MichaSobczyk I would encourage Kagi to not fall into pressure here. The kind of pressure we're seeing is just a tip of an iceberg. Imagine what's going to happen when Kagi reaches 100m paid subscribers, there will be journalists and politicians shouting everywhere how Kagi is not taking a decisive action in the X topic whatever that will be in the future. Imagine pressure from countries like China, Qatar or Iran, threats to ban Kagi in the appstore.
Kagi will be banned by autocracies (if it isn't already banned in some countries) regardless of any decision it takes on suicide prevention, so I don't think this point of objection is particularly relevant here.
Having read through the entire thread, I think people's feelings on this matter comes down to their own philosophical and political biases. Vlad and some others in this thread fall under the category of libertarians, who as a broad group "seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing equality before the law and civil rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice," and so want (adult) Kagi users to be able to access information freely. I doubt they would disagree with this characterization, even if some substrains of libertarianism place less emphasis on individual equality and freedoms.
My own biases are more towards interventionism to effect positive change, along the lines of "if you have the means to act effectively, then you have the responsibility to do so." As it as pertains to putting a notice on searches for suicide methods, my stance is that it should be done if doing so would reduce the likelihood of suicide compared to the status quo. However, Kagi’s Quick Answer widget already gives an excellent response that would dissuade a user from following through on an impulse (as explained by subject-matter experts up-thread). In other words, messages of dissuasion are already generated if a user asks a question, and trying to rephrase or remove these messages would itself be a demonstration of a particular bias. Kagi’s organic search results are also mostly satisfactory, although at 3% uniqueness they’re probably similar to those of major search providers.
Ultimately, this is a highly emotive topic, and I expect that no decision that Kagi makes now will be immune from being re-evaluated in the future. Along with the rest of us, Kagi exists in a society that has evolving views on information and responsible dissemination of information, and this will impact Kagi in the form of future regulatory scrutiny and consumer advocacy. That being the case and given that Kagi already tries to dissuade users from suicide with Quick Answers, I don’t think a change is warranted at the moment.
