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I find this ethical question very interesting. I question what is considered a valid threshold to morally object to a search API. Are Google and Microsoft exempt from the scrutiny that Brave is because their sheer size makes them a faceless and blameless object?

I don’t think there’s any question the beliefs of Brendan Eich are objectionable but does that actually have any bearing on Kagi’s mission to humanize the web? Maybe it does.

As a very happy Kagi user I am very curious to read the replies here.

@ilikekagi perhaps you have more insight to share for what alternatives exist to help Kagi
improve the search experience for their customers that don’t rely on products from companies led by reprehensible individuals. Something reasonable, constructive and actionable is always welcomed by the Kagi team in my experience.

Heya,

I completely sympathise with your concern. I want to clarify that Brave is a provider to Kagi, the same as Google or Microsoft and many other organisations that surely also have acted sometimes against the interest of their users, or wider communities. We respect the technical work they've done, and pay for their services accordingly. While you may not see today an improvement in your service, I'm sure you can understand that reducing our dependencies on any single provider is of critical importance to be able to stay truly independent, and will in the long run enable cost-savings that we have historically passed onto our users. Our social responsibility is to ensure as large a population as possible has access to up-to-date, well sourced information ranked according to their quality.

This is why Kagi's mission is to provide the best search/browser/assistant.

However, we don't live in a vacuum, and we have to understand that sometimes, we'll have dependencies on organisations that we do not agree with (eg. oil & gas companies, which we rely on transitively). We can't rebuild the world from scratch, alone. What we can do, and are doing, is ensure that there is a way to access the internet that's not gate-kept by companies that do not have your best interest in mind, so that you (and everybody else) has a chance to form better social and political opinions - and express them when they vote. Kagi's choice of providers won't impact California law, people's votes will.

That said, I welcome the scrutiny from the community. Please continue to keep us honest, and force us to challenge our decisions and convictions. Even if we do end up disagreeing, we'll do it better informed and understanding of community issues we may not have had on our radar.

    There's nothing wrong with being against gay marriage. Obama ran for president and acted as president while opposed to gay marriage.

    It's political opinion and everybody has the right to theirs.

    I don't think this thread has anything at all to do with neither Kagi, Brave, nor internet search. Instead it is just about smearing and cancelling an individual as part of political activism.

      carl I don't think this thread has anything at all to do with neither Kagi, Brave, nor internet search.

      If you were trying to advocate for keeping politics out of the discussion, I think you failed miserably.

          TisButMe
          You have to draw the line somewhere though. Is it okay to use a search engine built by nazis for nazis as long as the results are good? Braves ceo was also ceo of Mozilla and his vocal anti gay views were enough of an issue for Mozilla to get rid of him. As someone who identifies as queer I want no part in supporting a company ran by a bigot but that's just me.

            Holger Are you replying to the wrong post? I don't see what your reply has to do with my comment.

              Please, @Vlad, remain focused on search and do not allow cancel culture to creep into Kagi.

              Eich is the creator of Javascript, an early employee of Netscape, and a founder of Mozilla. When appointed to lead Firefox in 2014, he was poised to be a landmark leader, applying the clear thinking that was so sorely needed, as demonstrated by Firefox's subsequent collapse in users and demotion to being little more than a vessel for Google ads.

              Instead, a small handful of employee activists in non-engineering roles waged a vicious campaign against Eich. His sin was to have privately donated $1,000 in 2008 to the opposition to the Californian referendum to legalize gay marriage. This was his right as an American and a Californian. His right to have a political opinion was protected by the first amendment. He did not publicly campaign, he merely made an entirely legal private donation.

              Eich was not against gay relationships and civil partnerships. He has never expressed any homophobic sentiments. As a Catholic, in common with the world's 1.4 billion other catholics (and, indeed, 2 billions Muslims and countless other religious humans) he believed, in 2008, that the sacrament of marriage should remain between a man and a woman. This was a mainstream opinion at that time, shared by pretty much all democrats including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. All of them publicly opposed gay marriage.

              Again, this was 2008. Pretty much everyone, including most prominent gays, opposed gay marriage. It was a ridiculously niche issue and considered a distraction from issues that actually mattered to gays.

              The 2014 cancelation campaign, six years later, was never anything more than hypocrisy, a powerplay by low-level employees at Firefox. No one actually believed that Eich was a danger to gays. Their narcissism shot Firefox in the face and deeply damaged the Open Software movement.

              Now, a full decade later, you have a similar creature slithering into your forums and, in their one and only post here, demanding Kagi impair its service to comply with his demands. You also have another brand new member chiming in to say that Eich's $1,000 donation makes him "a Nazi". This ignorance of history perfectly illustrates why this manufactured hysteria does not belong on this forum. This thread should be deleted so that we can focus on issues that are actually relevant to the service that Kagi provides.

              Seriously, why not simply declare this forum a politics-free zone? There is absolutely nothing good that can come from entertaining this bullshit. The next thing will be that you cannot use an API provided by an Israeli company, or your image search results don't include enough "people of color" etc. Just make a decision now to focus this forum on your actual service and don't give any oxygen to this destructive form of mental illness.

              As an actual Kagi user, I applaud your use of any available API, from any source, to improve the service you provide to me.

              Please watch the language and refrain from using inflammatory remarks as I'd be forced to lock this discussion (it is already going way off the rails).

              I do not see any attempts of cancel culture. I see our users using their legitimate right to express their concerns. We are here for them, and we will listen and discuss, becuse we run a customer-centric company and this is why this forum exists. We personally addressed every single of 2,500 posts on this forum and we will do the same here.

              I would strongly suggest keeping things on topic - does inclusion of Brave results make the quality of overall Kagi search results worse or it does opposite? And when I say customer-centric this is what I mean, because providing the best search in the world is what people pay us to do.

              Everything else, especially politics, is something I am afraid I wll not be engaging with in my professional capacity. This is the only principled position that I can see, as everything else would lead down the rabbit hole which would inevitably lead Kagi to undesired place in the future. We are and want to be strictly only in the business of search.

              Therefore I see this as a uniquely worded bug report and I am trying to figure out is it valid or not in the context of search service that we provide.

                does inclusion of Brave results make the quality of overall Kagi search results worse or it does opposite?

                I think that's something that only the people working for Kagi can know, unless users are given tools to compare.

                  carl Well we included those results few days ago when it iwas announced. Users should be able to feel if their results improved or went worse.

                    Vlad Regarding result quality, Brave's search is optimized against Google search results. Ever since its Cliqz ancestry, documented on the Cliqz blog, it optimizes its ranking algorithm to match Google ranking as closely as possible. Brave's search discovery project uses clicks on Google's results in the Brave browser to discover new sites. In other words, it's not sufficiently different from Google to really diversify the search results.

                    Using Google, Bing, or Yandex results is practically necessary when making a general purpose English-language search engine palatable to most people. This isn't necessary, nor does it have a sufficiently high impact on quality when Google is already a source.

                        Seirdy Good analysis!

                        There are a few reasons that may not be obvious from a user perspective:

                        • Brave API is cheaper than Google API. If we can figure out a way to do use it transaprently without negatively impacting search results, we can use this to lower our costs (currently we serve both, but this is not the plan long term).
                        • Reducing our dependencies on any single provider is crucial for our resilience on the market. Having access to an API that is similar to Google results is beneficiary to reduce our reliance on Google. These things do not come over night and we have to prepare well in advance.

                            Vlad It might be better to aggregate many smaller sources. Stract, InfoTiger, and the Common Crawl index together could offer good coverage while maintaining unique results.

                            • Vlad replied to this.

                                Seirdy We already do implement many small search sources. It all happens transparently for the user. This is what makes Kagi results so good.

                                In practice there is also resource constraint. One thing is to plug in an API that we already know is good vs implementing, testing, iterating over many small sources. Also the price of niche API usually matches the price of a general search engine API. Many small sources may not allow us to replace Google while coming at much higher cost. Example is Looria API we use for shopping results which alone comes at 2x cost of Google web search. There is also reliability consideration (niche provider may not match that of larger company - InfoTiger is down right now as far as I can tell). Using a search API is one thing, but running a search business is very different.

                                  Seirdy Btw I haven't heard of Stract before, looks interesting. Any others we should look into?

                                      Vlad Thank you Vlad for your consistent, principled, and transparent approach. Regardless of how this “bug report” gets resolved, basing the outcome on the benefit to users and to search quality appears very reasonable and fair.

                                          CrunchyFritos Judging by the social media reactions to this, I wouldn't say most people describe explicitly amoral decision-making as "principled".

                                          Brave is known for bundling cryptocurrency in its browser, "accidentally" holding payments in escrow indefinitely, "accidentally" replacing links with affiliate links, and being run by someone who financed homophobic political campaigns and has not since apologized for that action. There needs to be one sufficiently large index; "one that's like Google but worse and significantly more problematic" is probably not a great option.

                                          Kagi has a good reputation among the wealthy privileged mostly-male Hacker News tech crowd, which is a small niche. If it wants to diversify and grow, it'll need to listen to users outside a privileged bubble and see what keeps potential users away. I've heard mixed reception from HN-like techbro circles, but universally negative feedback from queer people I've spoken to about this.

                                          This may be news to those fortunate enough to not live on the side impacted by issues like this, but people are hesitant to finance actors who finance causes that reject their own identity. If Kagi is to grow, it needs to consider viewpoints outside such a narrow demographic. I'd also consider whether opinions in this forum are biased; I'd wager that queer voices are underrepresented in a forum that also allows messages like "There's nothing wrong with being against gay marriage". We deal with these folks enough offline.