https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

Why I Lost Faith in Kagi

I've posted many times before about paid search engine Kagi but I
really wanted, like I have with other sites in the past, to make a
post that just outlines why I don't have any faith in it. Because the
majority of my reasons come from being in their Discord, which tons
of average users will never really look at, and I suspect a lot of
Kagi supporters do not know a lot of this backstory. This isn't a
heavily researched deep dive or anything, I feel like I always need
these kind of disclaimers when I'm just posting my thoughts about
something backed up with my reasons for thinking it...it's just a
quick rundown of why I personally went from a Kagi subscriber to a
Kagi Naysayer, so that I can have my reasons in one place that I can
link others to. And I have seen a lot of people recommend Kagi that I
personally know would be a lot less interested in doing so if they
knew this information, but they don't because it's not readily
apparent just from using the site.

For those unfamiliar to start with, Kagi is a paid search engine that
purportedly focuses on privacy. It's meant to be a no-nonsense
platform focused on being the best search it can be. Frankly, I think
at this point it's a very nonsense-focused platform that has an
extremely disinterested view of privacy, and I think it's not a
particularly sustainable project either.

First of all, as a project, Kagi stretches itself way too thin.
"Kagi" isn't just Kagi Search, it's also a whole slew of AI tools, a
Mac-only web browser called Orion, and right now they are planning on
launching an email service as well. None of these projects are
particularly profitable, so it's not a case of one subsidizing the
other, and when they announced Kagi Email even their most dedicated
userbase (aka the types who hang around in a discord for a search
engine) seemed largely disinterested. For products this niche, I
don't think you can afford to be running multiple niche products at
once. Your developers are going to be running far too ragged to keep
them all going. Last I could find Kagi employs about 16 employees,
half full time. Presumably not every single one of those 8 or so full
timers are web devs. That's not a lot of people to throw at this many
things.

Oh and they own a t-shirt factory.

You see, when Kagi had a funding round and raised about $670k. This
funding came from an investment round including "42 accredited
investors, most of whom are actual Kagi users". Unfortunately unlike
Cohost I can't give any kind of huge financial breakdown here,
because Kagi's finances are even less transparent. If there are Kagi
financial reports, I haven't seen them, just the occasional Discord
comment from Kagi employees. A while back they raised their prices,
which lost them a lot of subscribers, because they were losing money
per search at the old prices. They were actually still losing money
per search on the new prices. They eventually lowered the prices back
down a bit (and maybe raised them again? I've completely lost the
plot on their pricing at this point) and have claimed that at 25,000
users they would be breaking even. I am unsure what happened in all
of this for this math to be true, but my point is that they did in
fact reach at least 20,000 users, and to celebrate they set up a
business entity in Germany (they are currently US based), in order to
start a tiny little t-shirt printing company. And their goal was to
print 20,000 t-shirts to give out, FOR FREE, to their first 20,000
users (with users paying only shipping costs). But I cannot stress
enough, they did not just spend money on 20,000 tshirts to give out,
they set up a whole new business entity in Germany to run their own
t-shirt printing operation, with its own building and warehouse and
employee(s? I get the sense it's one guy but I don't know). And this
cost them 1/3 of their $670k funding round. One, fucking, third. For
t-shirts. Did I mention that the t-shirts don't even have the Kagi
name on them? Just the Kagi dog mascot, who is at this point the only
thing I like about Kagi, to the point where if I wasn't worried
people would try to talk to me about Kagi I'd opt for one of the
shirts myself. Great artist, whoever did this. Terrible financial
choice to start a whole t-shirt business to make 20,000 free t-shirts
that do not even get your name out there.

Discord convo, quoting @tkataja saying 'of course I don't know about
the financial situation of the company now and then, but', and Vlad
replies on 01/28/2024 'we are almost breakeven, at 25k subs we should
be'
Discord convo, quoting @HKayn saying 'Is Kagi actually operating at a
loss atm?', dev Thomas replies on 09/29/2023 'So we price our plans
for them to be slightly profitable on a revenue - cost per search
basis, but for now there aren't enough of you for that to fully
offset R&D expenses (eg. salaries, etc...). You can help by getting
your friends on :)
Discord convo on 05/23/2023. Vlad: 'we are not sustainable yet but we
are able to pay search and infrastructure cost after revenue from
subscriptions. Since there is a surplus there it is a matter of
scaling the number of users now to also pay for the salaries. That
should happen around 20k customers.' Grooty: 'how many employees do
you currently have?' Raymyn: 'Thanks for the response. Definitely
looking forward to the future of Kagi. You guys are definitely the
first product I have used in awhile that I am more than willing to
throw money at a subscription for. Hoping you guys hit the 20k mark
soon, and grow to 100k, 1 million, or more in the near future!' Vlad,
replying to Grooty: '~16, roughly half of them are full time'

T-shirt companies aside, there's one other thing about Kagi's
finances that was revealed recently in an update stream they did that
caught my attention--Kagi was not paying sales tax for two years and
they finally have to pay up. They just...didn't do it. Didn't think
it was important? I have no idea why. Their reactions made it sound
like they owed previous taxes, not that they just now had to pay
them. They genuinely made it sound like they only just now realized
they needed to figure out sales tax. It's a baffling thing to me and
it meant a change in prices for users that some people were not
thrilled with.

Kagi slide that says 'Also, sales tax/vat...' with a graph of the
world, plus sign, and graph of an unreadable graph, with an equal
sign saying 'we need to pay sales taxes'. Then 'Implementing now -
updates in the next few weeks, expect changes in January
Discord screenshot from 03/19/2024, Vlad says 'To clarify, this means
an end-price increase for affected members (sales tax/VAT will be
automatically added on top of Kagi price, if applicable in their
country/state) and this is mandated by Kagi becoming large enough to
have legal sales tax/VAT obligation. In addition, Kagi will have to
retroactively pay for all sales tax/VAT that we did not collect in
the last almost two years. We have chosen to absorb this on behalf of
our customers.'

But let's say that you can live with their financial issues. They'll
either survive or they won't and you'll just enjoy the ride. Yet,
there's a lot of reasons that I can't just enjoy the ride either. I
think the ride is going to get worse and worse in ways the casual
users haven't really noticed yet because of how much of it is in beta
or just Ideas That Vlad (the founder of Kagi) Had. And most of them
are surrounding AI. I have to assume a lot of people don't understand
how deep the AI rabbithole for Kagi goes, because I have seen people
recommend Kagi to people frustrated with Google's own AI bullshit. If
AI is the thing you are trying to get away from, moving to Kagi is a
lateral move at best.

As it turns out, Kagi was founded originally as an AI company, who
later pivoted to search. And going by their comments in their
Discord, AI tools seem to be what they spend most of their time on
these days. They're launching AI features left and right, and they
have fully bought into AI being the future of search. They believe
that by embracing AI, that will be the thing that sets their product
apart (kinda late now) and get them the kind of userbase that can
keep them afloat financially. They have "FastGPT", where their focus
is having a ChatGPT style service that is focused on being fast, not
accurate. And boy, it sure isn't, I messed around with this for a
while and it very confidently gave me a lot of extremely inaccurate
information about old sitcoms. But of course, it's all stuff where if
you didn't already know the answer to the question you asked you
wouldn't know it was wrong--like when I asked it about the All in the
Family episode Cousin Liz, it kept identifying the woman Edith and
Archie are talking to in the episode as Cousin Liz, but Cousin Liz is
instead Edith's deceased cousin who they were attending a funeral
for. Following a theme I asked it more broadly about homosexuality in
All in the Family and it spit out a bunch of text repeatedly saying
that Lionel Jefferson was gay. But I guess it did spit all of this
wrong information at me faster than some of the alternatives! I wrote
more about this experience on fedi, even though the content warning
says ChatGPT this was done with Kagi's FastGPT, I was just trying to
keep the thread simple at the time.

Like most search now Kagi has chosen to include Instant Answers that
are AI generated, which means they're often wrong, as well as a
"Universal Summarizer" tool, that again is more of the same old AI
bullshit. There's also a beta tool called Kagi Assitant, which
I...don't know what's really different about it than the other AI
stuff they're doing, I think it has a chatbot mode? I believe you
have to be a subscriber to see this. It's getting increasingly hard
to tell some of these services apart. There's also another beta
feature called Sidekick that puts Kagi AI stuff as a sidebar on your
own website. There was some demo where you could put someone's
Twitter handle in and it would give you a summary of who that person
was (nightmare shit). But the developers of Kagi fully believe that
this is what search engines should be, a bunch of AI tools so that
you don't even need to read primary sources anymore. If AI is your
problem with Google or Bing, Kagi is in no way a solution for you.
Kagi loves AI bullshit and they are going to find more and more ways
to use it. If you check out their Discord and listen to founder Vlad
talk about AI tools, it's clear that he will not listen to anyone
saying they might be bad in any way. To the point where he truly
believes that AI should be used to remove bias from news articles,
and show you which articles are "constructive" or "good" to view.
This is something he legitimately wants to implement and he seems
completely oblivious to the fact that this is not something AI can
do, that AI spits out exactly as much bias as it is fed in its model.
He's 100% a true believer in AI as unbiased. (Note in the below
screenshots: freediver is Vlad's HackerNews account)

Discord screenshot from 12/05/2022, Vlad says 'now something like
this is super useful...we can make the AI read through 50 web pages
in mere seconds, after doing 5 searches (that it decides on!), to at
the end produce a summary of someone based on just a twitter handle.
Total cost for this is maybe 6-7 cents but it just saved me 10
minutes?' Vlad includes a screenshot of the search for a user named
@scottleibrand, which shows a ChatGPT-style generated summary with
links to the sites it used, the text is a bit too small for me to
transcribe.
Hackernews screenshot, malikNF says ''> Kagi shopping results have no
affiliate links and feature the most helpful, unbiased reviews'
Wonder how they determine if a review is unbiased or not. Any attempt
at automating this process means someone else will figure a way to
game the system over time.' Vlad replies (as freediver) 'Which is why
we cannot say how, but please check and let us know if the reviews
sound unbiased :)'
Discord convo from 12/05/23. Vlad: 'Real balanced news would not
discriminate between left and right, but between constructive and
destructive.'' ram ram: 'it just so happens the left/right divide
correlates strongly with true/false and constructive destructive' the
last envoy quoting ram ram: 'I agree' Vlad: 'Interesting, that is
implicitly saying that one political option is the source of truth'
Ram ram: 'Not at all, it's explicitly saying that one political
option is supported by truth.' Vlad: 'but news should not be only
about politics?' Ram ram: 'All things are political in nature.' Vlad:
'A coffee shop opening in your town?' Ram ram: 'Business licensing,
source of beans, employment practices, building regulation, city
ordonances, taxes, food health and safety'
Discord convo from 12/05/23. Vlad: 'line of thought basically comes
from here https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/
news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli, embed for the Guardian article 'News is bad
for you - and giving up reading it will make you happier. News is bad
for you, it leads to fear and aggression. It hinders your creativity
and makes you sick. We should stop consuming it, says Rolf Dobelli,
who's abstained for years.' Vlad continues: 'then you ask a question
how does a product that makes news constructive to your life (vs
irrelevant/destructive)'

It's honestly impossible to write this without discussing Vlad a
little bit. Vlad is very "my way or the highway", but is the type
that will try to appear very measured and calm while completely
unwilling to budge. And he is very, very much the type that believes
"not everything is political" and "we don't get into politics". I
won't get into all of the Brave stuff because many people have
written about this already, but the support thread about it should
give you some ideas. His personal conception of bias is a guiding
factor in a lot of Kagi's decisions but it's frankly ridiculous. For
example, he has stated before that he thinks 3 star reviews on
products are "by definition" unbiased, because they must include good
and bad points. Nevermind that a lot of people's reviews of the
recent Star Wars films were "good space war stuff but too many
minorities in it". At one point someone suggested the idea that
searching for suicide-related terms should bring up a helpline, and
he rejected that idea because it would be "biased" (I guess towards
not wanting people to kill themselves). But at the same time, Kagi
partners with a service called Looria to provide "unbiased reviews"
on products in Kagi's shopping page. Nevermind that unbiased reviews
do not exist (there is just a difference between a sincere review and
a paid advertisement), but isn't promoting certain products in search
at least as biased as telling people to not commit suicide? You're
letting a third party decide what reviews your users should see.

And Vlad's attitude is also where Kagi's dedication to privacy falls
apart for me. Generally, if someone brings up a security or privacy
concern, Vlad's response is either "trust me bro" or "that's not
actually important". He has repeatedly stated that he feels less than
100 people on earth need full anonymity in a search engine (he has
never, that I could find, explained where he got this number or idea
from). He believes that email addresses don't count as personally
identifiable information, because you can simply use a burner
account. If you say that you wouldn't want Kagi using information
from your theoretical Kagi Email Address in your search results, and
would rather have a Proton-style privacy focused email? He says that
there's nothing to worry about, Kagi wouldn't do anything bad with
your data. If you bring up "what if Kagi gets sold to someone else?"
He says well, if they sold to someone who did something bad with your
data, they'd lose all of their privacy focused customers, so clearly
they'd never do that. Basically anything where you say "I don't want
someone to have this data about what I'm doing in a search engine",
his reply is "well, we wouldn't do anything with this information." A
lot of questions about what information Kagi collects on people is
met with either saying nothing (which isn't true, they connect your
account to an email address for payments, since it's a paid service),
or saying he isn't sure, or saying it doesn't matter because they
won't use it anyway. Asking what data Stripe collects on them through
Kagi, and more importantly what data Stripe sends back TO Kagi, also
gets you a vague "I don't know" answer. He doesn't entertain any
discussions about GDPR because he thinks they have nothing that
applies anyway. Questions about what would happen if the government
tried to force him to collect information about users are just
brushed away with "well we'd simply close the company", although he
also notes that he has no problem with criminals being caught through
their searches and doesn't want criminals using the platform.

Discord convo from 02/15/2024, Zack: 'That's not actually the only
thing I'm asking. Was also curious about more of the intricacies. I
would use stripe, I wouldn't opt for bitcoin anyway.' Vlad: 'the
point is we do not really want, need or care about your data. We just
need $10/mo from you to run the service. How you provide it to use is
a technical detail as far as we're concerned. Zack: I know that you
don't want/need/care. I was more curious about the actual reality
when using stripe, that's all. I will delve more into the stripe
policies another time though!
Discord convo. Heero, replying to Vlad asking 'what is missing?':
'GDPR Data download link. Where to get the data that is collected.'
Heero replying to their own post saying 'Something you could do about
this false time stamps?' with 'But this is more important for me, cry
laughing emoji, it's just annoying when sites cheat like that' Vlad:
Kagi does not collect any personal information' Kai: eh, you
technically need to provide a download link to a CSV with the email
address' Vlad: our payment processor does, and you can ask stripe for
that'
Discord convo, Heero replying to Vlad saying 'kagi does not collect
any personal information: 'You have an account, with mail and
billing. This is already personal information in the sense of GDPR,
winking emoji. Heero replying to vlad saying 'Well even email address
is not personal information the way kagi does it as you can enter
anything', Heero says 'That's actually I think not important' Heero
replies to Kai saying 'GDPR is stupid that way' with 'Yes, I agree'.
Vlad replies 'personal information is what you can be identified with
as an individual. No information you submit to kagi is personal
information except if you use your real email address to register. So
a data download link would download a file that contains your email
address. Heero replies 'Yes, and then you need to provide the data
associated with you. That includes personal preference settings for
search optimization I would think, no expert on this though.'
Discord convo, Heero replying to Vlad asking 'can you clarify what is
sensitive?': 'Sensitive data is private information that, if exposed
without permission, can lead to harm or misuse. Inputting websites
that should be preferred or not preferred is highly sensitive. That
shows a bit of a disconnect between data protection and you. Though I
really don't want to blame you, could be more that I actually live in
germany and we take such stuff far to serious :D' Vlad: We do not
collect/extract this information but the user volunteers it. As such
it is not clear how is it sensitive in terms of privacy protection.'
Heero: The thread model here would be something like that: I prefer
websites that are pro trans or anti trans, you see the profile and
the settings i have set, you see the mail too.'
Discord convo, Heero: your not really following GDPR standards. You
don't understand what sensitive data means (to be fair, I don't know
if you really do :) ). Even if I can input wrong data, you can't
verify that, as such you need to always take it as sensitive,
personal, private data. Also, giving you data volunteerly isnt a
thing in GDPR, the source of the data is not important. So, my
concern is, I don't know what you really track, as you don't give me
a copy of my data. I don't know if your obligated to, it's just
things I as european citizen expect.' Vlad: (quoting 'your not really
following DPR standards') You say these things but you do not really
provide evidence for it :) So again, can you clearly articulate what
your concern is? We very well know what personal information is and
what GDPR was made for. (quoting 'i don't know what you really
track') We have very detailed privacy policy where this is literally
written. Have you read it and still do not know what we track?'
Heero: 'Did I make it clearer know? I really want to stress that I
don't have anything against you or kagi :) just trying to be
constructive.'
Discord convo from 03/31/2024, Gohan: Just the thought of kagi search
having the ability to go through my emails would keep me far away
from using the email product' Vlad: 'as I said, it would be opt in,
we will need to be able to search email as a product feature anyway'
Gohan: That's why I said even having the ability to do so is a
massive turn off' Vlad: exposing it in search results is a benefit,
not sure why you would think that?' Gohan: 'because if you give any
company an inch, they'll take a mile', Vlad: 'not Kagi, I think you
may be misunderstanding how would this work and what incentives in
play'
Discord convo from 07/15/22, Vlad: people who really need anonymity
are very rare. Probably less than a 100 in the entire world.
Definitely not typical Kagi users. Unless they are criminals, in
which case we don't care they don't have full anonymity (nor we want
them as customers)'

I want to note with the above, I'm not a GDPR expert either, I don't
know what counts legally and what doesn't, but I strongly disagree
with Vlad's handwaving of the issue and his insistence that email
addresses aren't PII because you can use a fake one, because that's
true for names and almost any other information as well, that logic
doesn't hold up for this, and the logic is what I have the issue
with.

Between the absolute blase attitude towards privacy, the 100%
dedication to AI being the future of search, and the completely
misguided use of the company's limited funds, I honestly can't see
Kagi as something I could ever recommend to people. Is the search
good? I mean...it's not really much better than any other search, it
heavily leverages Bing like DDG and the other indie search platforms
do, the only real killer feature it has to me is the ability to block
domains from your results, which I can currently only do in other
search engines via a user script that doesn't help me on mobile. But
what good is filtering out all of the AI generated spamblogs on a
search platform that wants to spit more AI generated bullshit at me
directly? Sure I can turn it off, but who's to say that they won't
start using my data to fuel their own LLM? They already have an
extremely skewed idea of what counts as PII or not. They could easily
see using people's searches as being "anonymized" and decide they're
fine to use, because their primary business isn't search, it's AI.
They just don't want to admit to being an AI company anymore.
Frankly, it's not something I want to pay them to keep developing.
It's something I want less of out in the world. Do you need to quit
using Kagi? That's up to you. I'm not really trying to debate anyone
into leaving Kagi. My only interest is to explain why my opinion
shifted on it, and to share information that may or may not shift
your opinions. If they don't, it's not something I want to debate
people into. But I think most of the info here is going to be news to
a lot of people, and that's the thing. Most people aren't going to
dig into the discord for a project and read what the developers have
said about it over time, that's a bonkers thing to do that I did,
just do what you will with my findings. Because I know for a fact,
from talking to people, that a lot of Kagi users don't know any of
this.

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