I'd like to voice my disagreement to this suggestion. Censorship should have no place in the search engine or browser. It is up to each individual to do her due diligence and evaluate the truth of different sources. That's part of being human, it has always been like this, even before writing.
Crowd sourced evaluation or tagging I support, where the individual decides herself which crowd they want to be part of, but having some high-and-mighty censorship bureau decide what's true and what's false is nothing I want to see associated with Kagi.
We just have to remember during the covid pandemic how opinions and research that became forbidden and censored online because it was "dangerous misinformation" later turned out to be scientific truth. Right now today with the war, we have reliable and serious Western media sources being censored and forbidden in Russia, as well as reliable and serious Russian media sources being censored and forbidden in the West.
The Internet should be free, and I don't want my search engine to intervene. If a person doesn't have the mental capacity to evaluate the reliability of information, then they shouldn't use a powerful tool like a search engine. However, reading some unreliable news is much less of a risk than other things that appear online, such as scams etc.
I'm inclined to believe Newsguard is trying their best to do a serious job, but I wouldn't want this kind of agency anywhere near my search engine or web browser. If an organisation like this is not corrupted and malevolent from the beginning, they will soon attract infiltrators and activists with goals of corrupting the service for their own means. Looking at their Wikipedia, I see that Newsguard advisors is mostly made of USA military intelligence:
Its advisors include former officials such as Tom Ridge, former homeland security secretary, Richard Stengel, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Michael Hayden, former CIA director general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO chief, as well as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.[10][7]
Apart from Jimmy Wales, these are people worth zero confidence from the public. Their jobs are to push their agenda and expand US government power and interests at any and all costs. Keep them away from my search engine, please.
Let Kagi be a search engine that focuses on finding information instead of hiding information. I don't want more filters, I want more sources. That's why I've been on a crusade here for Kagi to start indexing books, and that's why I've suggested indexing of Instagram photos. If what I'm looking for is on the first pages, I don't care if there's a bunch of stuff there that I don't care about or dislike.
It's a better investment for Kagi to be a search engine that people need, because they can't easily find what their looking for elsewhere, rather than for Kagi to be a search engine that people want, because it's kind of neat to have some filters.
