Me thinks that "we're a privacy-first search engine" and "you have to register an account to use us" are two very opposite things

@campuscodi You have to register a Signal account too. Privacy != anonymity

@buherator @campuscodi You're telling these search engines encrypt queries? :P

@tris Usually what makes a difference is the business model (e.g. adtech vs. regular subscription). Your hair dresser may know exactly who you are and know a lot about you, but you can trust them not to sell your conversations because they make a living from cutting hair, not selling PII. A level of privacy is of outmost concern for many OnlyFans performers (to avoid stalking), while they show a lot of themselves publicly. Privacy != encryption either.

@campuscodi

@buherator @campuscodi So most of these so-called paid search engine just proxies Google's or bing's index? I don't think my barber does that

@buherator @campuscodi That has a clear purpose, unlike the account requirement for a search engine.

@Andromxda IME (with Kagi) the purpose of the account is pretty clear: they need to keep track of your payments and user settings. @campuscodi

@tris They usually have additional features like customizable results ranking and no ads (obviously). I'm not familiar with the technical implementation but it seems reasonable to aggregate queries toward index providers, which would decorrelate queries from users (from the APIs standpoint).

@campuscodi