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Kagi is now partnering with Brave

scy (@scy@chaos.social)

https://chaos.social/@scy/111704636274463611

So #Kagi is now partnering with #Brave, i.e. the company of Brendan Eich, who has been CEO at Mozilla for eleven days before he had to leave due to massive criticism of his homophobic views. Brave's most well-known product is a browser with its own cryptocurrency, co-designed by Eich. A feedback post asking Kagi to reconsider has been closed by Kagi's founder Vladimir Prelovac because "Considering company x founder political views is not a factor in [their] evaluation". https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave

Quite a controversial decision.... I love Kagi though, but I don't understand why they would want to drag Brave into this.

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steerclear

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I’ve no stake in either Kagi or Brave (and have my own issues with Brave and their CEO), but “partnership” seems like a stretch of definition here assuming this is in reference to the Brave Search API being added as another source for search results. Am I missing something here?

Kagi December 28, 2023 Release Notes

We have added Brave Search API as an additional source of results. With this, Brave API joins the growing list of Kagi's search sources, ensuring that if you can not find something on Kagi, it does not exist on the web. This will come at no additional cost to you.

noodlejetski

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Am I missing something here?

the part where Brave Search API is paid, and some people (including myself) don't want their money to contribute to Brave's business.

steerclear

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To better understand (and definitely not dismissing your opinion), was Brave where you drew the line as a customer or was Google, Amazon, etc also of concern where Kagi pays for services?

abhibeckert

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A lot of people really don't like Eich. When he was promoted from CTO to CEO of Mozilla, half of Mozilla's board resigned (one said it was because she refused to be a member of the board that appointed him, the other two didn't say why they resigned) and there was a massive campaign to get rid of him including websites showing popups to all FireFox users telling them to use another browser - specificially because of Eich.

He lasted 11 days as CEO of Mozilla, and founded Brave after leaving.

Since then, he's done things with crypto and said things about covid which have angered people even more.

steerclear

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You can count me as one of those people so don’t get me wrong; I’m all for not supporting Brave or Eich. I was just curious why this instance where Kagi is paying to use Brave’s search API (which, IMO, doesn’t carry the weight of being labeled a partnership any more than me being a partner with Sony because I pay for PS+) among many other companies/products is the dealbreaker for those that use Kagi. And there may be more to the story (or maybe there is an actual partnership I’ve missed) so I’m open to being more informed.

But if thats the root of the controversy, I can respect that even if I don’t necessarily align with the level of outcry here.

EngineerGaming

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I dislike Brave because they cultivated a not-so-deserved reputation. I see newcomers to privacy being recommended this and it's just sad.

Samueru

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Brave is great, it even lets you sync your browser session without having to use an email. And their android app lets you watch youtube vid without ads and in the background.

It along librewolf are the only browsers that come with good default privacy settings.

Edit: Looks like I struck a nerve on some people lol

skeezix

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You're comment implied it's a good privacy centric browser, which is wrong.

Samueru

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It actually is, it comes with good fingerprinting protection by default.

https://privacytests.org/

LWD

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deleted

Samueru

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Who is the brave employee that runs it? privacytest is actually a open source test that you can run in your browser and has its own repo.

Asudox

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Good fingerprinting protection != good privacy.

Samueru

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Alright what makes a browser good for privacy if fingerprinting does not count? (it does but I want to hear what you will say).

noodlejetski

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I drew the line at Brave.

steerclear

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Fair enough. IMO, Brave isn’t a big enough player compared to many other companies in the enterprise space used by Kagi (both that we know of as consumers and wouldn’t know of without being an employee with knowledge of their internal SaaS agreements) that Kagi’s specific use case of Brave singularly would have been the deal breaker (for me).

Personally, getting that granular with money flow quickly becomes untenable as a consumer as every business will, to some degree, end up paying for some level of service from the companies we hope to lessen the power of. As a consumer example, I may really dislike how Google is influencing the standards of consumer data privacy in the world and choose not to pay for or use Google products/services directly, but I couldn’t imagine boycotting all companies that use Google Workspace internally for email, docs, sheets, etc.

Kagi seems to be a main player that’s opening the conversation of paying for internet search when the world is used to a standard of “free” search, so saying they can’t utilize the existing search data sources is going to make that experience dead in the water. We need ripples if we hope for change.

Edit: sudneo‘s comment actually summed up my thoughts pretty well.

In my personal opinion, such unrealistic ethical requirements end up being a reactionary choice as they will ultimately impede new - better - players to emerge and will leave the existing - worse - dominating.

specseaweed

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That’s a really easy conclusion to come to when you weren’t the one being targeted.

And that’s a lot of words to say this isn’t your issue so you aren’t doing anything about it. Nobody needs the hand wringing. You can just say it.

steerclear

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Care to expand? Not sure how anything I’ve said is hand wringing nor what you’re implying I should be doing.

specseaweed

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Your entire comment can be boiled down to "I don't find this "tenable" and the issue isn't important to me relative to other issues".

That's fine. You can think that. Just go the brevity route next time. It respects the reader more than a wall of text.

steerclear

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I mean, you’re focused on minimizing a concluding thought around an informative dialogue originated by me asking about the perspectives of those feeling impacted by this (of which I’m not). I didn’t find the responses to be a waste of time to read so not sure why you felt that detracting from the discourse was to be your contribution rather than sharing your own perspective to further the group’s discussion.

HKayn

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It will be easier to sympathise with you if you explain how Brave has targeted you or impacted your life.