like, the businesses' websites have that data, they can be pulled out through the the AI short answer that pops up, if you if you so choose to use that in the search. Or if you use the AI tool itself, it could pull that from the website, and give you all that info. So, like, you you can get it, but it's not gonna be as straightforward as, like, the the Google Maps, find a thing, see all the reviews, all that fun stuff. That is unfortunately one of the few things that I do just still have to use from Google is Google Maps just specifically to find points of interest and see reviews and see hours that I know are, like, 99% going to be accurate.
[00:37:40] Unknown:
Okay. Very good. Thanks for the question, Jordan. We mentioned about paid plans. We haven't, talked about how how to pay for it. Obviously, I'm sure they take credit card, but presumably, there's, at the very least, a Bitcoin option. What's what's available there on the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency side for payments?
[00:37:59] Unknown:
Yeah. So they've accepted Bitcoin and Lightning for a while. It has been a very long time since I paid because I paid way up front. I'm trying to pull up their billing right now, actually, to just confirm what their options look like right now. Yeah. Last I checked, they had Bitcoin and Lightning, also just regular credit card stuff. The Bitcoin and Lightning works a little bit similar to Proton where you're adding basically, credit to your account. You're not, like, paying for a thing specifically, but you add those credits kind of like a gift card in a sense. And then you pay out of that when you go ahead and, pay for subscription or upgrade or whatever.
So, yeah, they they have Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning right now. They are adding Monero. I've already gotten connected connected with, their guy within Coggy who's working on it, who's a huge Monero fan. So I know that that is a work in progress. I don't have a a firm ETA, but I know that that's that was being worked on over the summer. So, hopefully, that will be out soon to have Monero support as well. But right now, they do support PayPal, normal debit and credit cards, Apple, Google Pay, and then Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning via OpenNode at the moment, but adding Monero as well.
[00:39:10] Unknown:
Awesome. I I knew you'd be in their DMs asking for Monero support. I, I shouldn't be surprised. Yeah. Yeah. Nicely done. Nicely done. I'm sure it'll, get a quick uptake when, when they do add it. Okay. Great. Just a reminder, guys, if you have any Kagi, or search based related questions, please do drop them in the chat. And, as I say that, John, dad has just dropped into the chat. Welcome, John. Nice to have you with us. Seth, when I was doing some research for this, I kept stumbling across, a concept or a feature for Kagi called lenses. Could you outline what those are and kind of how you use them, if you do use them, and why they could be useful to to the listeners?
[00:39:52] Unknown:
Yeah. So when when we get into the more advanced search functionality, I'll be quite honest. I'm a bit of a a plebe when it comes to the, like, fancy things like bangs or lenses, where I I do use them some, but I am absolutely not the the most power user out there. So there are gonna be some people who have some more advanced usage. And the nice thing with Kagi is I can already guarantee you that the things you're used to in other search engines like Bangs are already there, work really well, very customizable. When it comes to lenses, the real benefit to me and the main thing that I use it for is limiting results to, like journal articles, academic papers.
Because a lot of the, like, the technical research that I do, I want to actually make sure I'm getting it from good sources. And, specifically, again, I'll call back to the AI side of things. Specifically, using Kage Assistant with lenses for academic papers and focusing it on actual, like, published scientific research is really, really useful for getting answers to questions where you don't wanna just rely on, like, Reddit user one three five for your, your medical question or something like that. Like, he he wanna make sure that there's there's something behind it. And so that is really, really useful.
The other one that I have used before is they have a small web, which is kind of like lenses. But, basically, they they can limit search results to only, like, regular personal blogs, which may sound really weird. But there's actually just a lot of absolutely fantastic stuff out there from people who just like writing, and they have a blog. And it's hard to find their search results, Usually, if you're using something like Google or others, and Kagi has a deep love for the kind of the small web like it used to be where people just had blogs and they publish random things. And there was a lot of value there. And so you can limit it to things like that, which is really good. But there's also I mean, there's you can make it developer centric, so you can, like, limit it to things like GitHub, Stack Overflow.
There's a lot of, like, a lot of advanced functionality. You can go very deep in that. You can create your own lenses and get very specific with what you want to be returned. So, again, it's really about you making the most out of your search results. I generally just rely on copy results as they are. I don't go into the more advanced stuff usually. I know I should. I kinda just need to figure out how they work. I haven't really spent the time on that, but I use just kind of the default lenses every now and then. But there's a lot of functionality there that I think people who are a little bit more in the weeds of search engines could could make the most of.
[00:42:27] Unknown:
Nice. Okay. Cool. Nosta Gang has, made a great comment over on the Nosta chat and, that says that Kagi is in the notes note note circle that you get if you're a paid, subscriber of notes note, you also get three months of, Kagi, presumably the the pet the minimum paid search, paid tier for free. So if you are a Notesnook paid user, make make sure that you check that out. And Bon is also asking, Seth, he wants to know if you've used the Kagi browser at all. I didn't even know there was one. Apparently, it's available on macOS and iOS.
[00:43:03] Unknown:
Yes. So first on the the Notesnook circle thing, I I was in the worst of all worlds where Notesnook, Entei, and Kagi all kind of have started partnering together to build this this cool web of, like, actually good FreedomTech services, and providing benefits, but only if you're a new user. And I'm already a paid user of all of them. So I get no benefits, unfortunately. But if you're using any of those three, I believe they all have deals to use the other, if you're already a paid subscriber of those. So, yeah, definitely check it out if you haven't. It's a fantastic way to to try three of, like, the best privacy preserving services out there, with discounts. Definitely check that out.
When it comes to I'm totally blanking. What was the question about? About the have you used the browser? Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So Kagi does have their own browser, and it is it's built from the ground up. It's called Orion. I'll be completely honest. I haven't used it in about a year. I tried to use it basically for six months straight last year, and it was okay, but there were a lot of growing pains. Building a browser is incredibly difficult, and they're trying to do it in a way that's not just, like, Chromium under the hood, slap a fancy wrapper on it, and pretend it's a better browser. Like, they're actually doing it from the ground up, building the the engine itself, having extension support for both Safari and the Chrome Firefox stores.
So they're they're doing a lot of very advanced stuff under the hood. It wasn't quite there for me in terms of daily driving, but that was probably nine to twelve months ago that I stopped using it. And I know they've been very rapidly making progress on that front. So I I think it's definitely worth a try. Again, they're trying to do that in a privacy preserving way. It obviously is gonna have first class integration with all of Coggy's stuff, but is is a cool idea and a cool approach. Practically, I'm not sure that it will pan out just because browsers are so freaking difficult to do, especially when you're doing them right from the ground up.
And so I'm I'm a little hesitant that it will actually work out in the long run, but it is very much worth trying. And that's another thing that I gladly supported them with because I I wanted to have more browsers that aren't just built on Chrome, and and have used off and on. But it it wasn't quite there when I used it before, but it's a it's a cool concept. It when it worked well, it was very fast, like, noticeably faster than I'd had with something like Brave or Firefox. But, yeah, definitely definitely worth trying out if you are on macOS or on iOS.
[00:45:45] Unknown:
Alright. Cool. Yeah. I I'd also not stumbled, stumbled across that one. Orion browser. Cool. Maybe I'll check that one out. Alright. We we're coming in, very close to time already. We haven't even got to any of the pre I do wanna let you talk about any of the additional features that we haven't already covered off. We've already covered off, obviously, no ads, better search index, AI assistant, general AI usage, the summarizer. What else is in the Kagi, toolbox that you use? I know they have a news, a news feature. Do you use that one?
[00:46:19] Unknown:
Yeah. So, I mentioned that before that the news is actually, like, you don't need to be a paid Coggy user. Like, you should just go check out the Coggy news app. It's a really cool concept where, basically, Coggy users or community members can help to craft the categories and tweak the sources that are used there to try and and make, like, a really high quality feed of sources. And then Kagi news, you just basically choose the categories you want to see news about, choose how many articles max you want it to show you, and it'll combine the sources that Kagi community members have come up with for those categories, with their AI summarizations and essentially give you, like, customized news feeds where AI summarizes and creates the, like, quote, unquote news article for you with all of the links very clear to to where the links are coming from, where the data is coming from.
And the goal is really to let you get news, but not have to doom scroll to get it, which is exactly the reason why I just haven't really consumed any news other than what I happen to see when I'm, like, browsing x for work or something like that. I haven't really done news in years because, like, all of the ways to get it have just been so awful. And I have started using Cognos since they announced it, pretty much every day. Because, again, I can choose which categories I actually wanna learn about. I strictly limit it to 15 articles no more because I don't wanna get stuck in it. I just wanna quickly see if there's anything that pops out. If there is, I get the quick, good quality AI summary with all the links out if I wanna learn more.
And then once I go through my categories, I'm done. And they they refresh once a day, very intentionally, not all the time. So you're not gonna get any news new any news news. Wow. That's a tongue twister. Any new news articles until twenty four hours later from the last time it refreshed, which, again, feels weird in the the current environment where we expect our news to be, like, up to the second, but it's actually really refreshing. Like, I'll I'll find myself opening it just kind of out of habit of expecting that when I open an app, there's a ton of new stuff waiting for me, and then there's not. And it's actually like a breath of fresh air. I can just close the app and move on. It's it's nice.
[00:48:31] Unknown:
Nice. Okay. Cool. We've had, blister four in the Nostra chat says, no account is better than a private account, which I would agree, but, obviously, no account is gonna limit your usage. No trust needed. Maple AI has an has anonymous accounts. Does Kagi?
[00:48:50] Unknown:
Yeah. I so I just saw the announcement from Maple's anonymous accounts. I need to see exactly how they work. I in my very basic understanding after reading their tweets, it's gonna work actually very similar to privacy pass, where you have an account, but you actually you disassociate the proof of account from the account info itself. And so I think it's a a very similar concept. I I haven't dug deeply into how Maple's doing it, but it's a very similar concept with privacy pass for Kagi. And while I agree, like, the general concept, yes, I would love to not have an account. To me, it is very, very, very much worth the minor downside of having an account, especially if you're using privacy pass for the massive upside in terms of the quality of what you're getting, in terms of supporting a good service and a company that's actually building and prioritizing the customer and not sucking your data and not acting as a giant surveillance machine, not prioritizing ad monopolies over you, it's very worth it to me. And, especially, like, I think everyone kind of assumes their threat model is this, like, crazy. The FBI is out to get you. But you're probably if you're listening to this, you're just a regular dude. You have limited time. You wanna use the best stuff available. You want to get good quality results. You want to fund companies that are actually doing things the right way. And Kagi is that. Like, it's it's just fantastic. But, obviously, if you do have the I can't have an account no matter what. I can't even pay in Bitcoin or Lightning for some reason.
Brave Search is still fantastic, and Kagi's free tier is still pretty good too.
[00:50:20] Unknown:
Okay. Yeah. That was a great question, actually. Thank you for that, blister four. Something has popped into my mind as we've been talking through. With the whole integration with, the AI assistant and things like that, is is there a compelling use case here for the average Joe that has a ChatGPT paid subscription or similar to switch over to Kagi to get all of the additional benefits and still have all of that AI interaction, so that, you know, they're not knee capping themselves in terms of, like, going to a substandard model, but they're also gaining all of that privacy benefit for, you know, especially if they take the $5 a month, no extra cost. Does that seem reasonable, or is there is there a hole in my thinking there?
[00:51:01] Unknown:
I think it is. I I the only caution I would add is that I would expect the AI to be a little bit slower, because you are obviously getting the privacy benefits, but also because you're not relying on, like, the AI company to actually run the model itself, but it is a smaller company. From what I can tell, the actual AI results, like, the tokens per second kind of stuff, is a little bit slower than you would get when you're using these natively. To me, that's fine, especially with my use cases. I'm not just sitting there chatting with an AI all day long. Like, I'm very intentionally using it for deep research. If it's something that I know is gonna take a while, I'll start it and just go do something else, go to the bathroom, make a cup of coffee or something. It's never that slow. Like, just to be clear, it's not, like, minutes, but it just isn't gonna be quite as blazing fast as those. But, again, to me, the trade off or the benefit of having better privacy, all of my searches and prompts and results not being used for training in an AI that I have no control over, and being able to pair it with Coggy search, I I think it would be a much better solution for most people. It very much does depend on your your specific needs, though.
But, yeah, I mean, for a lot of people, just if you use it for the AI, I think probably you'd need the premium tier. If you're, like, a heavy chat GPT user or something, you'd probably need the premium tier so you don't have any limitations on the AI usage. And so you can use more premium models. Yep. But I would think that would be a fantastic swap over, and then you get all of the other amazing coffee services as part of that.
[00:52:34] Unknown:
Alright. Awesome. We've got a presubmitted question from DrinkCore. It says, I'm already a de googled de googled and use Brave, mobile browser, or dot dot go instead, which I believe don't promote certain search results or slow show me with ads. Why should I add Kagi to my arsenal and pay for what I'm already getting for free? I think we've kind of already, you know, answered this with the wealth of additional features that that Kagi offers as well as the the whole index piece where we're not relying on Google. It's it's very much more than just, you know, you don't see ads. You've got the AI summarization. You've got the news, well, which is part of the free tier, the the the privacy option with the privacy pass.
So I think we've probably already covered this offset, but is is there anything else that we haven't covered off that would be specific to this question where you'd be like you know, that would answer the short question of why why pay for it. I think we've probably covered it, though.
[00:53:27] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I think we've covered everything. I would just say try it. Like, the try the free tier. Like, again, you're not locked into anything. Give it a go. See if you like the search results. See if you like the the additional features that you get out of it. And if you do, it's something you can pay for it. If not, I I think I'm I'm thankful there are really good options like Brave Search, specifically. DuckDuckGo is reasonably good even though I I definitely prefer Brave Search. So it's nice that there are really good options out there. You don't you don't have to use Coggy, but I do think, at least in my in my usage and in many others, it's much better than any of the others.
[00:54:02] Unknown:
Alright. Great. We do have another presubmitted question. If I can just find it, where has it gone? It was from Black Coffee. It was more of a of a comment actually that I just wanted to ask a question off the back of. He said that, referring to Kagi, obviously, I liked it and used it for a while a few months ago, but couldn't keep paying for it as I was spending a lot of money using it. Now that seems to me like it could be like he was on the the wrong tier potentially. And but but the re the question that I wanna ask off the back of this is, like, let's say I go for the the the the basic tier, the $5 per month. Do I get to a point where it just stops working, or are they gonna continue to charge me for, like, an over usage type thing?
Whether with you being on the ultimate is something that you've ever experienced or have any knowledge of.
[00:54:56] Unknown:
So that is a good question. I since I have just been on higher tier plans from before day one, I don't specifically know. My understanding is that it it just stops at that point. But like we talked about, 300 searches a month may not sound like a lot, but I think for many people, that would be enough. But I I don't think that they charge, like, overage charges or anything like that. That doesn't wouldn't seem like them.
[00:55:23] Unknown:
Yeah. It it doesn't seem like it. I mean, obviously, we're probably missing a bit of context from Black Coffee there, and it might just be a tier. Like, he was on the wrong tier or something, but who knows? Yeah. Quick reminder, we've got a couple of minutes left, guys. If you have any any final, questions that we've got three minutes ago, so get your questions in quickly. Seth, and any we can cover off that you use that we haven't covered yet?
[00:55:47] Unknown:
I think that that's the vast majority. I'm just double checking to make sure there's nothing that I'm I'm forgetting here, but those are definitely the the primary ones. Oh, the the one that I would add that we haven't touched on at all, is just quite simply, when you're searching, you can actually, like, blacklist sites that you don't like getting results from. Quote Quora was my instant one because I feel like anytime you search for anything, you get these poor results, and they're, like, absolute garbage, even if there is an answer.
Things like that. If you if you are getting them in your search results and you know, like, man, this site is never useful or, like, I hate Reddit. Like, I don't like the way that they do things. I wanna just not see Reddit results. You can easily tune your search as well. And those kinds of things are really simple. Like, you can you can go deep into the coggy side of things. They have very advanced choices. You can do, like, super advanced things if you want. But I think for most people, there's, like, that ability to realize, like, oh, I'm really like, don't give me Facebook results. Like, I don't have a Facebook account, or I really don't like this specific site, or I love this one, so prioritize this result is really, really useful. Like, I've also done that with some blogs of people that I really like in the space is I've, essentially pinned their results. So if I do a search and their blog mentions that at all and comes up in the results, instead of being somewhere down in the ranking based on what Kagi thinks, it'll just pin that to the top and immediately show me that result, which is super, super useful if I know that I have some high quality sources where if they've written on it, I want to read that first.
It's a it's a killer feature. So just that simple tuning of, like, I love this or I hate this and being able to have some control over the results that you get and that being honored from then on is really, really powerful, and doesn't take any, like, fancy functionality. You just click next to the result, choose to hide that source, or prioritize that source, and just move on with your life.
[00:57:42] Unknown:
Very cool. Okay. That brought us beautifully up to time. I don't know about you listeners, but I am going straight after this to go and get the the paid tier. Seth, you've you've Kagi pilled me. I've been using the free tier this week and and had great experience, but, knowing you know, doing a bit more of a deep dive of all of the all of the more advanced features has definitely tipped me over the edge. So in fact, no. I'm not gonna pay for it. I'm gonna go to my notes and I can get my three months free first, and then I'm gonna pay for it. So, but, yeah, this has been very, very useful, and it's definitely something that I'm gonna add into my toolbox. I I I quite like the basic usage with the search and the AI summarization. That's a big part of my kind of web based usage these days, quite similar to yourself when doing research for for shows like this, basically.
So definitely adding that one into my arsenal, and I appreciate your insights as, as a Kagi OG. Max, if you listen to this, get well soon. We hope to have you back next week. Thank you to everybody that has been, asking their questions, send this into the chat. CU Barminer, Bon, the usual suspects. We, we appreciate your support. And Saswal just, coming in clutch with the the final boost of the day, 2,100 sats, and says come to Milwaukee, Max. It's not gay. Well, hopefully, he's listening. He'll pick up that message afterwards. And, yeah. Get back to you, Max. And thank you all for stopping by. We will see you at the exact same time next week.
[00:59:35] Unknown:
Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London. Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet, Foundation, and my NIM box for keeping the Ungovernable Misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and artwork. Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills.
Thanks to Expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news or continuing to grow the mesh to Dell. Finally, a big thanks to the unsung hero, our Canadian overlord, Short, for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the scenes. We love you all. Stay ungovernable.
INTRO
Today's Topic: Kagi
Alternatives: DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Brave Search, SearX/Whoogle
What Makes Kagi different: index quality and no ads
Self-Hosted Front-Ends
Kagi Pricing Tiers
AI Paired With Search
Mobile, Apps and Assistant Features
Account Linkage Concerns and Kagi Privacy Pass
Local Results and Maps
Paying Privately
Have You Used The Browser?
Kagi News
Anonymous Accounts, Threat Models, and Practical Trade-Offs
Power features: Blacklist, Pin, Boosts, and Lenses
Wrapping-Up
OUTRO
