Agreed. I've been a subscriber for over two years. At first the depth of search results was not as good as Google's but I used Kagi nonetheless because of the no-ad policy.
Today, the results are just as good as Google's and still no ad, making Kagi a no-brainer in my eyes.
Thank your for taking the time (!) to articulate your thoughts.
We think there will be many angles to look up our site:
- Do other people share my name, n my country and in the word?
- How rare is my first or last name?
- How old is that person I met? What's their birthday?
- Percentage of a population accounted for as proxy of a country's digital footprint.
You will find these answers super quickly, without a great investment.
That being said, we're also looking for volunteers: people who find lists or create dozens of records. As I'm sure you know, Wikipedia runs on 300,000 volunteers - that's 1 volunteer for 10,000 visitors!
Wikipedia volunteers do it for the love of knowledge. I think we can find similar-minded people, probably among those currently active in genealogy.
One last note about our name, we're a proper 501(c)(3) and our name is trademarked so I see little risk there.
Thank you again for your constructive remarks.
Thank you for your remark. We try to address the issue in the Methodology section but it's a complex question. Roughly speaking, GDPR was passed to prevent merchants from contacting potential consumers without their consent. Well, we don't have anything to sell, we don't collect phone numbers or email addresses and we will never contact anybody.
That's what they said about wikipedia and here it stands 20 years later, stronger than ever. Trolls will always exist but there are ways to keep them at bay, we're working on it.
Thank you for your comments. We're well aware of the pitfalls you're pointing. Some of them can be avoided now, others will need a dose of AI down the road. For now, we log the data when we find it.
Mentioning the sources is a tricky issue. Our philosophy is to say as little or as much about everyone. Barack Obama's record is no more developed than yours. Linking a record to Wikipedia or to the list of Minnesota's sex offenders would break that rule, and not in a good way in my opinion.
No need to be venomous. No, it's not an ego project. I'm not saying it will lift the Third World out of poverty but it's a genuinely disinterested endeavor. And I give to other charities, some of which you would probably approve of.
Proton. Import process is super easy. I would recommend going for a paying plan. You can import your own domain name, have multiple addresses, you get a VPN, lots of storage space, etc.
And they'll never open your mailbox to the FBI.