[HN Gopher] I Lost Faith in Kagi
___________________________________________________________________
I Lost Faith in Kagi
Author : Tomte
Score : 554 points
Date : 2024-04-12 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (d-shoot.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (d-shoot.net)
| koutsie wrote:
| They lost my faith when they partnered with brave
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| Nah the Brave thing got spun up a bit. Kagi just wanted the
| extra search index data, which isn't even originally from Brave
| - they acquired it from Cliqz.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| What's wrong with Brave?
| tail_exchange wrote:
| The founder, Brandon Eich, made donations in favour of
| banning same-sex marriage.
|
| I also refuse to use anything from Brave for this reason.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Brendan Eich also created JavaScript. So you're going to
| have to pretty much stop using the Internet entirely if
| you're going to act like his work has anything to do with
| his political opinions. Personally, I separate a person's
| work from their political opinions and I think you should
| too.
| tail_exchange wrote:
| Not really. Life doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing
| dichotomy like this. It is a perfectly fine decision to
| boycott a product if it is viable to be boycotted, and
| keep using a product if it's not: using the web without
| JavaScript is almost impossible, so I'll use it; using
| the web without Brave is easy, so I won't use it.
|
| This is not about separating a person's work from their
| political views, it's about not giving more power to
| people you don't want to have more power. If he is going
| to use money to campaign against LGBT people, then I'll
| do my best not to give him money, and I think you should
| too.
| AndroTux wrote:
| What a stupid statement. You do realize that they partnered
| with Microsoft Bing for their search results from the very
| beginning, right? In what world is Brave worse than Microsoft?
| keyboardJones wrote:
| I'd rather them lean on Brave than Google or Bing
| bruxis wrote:
| The era of having startup founders both immediately accessible on
| social platforms (X/Twitter, Discord, etc.) and overly willing to
| share their opinions is a messy one.
|
| It's hard enough in a small startup to prevent CEO "commentary-
| driven-development" , let alone have their random thoughts
| driving investment insight and user acquisition/attrition.
| dartos wrote:
| Messy, but valuable imo.
|
| It's good interacting with the real people that make software.
|
| IMO, The fact that it's so detached from the customer is part
| of why MBAs fit in to leadership so nicely.
|
| None of the customers see it coming, because they don't
| interact with employees.
| jsheard wrote:
| Even without seeing Vlads comments it was already disheartening
| to see them investing in AI features of questionable utility
| rather than focusing on the core search product. Trying to make
| a new search engine is already a difficult enough task without
| spreading themselves even thinner, and diluting the value of
| the subscription for those who just want search because they
| only offer unlimited searches in conjunction with unlimited
| access to the AI tools.
| infecto wrote:
| To me the Orion endeavor was much more concerning. I don't
| understand how you can sustain a company of a handful of
| people and work on search, ai, ai+search, orion and making
| tshirts.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Orion came before Kagi Search. If anything, I'm sure Orion
| users found this Kagi endeavor much more concerning.
| Dayshine wrote:
| What do you mean? The unlimited tier didn't come with AI last
| time I checked. That's the ultimate tier which costs 2.5x as
| much to pay for the ai?
| jsheard wrote:
| The $10 unlimited tier gives you unlimited access to
| FastGPT and the summarizer. The 2.5x more expensive plan
| above that gives you more AI features, but it sounds like
| you're paying for early beta access, and they will filter
| down to the cheaper plan eventually.
| Tomte wrote:
| Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
| smcleod wrote:
| Sounds like Vlad did a pretty sane, human thing reaching out
| and offering to discuss.
|
| The authors replies seem pretty rude (or at least somewhat
| aggressive / dismissive). Kagi is Vlads baby and I could
| imagine he would care and try to explain when he thinks someone
| has the wrong idea. However to the author - it's just another
| service he doesn't use anymore.
| WA wrote:
| Vlad is not discussing, he is lecturing. The author of the
| blog post seems right. Vlad defends his position "lol email
| is not PII" repeatedly, despite being obviously and
| completely wrong. He has no understanding that it doesn't
| matter that a user could enter fake information.
|
| His business collects email addresses, which is a process.
| Under GDPR, this process must be documented, users must be
| given their data on request (even if it just contains an
| email address, but usually it also contains the signup date
| for example as a proof for their data processing consent) and
| users must be informed about their rights to correct or
| delete such data.
|
| He comes off totally as the "trust me bro" guy with zero
| respect for a different perspective and doesn't seem to be
| interested in changing his (objectively wrong) opinion. It is
| almost laughable, because "is email PII" has been discussed a
| million times since the introduction of the GDPR that you
| must've lived under a rock to dismiss it like Vlad did.
| eviks wrote:
| he explicitly said in his email that "Personal emails are
| PII.", so how is that a defence of his previous position?
| WA wrote:
| I re-read again. You are right, he says "personal emails
| are PII" in this email. In the original post however he
| dismisses the whole GDPR data request process as "we
| don't need this, because you can provide fake data".
|
| Point is: if the business requests an email address, many
| people will provide their real email adress and your
| business needs to document this process under GDPR. I
| just checked. The signup form doesn't say "please give a
| FAKE email address", it just says "email address".
|
| If a user provides a real email address, Kagi must
| respond to GDPR Art. 15 requests by providing...that same
| email adress. Might sound silly, but usually, there is
| other data associated with this. Usually, at least the
| timestamp of the signup. If a business is really GDPR
| compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like
| user settings and so on.
|
| Or, if the user signed up and later deleted the account,
| his email should explicitly NOT show up when asking for
| personal data.
|
| See, it is about documenting the process, whether the
| outcome is "here is your email address you just asked
| for" or "we don't have any data on you". And Vlad says
| that this process is irrelevant for Kagi, while it is
| not.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| >If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a
| download option for stuff like user settings and so on.
|
| I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've
| never received one that contained my user settings, so
| that seems pretty normal.
|
| The whole PII convo seems incredibly asinine though,
| "PII" is not a thing in the GDPR. Personal data is[1],
| but that's not the same thing.
|
| If Kagi keep a record of searches performed by a user,
| that's something that a SAR should be used for, but the
| whole convo just misses the mark entirely.
|
| [^1]: See article 4.1 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's ultimately not up to Vlad. If the law declares email
| addresses are PII, they're PII.
|
| If he's positioning his company to challenge that law
| when he runs afoul of it, that's a choice they can make
| but it's a business risk (and IANAL, but... Probably one
| they'll lose).
| thisisjasononhn wrote:
| Lori is a she, not a he.
| eviks wrote:
| Vlad is Vlad, not Lori.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| I don't care if it's someone's baby. I'm the paying customer
| paying in both money and sensitive information I expected to
| be well protected.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| You can make that argument for initial approach, but it falls
| flat on its face after the author told Vlad that they didn't
| want to communicate with them and Vlad responded with a
| lecture.
|
| Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.
| magistr4te wrote:
| Tldr: you can't just spread a very negative opinion about
| someones hard work and then plug your ears shut for any
| kind of non-symathetic interaction.
|
| In my eyes this rationale would make sense if there was no
| backstory to this. If there was no preceeding blogpost, I'd
| consider Vlads messages pure spam.
|
| But the context here is different: The author wrote a very
| critical, and clearly opinionated blogpost. There was clear
| intention in engaging with this subject.
|
| Now the author seems to want to avoid responsibility, while
| Vlads attempt to react to a public hit piece with a
| respectful conversation was honestly the best way to handle
| this.
| rsynnott wrote:
| You can criticise something without obligating yourself
| to have a conversation with the subject. In fact, that is
| generally how most critical writing has worked, for
| centuries. If you're unhappy with the review of your
| restaurant in the paper, you _might_ be able to convince
| them to publish a short owner response, once, but they're
| certainly not going to engage in a dialogue about it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > You can criticise something without obligating yourself
| to have a conversation with the subject.
|
| That's the fundamental premise of telling people that
| they are sealioning.
|
| Not everyone agrees with it (I suspect age plays more a
| role than anything else).
|
| Your historical example doesn't really map very well to
| today, because control over the ability to put some text
| somewhere that others can read it is very, very different
| than it was historically.
|
| None of this excuses the Kagi CEO's failure to back off
| when asked/told to. They should just have used their own
| blog or equivalent to respond.
|
| Still, generalizing to a broad claim about raising an
| issue in public creating no future obligations seems
| somewhat wrong to me. You don't _have_ to speak in public
| about anything at all. For me, your choice to do so
| creates some _limited_ obligations towards future
| engagement (though I 'm not sure quite where the limits
| lie).
| catapart wrote:
| >There was clear intention in engaging with this subject.
|
| Yes, and then that engagement - which very much took
| place - did not give the author any confidence that
| FURTHER ENGAGEMENT (via email) would change the
| situation.
|
| If I talk to you back and forth about an issue I have and
| feel like I'm talking to a brick wall, so I then write a
| critical review based on those issues, why should I be
| forced to _not_ be a brick wall, in return? If Vlad wants
| someone to listen to him, he should probably take some
| time to engage with (not just 'listen to') what is being
| said on it's _fundamental_ merits (not whatever surface
| level bit he wants to latch on to).
|
| Recontextualizing an issue is not addressing it.
| Explaining an issue is not addressing it. Describing a
| paradigm that contextualizes an issue is not addressing
| it.
| mbStavola wrote:
| You are right... up until maybe the second reply.
|
| Vlad saw something critical of his hard work and wanted
| to put in the effort to clarify his stances and mend a
| relationship. I can absolutely understand that, your work
| is a reflection of yourself and nobody wants to be judged
| on misunderstanding. He might've even felt like he let
| someone who cared about Kagi down and wanted to make it
| right. Again, all understandable!
|
| _However_ , twice, the blog post author said they did
| not want to engage. At this point, regardless of how you
| feel about what was said, you should probably move on;
| they said their piece, you tried to engage, they
| rebuffed, oh well, do something else! To continue on is
| both incredibly annoying and a bit unhinged.
|
| If Vlad absolutely felt like he needed to respond to
| this, he should've digested the main points of the
| original blogpost, reflected on them, and written his own
| blog post to a more general audience. Not necessarily in
| _response_ to the author, but understanding that more
| people probably feel this way as well and want to hear
| clear answers. Perfect examples of this would be an "Our
| stance on privacy" or "How we're ensuring Kagi's future,"
| again factoring in the criticism from the author.
|
| I write all of this as someone who _pays_ for and _likes_
| Kagi. I think it 's a good product, if a bit scattered at
| times. But the blog post does hit on some concerns that I
| have (privacy being the biggest) and seeing the follow up
| leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
| mekoka wrote:
| There's probably some backstory between Vlad and Lori
| there.
|
| But beyond that, there's some irony in that exchange. If
| Vlad had simply stopped engaging when Lori asked, it
| would indeed make Lori seem like more of an asshole for
| rejecting an appeal to have a simple conversation. But
| then Vlad transgressed that wish, making Lori's case
| about not wanting to engage.
| Semaphor wrote:
| So does the author. But then I also don't care about the
| author and don't pay them for my search engine :/
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| Perhaps we live in different worlds, but there's a world of
| distanced between unhinged and roughly 3 emails to someone
| who wrote a peice targeted specifically at your business.
|
| If anything the replies in that Mastadon thread make the
| author and others appear petty, combative and immature imo,
| and I do not say that as someone who agrees with all Vlad's
| perspectives.
| davidcbc wrote:
| If someone tells you to stop emailing them after 1 email
| don't send 2 more. It's that easy
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Is it so weird that I 100% agree with both you, and the
| parent comment yours is replying to?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Sure. But the first time they said "don't email me any
| more", it was actually more like "Don't email me any
| more... and another thing! X Y Z." playing an equally
| petty game of "who gets the last word".
| paipa wrote:
| If you want someone to not e-mail you, tell them (if
| that) and block them. It's that easy, unless you're
| baiting
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| After posting a blog entry specifically targeting and
| naming someone, their business, posting it on the
| internet and starting a Mastodon thread.
|
| I'm all for generally leaving people alone, and being
| civil, but context please.
|
| You don't get to open a salvo against someone, while
| pretending you're above interaction with them, then play
| the victim when they respond and universally and
| unilaterally dictate terms while always trying to get the
| last word in.
| UberFly wrote:
| It all had the usual flame-bait "look at me" vibe as much
| as any substance. I feel that Vlad fell for the bait more
| than anything.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| One thing I absolutely _love_ about online discourse: shit
| all over someone, then block them. It is something that you
| don 't see with in-person communications - because you
| really can't just "close off" the discussion to one way.
|
| Anyway, I just think that people do things in online
| discussions that they wouldn't do to someone's face. And
| that tends to be a _bad_ thing for reasonable discourse.
| sph wrote:
| Another thing you don't quite seen in real life:
| strangers that record a serendipitous conversation, to
| later post it for the whole world to see, to point and
| laugh.
|
| The Internet has turned us into sociopaths.
| gandalfgreybeer wrote:
| >Another thing you don't quite seen in real life:
| strangers that record a serendipitous conversation, to
| later post it for the whole world to see, to point and
| laugh.
|
| In the thread linked above, I think his reasoning for
| posting the email is reasonable. I find this similar to
| what the Apollo dev did when discussing with Reddit
| people. If he didn't record the conversation or make it
| public, his words could have been twisted.
| mac-attack wrote:
| > One thing I absolutely love about online discourse:
| shit all over someone, then block them. It is something
| that you don't see with in-person communications
|
| Ummm dating and breakups?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You missed out a step. Shit all over them, then block
| them, then tell them that you blocked them (steps 2 & 3
| may be reversed on some platforms).
| t8sr wrote:
| The author's response is perfectly calibrated to drive
| someone up the wall. Sling some mud and then hide behind
| "help, I'm being cornered."
|
| Imagine doing this in the offline world. How well would
| this kind of behavior go over with people at the grocery
| store, do you think? Why is it acceptable online to behave
| like this?
| thorum wrote:
| As alternative perspective in terms of power dynamics:
| The Kagi CEO is a somewhat powerful figure as the CEO of
| a well-known tech company. The blog author is a random
| person from outside the tech startup culture.
|
| The internet levels the playing field so the random
| person has the power to post criticism of the more
| powerful person and be heard. It doesn't make sense to
| compare with the offline world because this wouldn't be
| able to happen outside the internet.
|
| In response the CEO is attempting to force them into a
| different context where he once again has power. The
| author recognizes this and therefore refuses.
| t8sr wrote:
| But you're not talking about Tim Cook, this is a guy
| running a company of ~10 people. Someone on the internet,
| with a following and an audience, has written an essay
| about how Vlad is a bad person, and now is implying the
| latter is abusive for trying to have a conversation.
|
| This is psychotic behavior.
|
| There's a huge spectrum between NY Times writing a
| sourced article about a powerful business magnate and
| someone disparaging an SMB owner on their blog. If I took
| the posts and emails of someone I knew in my life and
| posted them online, I would probably get a call from the
| police.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| This feels very similar to the trope on X, where someone
| makes an inflammatory or stupid comment, people angrily
| respond calling them stupid, and the original person then
| claims they're being harassed/were just joking, and
| ultimately neither side actually communicates. The people
| who like the original poster continue on believing that
| they were being harassed, and people who thought they were
| being stupid continue on believing they're being stupid.
|
| I feel that Vlad is justified, even if I personally
| would've just considered it to be a lost cause and just
| kept receipts in case it became necessary to publicly
| respond, similar to how the Apollo dev released receipts
| when Reddit tried to make him out to be in the wrong.
| fckgw wrote:
| Vlad is justified to reach out and try to start a
| conversation but when the author says no, you drop it.
| That didn't happen here and it's a bad look.
| danpalmer wrote:
| This post suggests the author has tried this already, has had
| these discussions and has reached the natural end of that
| process.
|
| I've also had a similar discussion with Vlad on comments
| here, he definitely doesn't try to view things from other
| people's perspectives.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Vlad's message to "discuss" reads more like a sealion-ey _'
| let me explain to you why you are wrong, you just don't
| understand why you are wrong, I am very smart and not wrong'_
| than an honest admission that Vlad was wrong and is
| interested in being humble and learning from someone else.
| fn-mote wrote:
| ^ The parent link leads to an email chain between the CEO and
| the blogger in which the blogger says "go away I do not want to
| talk to you" several times and receives a chain of emails back.
| Text version:
|
| https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
|
| Read them yourself, but to me they look like the emails of a
| persistent salesman. They were remarkable only in that they
| provide more excuses than concrete responses.
| fridek wrote:
| I find this quote funny and on some another level of
| disconnect about what they are competing with:
|
| > Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for
| free.
|
| For a couple of my university years I had nothing but free
| Google t-shirts. They were throwing so much of this crap
| around that my closet was halfway to 20k. I only lamented
| they never gave away Google trousers or briefs.
|
| They have a fair shot at competing with Google on quality of
| search and they should focus on that. If they think they can
| complete on AI, email or swag - good luck, and I hope you
| have a good money printer.
| vaughnegut wrote:
| Honestly what he says makes sense in his "rebuttal", except for
| the part where he continues emailing after being told to stop.
|
| I actually stumbled across the AI stuff being turned off by
| default yesterday when I got curious and was poking around the
| feature request forum. It was explicitly because a lot of
| people hate it for moral/ethical reasons. A lot of the comments
| in the replies are specifically about the AI stuff in spite of
| it being disabled by default.
|
| Most of this seems fine for a startup?
| llm_trw wrote:
| Why even reply to an email when you intent to ignore it?
|
| >Yes, hello so called prince of Nigeria. I have no interest in
| a discussion about the intricate court politics of Nigeria or
| its Byzantine inheritance rules. As you can see from my blog
| post it is entirely unlikely you would ever gain the throne
| even with my $2,000 wire transfer.
|
| The only thing I take away from that is I'm very happy I don't
| know either of them and am never likely to.
| catapart wrote:
| This definitely needs more eyeballs. What a gross person Vlad
| is being.
| magistr4te wrote:
| While I do not agree on Vlads interpretation of PII and GDPR at
| all, that whole conversation was so incredibly mishandled by
| the author of this blog post.
|
| I understand not wanting to engage in a conversation about a
| product you don't care about, but after collecting so much
| information and writing a lengthy blog post about it, that is a
| different story. In my eyes, the author wrote a hit piece
| _largely_ based on personal grudges, and then wanted to avoid
| any kind of responsibility.
|
| And from my point of view, a lot of the financial stuff "makes
| sense". This is a small startup, probably with little business
| experience, and it shows. But why make it look like they are
| doing evil because of small, negligible mistakes?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| If someone mails you
|
| > I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous
| reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting
| more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does
| not mean I want you to argue with me about Kagi in email
| either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want
| to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read
| that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you
| would notice that I link to it.
|
| replying with a 1100 word long email is a _mood_.
| astura wrote:
| Wow, strong Tommy Tallarico vibes there.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| I don't have a horse in this race, but the author of this post
| sounds insufferable based on their email responses and
| fediverse thread. They post a public email on their public
| website (I assume for people to reach out to them) and then
| gets mad when someone does so?
|
| > I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous
| reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting
| more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does
| not mean I want you to argue with me about Kagi in email
| either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want
| to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read
| that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you
| would notice that I link to it.
|
| If they don't want to talk, just don't respond.
|
| The author also cross posted their blog to multiple social
| media platforms, which I assume means they wanted it to get
| attention. But then when the CEO does see it and offers some
| explanations they get mad that the CEO "vomited out" a reply
| that they didn't want? I'm sorry, but the CEO of Kagi
| definitely sounds like the reasonable one here, thanks for
| linking this thread.
| sph wrote:
| Jesus I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be
| an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of
| terminally-online people that spend way too much time being
| angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry
| they are.
|
| Like, these days you do not know when you email someone if they
| reply to you, or if they will post screenshots of your entire
| conversation to social media showing how _utterly disgusted_
| they are because you dared talk to them.
|
| Have these people forgot about how strangers in real life
| behave and communicate?
| drcongo wrote:
| Yeah, I flagged this as the post feels completely unhinged to
| me, like the kind of ranting I used to get in emails from a
| schizophrenic friend.
| t8sr wrote:
| At the risk of sounding grumpy, a big difference between the
| tech community today and in the Usenet days is that the
| Usenet crowd's interpersonal skills weren't two standard
| deviations to the left of the mean at your local Target.
| sph wrote:
| We reminisce about Usenet as this cesspool of human
| interaction, while everybody today is a pre-offended
| sociopath with an audience.
|
| I miss talking with the average idiot from the 2000s
| internet.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Not a Usenet user, still an average idiot with an open
| inbox and a love for talking with random people. If you
| miss those days ping me via email, I'm always happy to
| meet new people.
| sph wrote:
| Fuck it, why not, you might be able to help me with
| something. I'll send you an email.
| acheron wrote:
| > I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be
| an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of
| terminally-online people that spend way too much time being
| angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry
| they are.
|
| Yes, my impression as well. (I have never used Kagi but have
| considered trying it.)
|
| Among the other things, the blog author approvingly put up a
| screenshot with someone insisting on seeing the entire world
| through their own political views and demanding others do so
| as well. ("Actually, the word 'politics' means 'everything',
| and also I'm right and everyone else is wrong.") As the meme
| goes, they need to touch grass.
| green_dragon wrote:
| > Have these people forgot about how strangers in real life
| behave and communicate?
|
| It's possible they have. These are the kinds of people who
| savored the COVID fear mongering as it became easier and more
| acceptable to become a shut-in.
|
| This is not a bad thing. They're terminally online, not out
| in the real world touching grass. This makes live more
| pleasant for the rest of us who aren't terminally online.
| alephxyz wrote:
| Yikes. The lack of emotional and social maturity in the tech
| industry will never cease to impress me. Vlad is coming off as
| a big narcissist and the OP as disingenuous. If you don't want
| someone to email you, just block or ignore them and move on.
| Don't publish your private conversations for the terminally
| online peanut gallery.
| ufmace wrote:
| Thanks for that. After reading both, I'm fine with Kagi and
| somewhat more annoyed by the author.
|
| Perhaps Vlad is a little excessively enthusiastic and
| protective of his baby. But then you don't do something frankly
| crazy like start a new search engine from scratch in 2023
| without being a little bit off. If we actually want a viable
| alternative to the advertising-funded search monopolies, we've
| got to be tolerant of some personality quirks.
|
| And perhaps the T-shirt gambit is a poor use of limited
| resources. But have any of the startups that ended up making it
| big not make a few poor investments on the way up? I'll forgive
| it.
|
| Meanwhile, Vlad's response does spell out several ways in which
| this lori exaggerated or misinterpreted things. Which of course
| are not acknowledged or responded to at all, despite lori's
| self-important tone. If you want to take your ball and go home
| because somebody doesn't take your concerns seriously, well you
| can, but don't expect me to follow you.
|
| IMO, Vlad would have been better-off making his response his
| own blog post somewhere rather than an e-mail exchange. But eh,
| at least it's out there.
| neoromantique wrote:
| I'm sorry, but the author sounds, unhinged?
| Bnichs wrote:
| I think a lot of this can be ascribed to "startups don't always
| do the right thing" and you have to learn a lot over time.
|
| That's said, I've been a customer for a while and the t-shirt
| debacle is one of the dumbest things I've seen a small company
| do. Even if you try and call it marketing cost (no name on the
| shirt makes that hard), there's no way it was the most efficient
| use of money for marketing.
|
| And setting up infrastructure for it wreaks of "I'm bored with
| search let's do t-shirts." it completes goes against "do one
| thing really well" and just seems like a waste. If I were one of
| those investors and my money got spent on that I'd be really
| upset.
| foobarian wrote:
| On the other hand, I see it as evidence that adtech is not in
| control of the company. Public companies or companies beholden
| to ad money would never be able to get away with a stunt like
| that. Can you imagine Meta sending each of their users a
| T-shirt? At > $40 RPU they could afford it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Can you imagine Meta sending each of their users a T-shirt?
|
| If they thought it'd help, absolutely. Facebook has a long
| history of doling out swag; I've got a free Oculus sitting
| downstairs.
| jsnell wrote:
| The (publicly listed) bank I'm a customer of sent me a pair
| of oven mitts during the 2008 financial crisis, with an
| accompanying note that I'd paraphrase as "there have been
| rumors about our financial stability, and to show how untrue
| they are we're sending a gift to our customers".
|
| It remains the worst customer retention pitch I've ever seen.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Vlad's interpretation of GDPR is both horribly wrong and very
| concerning.
|
| Personally Identifiable Information includes anything that can be
| used to uncover a person's identity. An email address is PII, as
| it can be used to identify which person their data relates to -
| and they _do_ have data, at the very least a user account and
| settings but likely also logs.
|
| Full names, phone numbers or IP addresses are also PII - if you
| have a server log with source addresses, that's PII under both
| GDPR and CCPA. Why you have it, and whether _I_ can take steps to
| hide my identity is no excuse - you need to follow the legal
| process for PII under GDPR and CCPA, need have data controllers
| in place and ways for any individual (registered or not!) to make
| the appropriate data requests and removal requests as applicable.
| danieldk wrote:
| IANAL, but even UUIDs and hashes of user names can fall under
| the EU, when there is a future possibility of linking it to a
| user (e.g. through behavior). See e.g.
| https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/86570/in-gdpr-terms-...
|
| _To determine whether a natural person is identifiable,
| account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to
| be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by
| another person to identify the natural person directly or
| indirectly._
|
| https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-26/
| carlosjobim wrote:
| An e-mail by itself is not PII, it has to be connected to other
| personal data. When companies use Stripe for payments, those
| other personal data are cared for by Stripe.
|
| There are people who argue that just the name of a person is
| PII and they are wrong.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > There are people who argue that just the name of a person
| is PII and they are wrong.
|
| It's very easy for a name to be PII. I'm quite certain mine
| is unique, due to hyphenating when I got married.
| mwrd wrote:
| There is no test under GDPR for personal data that can
| identify an individual to have to identify a single unique
| individual to be in scope of the legislation, just that the
| personal data can be used to identify _an_ individual. Two
| people living at the same address with the same name
| sharing the same telephone doesn't suddenly make all that
| personal data fall out of scope.
|
| Whilst the response from OP is so obviously wrong and
| confusing that it's likely to be a troll and not worth
| engaging with, it's worth clarifying to anyone reading this
| thread that email addresses most certainly do qualify as
| personal data under GDPR. GDPR very clearly states what
| personal data is (see https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-
| data/ and https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/personal-data/) and
| that storing or processing of this data necessitates the
| need to comply with the requirements of the GDPR
| (particularly the rights detailed under https://gdpr-
| info.eu/chapter-3/).
|
| For the purposes of this conversation, an email address is
| personal data, operating in the EU (and additionally, by
| way of carried-over legislation, the UK) means complying
| with the GDPR, and therefore Kagi need to provide
| mechanisms by which people covered by the legislation can
| enforce the rights afforded them within it.
|
| (GDPR also doesn't use the term "PII", merely just
| "personal data" and goes on to detail what this means in
| terms of identification, which might add to the confusion
| in OPs original message).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Your name by itself and not connected to anything else, is
| not PII. But there are many people who argue that.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Your name by itself and not connected to anything
| else...
|
| It's in your database. That's inherently a connection to
| something else.
| Kuinox wrote:
| > There are people who argue that just the name of a person
| is PII and they are wrong.
|
| > 'personal data' means any information relating to an
| identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject');
| an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified,
| directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an
| identifier such as a name, [...]
|
| https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/
|
| A name is PII, as stated by the definitions in the GDPR.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You're misunderstanding. The name by itself is not personal
| data, but data connected to a name is.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "in particular by reference to an identifier such as a
| name"
|
| What is there to misunderstand?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If I write a name on a piece of paper here on my desk, I
| have not violated GDPR. If the radio commentator speaks
| the name of the soccer player who made a pass, he has not
| violated GDPR. But there are people who argue that names
| by themselves (without reference to anything else) are
| protected personal identification data. Which they
| clearly are not.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Thank you for demonstrating you have no idea what the
| GDPR is.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Thank you for your sarcastic comment.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The GDPR's scope is defined as:
|
| "This Regulation applies to the processing of personal
| data wholly or partly by automated means and to the
| processing other than by automated means of personal data
| which form part of a filing system or are intended to
| form part of a filing system."
|
| A name or email in Kagi's database is very clearly
| subject to GDPR. A note on your desk may not be; not
| because the name isn't PII, but because not all PII is in
| a protected context.
|
| You're incorrectly mixing up "it's not PII" with "it's
| not subject to GDPR". It's still PII even if you're not
| legally required to protect it in a specific scenario; I
| can, for example, tell random people about my wife's very
| unique medical conditions, but her hospital cannot.
| arghwhat wrote:
| This is wrong on all points. GDPR quotes that directly
| contradict this below.
|
| Quoting GDPR Article 4, point 1
| (https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/):
|
| > 'Personal data' means any information relating to an
| identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject');
| an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified,
| directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an
| identifier such as a name, an identification number, location
| data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific
| to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic,
| cultural or social identity of that natural person.
|
| And Recital 30 (https://gdpr.eu/recital-30-online-
| identifiers-for-profiling-...), which gives some more
| examples of identifiable information such as IP addresses:
|
| > Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers
| provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols,
| such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or
| other identifiers such as radio frequency identification
| tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when
| combined with unique identifiers and other information
| received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of
| the natural persons and identify them.
|
| There is also the quote from the Danish Datatilsyn
| (https://www.datatilsynet.dk/english/fundamental-
| concepts-/wh...) also makes some more examples and explicitly
| highlight that is is PII even when it must first be combined
| with other data:
|
| > Personal data may, for example, include information on
| name, address, e-mail address, personal identification
| number, registration number, photo, fingerprints,
| diagnostics, biological material, when it is possible to
| identify a person from the data or in combination with other
| data. It is said that the information is "personally
| identifiable".
|
| ---
|
| An email address is obvious PII because it is a globally
| unique identifier representing a way of contacting a specific
| person. You can find the name of the owner separately and
| correlate it with your stored data, thus identifying the
| person.
|
| Even if you store _nothing else_ , the email reveals that you
| have an association with the user, but you most likely also
| have data that ties activity to the email such as the user
| logging in and using your service in any way or form.
|
| > There are people who argue that just the name of a person
| is PII and they are wrong.
|
| A person's name is the most obvious case of personally
| identifiable information.
| infecto wrote:
| I still pay for Kagi for its search but this has kind of been the
| problem from the beginning with their org.
|
| - Search has been a breath of fresh air, I wish they dedicated
| more time to it.
|
| - Orion...is ok? I use it off and on and it is fine but would
| rather have better search. The premise of the browser is nice but
| it feels like this could probably be a whole separate company or
| a purely open source endeavor. It has always been kind of clunky
| and not something I want to pay for.
|
| - AI tools, I get the multiple pivots and I do believe that more
| recent advancements in ML/AI will make search a better experience
| but I do wish they had a little more focus.
|
| - The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in their
| org. The way I look at it is instead of making their products
| better, they flushed a bunch of money down the drain for t-shirts
| and its offensive to paying customers who are paying because they
| enjoy the product and want it to become better, they don't want a
| t-shirt.
|
| - I don't care about email, I don't care about other tools, make
| a great search experience first. Release all of the AI
| enhancements that you think will make sense, focus, focus, focus.
|
| Edit: As I was adding my comment this post flagged and marked
| dead. Sometimes HN is weird.
| Sakos wrote:
| As a "hard-core" Kagi user:
|
| 1) I legit can't fathom going back to Google or any other
| search engine. I don't know what I'll do if they go under.
|
| 2) Investing in integrating AI into their search is absolutely
| vital and I like a lot of what they're doing there
|
| 3) Everything else, including the insanity of the t-shirts
| thing, is a complete waste of time and money. I don't
| understand what their strategy is if it isn't to set money on
| fire.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| I considered investing a small amount in them when they were
| raising a round from customers since I loved the search
| product so much. I too can't imagine going back to anything
| else, especially now that I have prioritized and blocked
| domains set up perfectly and added lenses, and this stuff
| works across desktop and mobile!
|
| I've been mildly regretting not investing up until 5 minute
| ago when I read about spending 1/3 of that on the t-shirt
| factory.
| sithadmin wrote:
| The claim that's made in this blog - that Kagi 'owns a
| t-shirt factory' seems disingenuous, or lazy at best.
| Kagi's own blog says that instead of going with a major
| branded merch manufacturer/distributor, they chose to work
| with a small print shop instead. Nothing about blowing
| funds on an actual factory/print shop. "Owning a merch
| operation end to end" just means they're not paying some
| manufacturer to do production, warehousing, order
| fulfillment/drop shipping, etc.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I do not understand this distinction. Either they "own"
| the merch operation "end to end", or they don't. You
| can't have it both ways.
| EasyMark wrote:
| You can contract facilities or output percentage. You
| don't have to only "own it end to end" or not.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| If you contract facilities then you don't "own" the merch
| operation "end to end".
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Kagi's post says further down that they
|
| > allocate[d] nearly a third of our investor-raised funds
| to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts
|
| Though it sounds like they don't actually own "a t-shirt
| factory", but rather a t-shirt distributor.
| infecto wrote:
| Totally agree on all points. I don't believe I have the
| technical capability for it but both the fear of losing great
| search and the lack of direction has made me think about what
| it would take to replicate the search experience.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Investing in better search is absolutely vital, and AI may be
| the right tool there, but I don't care about the AI. I pay
| Kagi to be a better search and informational retrieval tool,
| not to do AI.
| Sakos wrote:
| It's not like they've gone all-in on AI though. Going
| through their changelog https://kagi.com/changelog it looks
| like they regularly make improvements to their core product
| and there've been a lot of significant QoL improvements in
| recent months. Just the Wolfram change alone has cut my
| need for Google significantly.
|
| The one thing I really hope they put more work into is
| searching for local news. That's one of the areas where I
| still have to turn to Google.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Everything else, including the insanity of the t-shirts
| thing, is a complete waste of time and money.
|
| Presumably the tshirts are a marketing cost that they hope
| will lead to greater brand exposure and more subscribers.
| Sakos wrote:
| They should've spent it on a marketing agency, because I
| don't know how a shirt which doesn't even have the name
| Kagi on it is supposed to give them brand exposure.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Or advertise on a billboard along Hwy 101 as you enter
| San Francisco.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| I was giving them the benefit of the doubt up until this.
| Wtf? I'd be happy to wear a brand t-shirt "Kagi" and
| that's it.
|
| What an own goal. I'm sure it made sense to them but I'm
| worried they don't truly understand their customer base.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I agree with a lot of your sentiments, but we're just in peak
| ai I think.
| troyvit wrote:
| I can't speak to the t-shirts. I was on duckduckgo before
| Kagi and also can't imagine returning there. I don't know
| what they're doing there but it's not improving. And yeah I
| am so with you on 2).
|
| It seems like (again, t-shirts aside) Kagi is throwing a
| bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I hope they're
| having fun because I sure am.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I agree, but not necessarily that AI will make results
| better. Search engines already rely heavily on heuristics,
| and I really doubt that LLMs or vector databases are going to
| improve results in any combination. At best, they will
| overfit results to the lowest common denominator.
|
| What I want is a search engine that supports full-text
| queries with exact matches. This quite literally no longer
| exists anywhere, and maybe that's because it just doesn't
| scale. Nevertheless, I would find a lot more value in a
| search engine that returns exact matches. Someone will
| probably reply saying that Kagi, DDG, or The Google do exact
| matches with quotes, but this is not true. When it works,
| you've just gotten lucky. At best, it will filter out inexact
| matches, but that doesn't mean it will actually return every
| exact match in the index.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I agree pretty much verbatim. I don't see how anyone could
| criticize them for getting into the AI game as well or at
| least using a 3rd party AI software for some results. That
| would just be silly these days. I like Orion browser but to
| be honest firefox does what I need.
| Raed667 wrote:
| orion is the only browser i use on ios as it supports
| uBlockOrigin and a bunch of other extensions.
|
| i'm glad they spent the time and effort on it.
| Dayshine wrote:
| Re the t-shirts: last time I checked the were private equity
| not VC and priced their product for profitability not growth.
|
| Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to
| charity?
| infecto wrote:
| So if I understand your comment, you are suggesting that they
| went and raised money to make t-shirts?
|
| Not upset in the slightest, I love Kagi search and want to
| see it continue. Merch is a solved problem and there was no
| reason to bring it in-house and make such a big announcement
| around it.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Maybe they wanted to make T shirts. Who knows. I don't get
| why people are up in arms about it.
| Dayshine wrote:
| I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and
| often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on
| pointless things like marketing or internal
| transformations.
|
| The difference they don't tell you about their internal
| accounting so you don't join the dots.
|
| Start ups burn money on silly things like offices way too
| nice for what they need all the time. That's much closer to
| unethical than a company with no real duty to outsiders
| throwing away money.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't see any claims that they are unethical. "Losing
| faith" seems to be being used more like losing hope or
| something. People are worried that they are doing things
| that seem a bit wasteful because they don't want them to
| fail.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to
| and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on
| pointless things like marketing or internal
| transformations.
|
| Bradford Shellhammer (fab.com) wanting to speed run
| getting his United Global Services (invite only, elite
| tier, qualification criteria believed to be $50K annual
| base fare spend or 150K miles/year) so would fly back and
| forth between New York and Frankfurt every week, first
| class, while laying off employees left right and center.
| kelnos wrote:
| No one is saying self-owned companies aren't allowed to
| do things like that.
|
| But we are still allowed to criticize moves that we think
| are counter-productive or a waste.
| infecto wrote:
| I think the difference being that the niche customer
| based with Kagi is what will keep the lights on going
| forward. People share these feelings because they love
| the product and want to see it continue. Instead of
| taking it as hostile, it really comes from a place of
| love and wanting to see success. Very little to do with
| how you see it.
| jacekm wrote:
| > Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to
| charity?
|
| Yes.
| Dayshine wrote:
| Would you be upset if they just paid themselves a higher
| salary?
|
| Do you think they charge too much?
|
| Do they charge more than you think it's worth?
| kelnos wrote:
| Depends on if those higher salaries actually motivated
| higher productivity, commensurate with the increase.
|
| Or, at the bottom end, if their previous salaries were
| barely ramen-style living wages, I would be glad that
| they have become able to pay themselves enough to be
| comfortable.
| kelnos wrote:
| False dichotomy. They should be plowing that money into more
| R&D, or, absent the current ability to do that, saving it for
| a rainy day.
|
| As a paying customer, I want Kagi to succeed. I want Kagi's
| search offering to keep improving. Spending a couple hundred
| thousand of the company's money on t-shirts (one that I would
| receive, as I was a fairly early customer) sounds foolish to
| me, regardless of how much the founder is personally invested
| in the company, and regardless of whether or not he'll invest
| more of his own money to keep the company growing in the
| future, if needed.
|
| I'm still bullish on Kagi's future, but things like this (and
| things mentioned in the linked article as a whole) make me a
| little worried.
|
| > _Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to
| charity?_
|
| Probably! When I was at Twilio, we participated in GitHub's
| charity dodgeball tournament a few times (early last decade,
| I think). The cost of admission was $3000 per team, and would
| go to charity. After a couple years doing it, finance started
| getting uncomfortable with it. We were a private,
| unprofitable company (now Twilio is, of course, a public,
| unprofitable company), giving away money that our VCs had
| invested in us.
|
| Initially I rolled my eyes, "just the bean-counters doing
| what they do best: whining about every bit of spend". But
| later, looking back, I realized they had a point. While $3000
| wasn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of the company,
| what benefit was spending it actually providing the company?
| Ok, so 12 or so employees got to go and have a fun day at a
| rec center, boosting morale for them. We got our logo on the
| website for the tournament, which was maybe a little
| visibility/marketing. But was that really worth $3000 of our
| VC money? Maybe it was, but I don't think it's an obvious
| "yes".
| Zambyte wrote:
| > I wish they dedicated more time to it.
|
| What changes you have in mind to search functionality? I feel
| like the core search is rock solid as is, but they address
| search quality reports on their feedback forums all the time.
|
| To me, the AI features (and specifically how they are only used
| when you opt in per query) _are_ enhancing search, and the time
| they have been allocating to those features has continuously
| improved Kagis utility to me.
|
| Note: I subscribe to Kagi Ultimate, so I use some AI features
| that are not available in the base plans.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Search quality requires maintenance and continual tuning.
| It's not a one and done "add more functionality" kind of
| product.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Fair. I was trying to make the point that they are already
| dedicating time to continuously tuning based on feedback on
| their forums.
| Closi wrote:
| I mean they could focus on actually building out their own
| search engine as an example? (i.e. moving further away from
| using Google and Bing APIs)
|
| It's just a matter of focus with a team of that size.
| dustincoates wrote:
| I love Kagi, I'm an early paying subscriber, but I think the
| quality of their results is overstated. Anytime you get past
| result #5 or so, the results just get _weird_. If you have to
| do deep research on something, you'll often get pages that
| seemingly have nothing to do with the query, or these class
| of pages that seem to be poor answers to common queries
| aggregated together.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I hope not to sound like I'm blaming you, but do you
| actually use the features that are unique to Kagi? Over
| time my manually configured block/lower/raise/pin list has
| continuously grown, quickly leading to higher and higher
| quality search results. I also have integrated custom
| lenses and bangs into my workflow more and more over time.
| I often end up searching seemingly very generic things and
| getting exactly what I'm looking for in the first or second
| result. Maybe my results after the first couple are weird
| too, but it doesn't really matter to me because I don't
| actually get very deep into results most of the time.
| lttlrck wrote:
| DDG is like that. If it can't find any more matches it
| seems to spam random results.
|
| I tried Kagi and really enjoyed it but the pricing tier
| doesn't sit right with me, it's not _that_ much better than
| DDG _for my purposes_. All these monthly subs start to add
| up. I 'd be happier if there was a lifetime tier.
| Valodim wrote:
| How much would you drop for a lifetime license of a
| product like this?
| infecto wrote:
| - Localized search is not a great experience
|
| - Business listing search via maps is not a great experience.
| Maps and searching on maps are a more important endeavor than
| browser and email when thinking about the ecosystem.
|
| - AI is definitely important but so far none of those
| features (afaik) have trickled down to non-ultimate users.
| From what I have seen, features have been removed from the
| regular plans.
|
| - Remove reliance on using bing/google searches.
|
| - Search is not a one and done operation.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I feel like the core search is rock solid as is_
|
| Certainly not. I still get a decent amount of AI-generated
| blogspam in my results. Yes, it's great that Kagi offers me
| the option to manually block sites I don't want in results,
| but that's a workaround, not a solution, to the AI-generated
| spam problem.
|
| I don't know if it's possible to detect this sort of crap
| automatically, but IMO this is the biggest threat to web
| search today.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > What changes you have in mind to search functionality?
|
| Reverting the changes from around December that made it next
| to impossible to search for language-agnostic or English
| terms in another language.
|
| Also reverting the changes over time that brought them closer
| to google or DDG and ignoring search terms unless you use
| verbatim or quote everything.
|
| Kagi used to be about being explicit, but it's slowly turning
| into the same "we know what you want to search for, so STFU"
| that all the other search engines are.
|
| User since December 2021.
| keyle wrote:
| Orion is my daily driver and I hope they don't crush that. It
| has bugs, but it works.
| laborcontract wrote:
| Kagi's killer feature is somehow managing to get literally
| every post about them featured on the front page of HN.
|
| If they fail with all of the free marketing they've been gifted
| by this community I can only shake my head.
| edgyquant wrote:
| A lot of us either use them or have used them in the recent
| past
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Edit: As I was adding my comment this post flagged and marked
| dead. Sometimes HN is weird.
|
| I'm a full Kagi shill. But I also want the stuff I like to
| remain stuff I like and reasonable criticism is the path there.
| freediver wrote:
| > The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in
| their org. The way I look at it is instead of making their
| products better, they flushed a bunch of money down the drain
| for t-shirts and its offensive to paying customers who are
| paying because they enjoy the product and want it to become
| better, they don't want a t-shirt.
|
| Kagi founder here and I want to clarify the train of thoughts
| around Kagi printing and giving away 20,000 t-shirts for its
| users.
|
| - Kagi is not a typical VC funded startup.
|
| - It is company I bootstrapped by going all in (meaning I put
| millions of dollars of my money into it).
|
| - After all these years building it, we are lucky to have such
| incredibly passionate user community.
|
| - That community is 100% responsible for Kagi's growth as a
| business through word of mouth (Kagi does no paid advertising).
|
| - We are also famously taking a firm stance against ad-tech, so
| conventional advertising is not something I want to do.
|
| - To do something as crazy as to start a company that builds a
| paid search engine and browser you obviously need to be
| thinking out of the box.
|
| So combine all of this together and I thought that sending a
| t-shirt to all the people who supported us along the journey
| made a lot of sense.
|
| The only thing I did not count on is how difficult will be to
| pull this off as I did not want to settle with less than
| premium quality for these t-shirts. As a result they will be
| delayed (my best guess is July/August) and I apologize for that
| to our users. In hindsight, we probably should have opted out
| for something easier to pull off (someone mentioned a billboard
| on 101, that would certainly be much easier).
|
| This did not jeopardize Kagi's finances in any way at any
| point, nor I would do anything like that ever (as I said I am
| all in and have everything to lose, so I run a fiscally
| responsible business). In fact, Kagi has turned profitable
| recently.
|
| This has also not impacted our ability to hire (we went from 10
| people twelve months ago to 25+ now) and it did not impact our
| ability to ship a great product (check Kagi and Orion
| changelogs). I would venture to say that most Kagi users agree
| that Kagi is getting better and better every week with great
| speed.
|
| So would I do it again? Well let's wait and see what we have in
| store for hitting 50,000 members mark :)
| recursivegirth wrote:
| I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. Your gut
| got you this far, but to be a profitable company you are
| going to need to consider the advice and concerns of your
| stakeholders. Based on your current description, you have two
| stakeholders (yourself + customers).
|
| If the venture fails, you will ask yourself if you listened
| enough. Be proactive, address concerns, do not put yourself
| in a defensive position. Embrace change, be agile, and most
| importantly listen to your feedback.
|
| Wish Kagi nothing but success, I would very much like a
| disruptor in this space. Best of luck to you and your team.
| nottorp wrote:
| That reminds me of the faster horses quote I'm afraid.
|
| Or you know, that all cell phones had to have a physical
| keyboard. Until they suddenly didn't.
|
| [Never tried Kagi, but let the man do his thing.]
| skydhash wrote:
| Maybe customers were wary of having 1 ton of steel
| barreling down the street. And there's no ergonomics in
| phones. Their prime quality is portability. Ergonomics
| has been sacrificed to convenience.
| nottorp wrote:
| Iirc it was said that speeds over 30 km/h will kill you
| too.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| A ton of steel bearing down at those speeds will do so
| handily.
| croisillon wrote:
| worldwide over 1 million deaths a year...
| Freedom2 wrote:
| How many of those were wearing seatbelts?
| agos wrote:
| very few pedestrians involved in accidents with cars are
| wearing seatbelts
| Freedom2 wrote:
| It's interesting to see the change in discourse given the
| opposition to seatbelts from this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39977058
| swatcoder wrote:
| This is a forum where people respond well to practical
| explanations from thoughtful founders.
|
| I don't know if the OP got what they needed from this
| reply, but I assume I'm not alone in being impressed by the
| humility and candor of the response _and_ developed _much_
| greater affinity for Kagi from some of the specifics of
| what were said.
|
| I want more companies to have communicative, principled
| management that invites a sustainable base of like-minded
| customers/partners and fewer companies that pretend they
| can please 7B people by radically changing their product
| every 3 months.
| gspencley wrote:
| Interesting take. It is valid and don't take my
| alternative interpretation as suggesting otherwise.
|
| I owned a business for 18 years. For 15 of those years it
| was my primary source of income. I valued feedback, tried
| my hardest to solicit as much of it as possible, and
| always took it to heart (though I had to always try and
| glean statistics from the sum of all feedback so that I
| was never spending resources on minority opinions).
|
| What I read from the user was that the company created an
| optics problem. It wasn't whether the company was losing
| money or not, it was just that the user is choosing to
| support that company because they want a really good
| search engine, and the optics of divesting the company's
| resources into multiple projects makes it appear as if it
| _could_ be the case that not enough focus is being spent
| on what really matters to that user.
|
| What I read from the founder was that the optics issue
| went completely over his head and a complete dismissal of
| the user's concerns and feedback, along with a doubling
| down of the decisions made.
|
| It's not a good look in my opinion. Even though the
| founder was polite and didn't say anything inappropriate,
| I would NEVER have responded to a customer of mine like
| that.
| catapart wrote:
| You sound like a very good businessman, and a reasonably
| astute interrogator of user feedback. I wish there were
| more businesses with people having those traits at the
| helm!
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I get OP's take, but freediver is essentially saying that
| Orion and their other ventures are a part of the vision.
| To OP and others, it may seem like a side-mission or a
| waste of resources, but I trust the guy bootstrapping the
| company with his own money.
|
| Hell, Orion is the first Webkit browser where FireFox and
| Chrome plug-ins work on iOS. If may seem like a misstep,
| but I see it as calculated. If Kagi search hopes to ever
| take on Google and Chrome, they need their own champion.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| It's a stretch to justify paying for search, but I do it.
| To find out I actually pay for a bunch of stuff I don't
| care about when search is still a work in progress, naw
| bro, I'm good. I don't go to a restaurant that has a
| partial menu to fund a race team. Cool that was your
| reason for opening the place, you sunk a ton of money
| into something you think it super cool, but I'm actually
| here for the food and ignored you don't have fryers yet
| when I thought that me eating here was supporting them
| coming, not something else.
|
| You are both right. Freediver laid out the vision, and
| some users are saying the vision isn't what the paying
| users are paying for. As someone who ran a business like
| this, GS is telling Freediver this should probably be
| something to give extra attention to and consciously
| decide is it the company the vision or the search product
| people are paying for?
| prewett wrote:
| How is this different from Hershey funding a school for
| orphans from its profit, or Microsoft funding Internet
| Explorer with some of the price you paid for Windows
| (theoretically), or any business that uses income from
| its stable products to fund new products? The only thing
| I can think is that you are not actually satisfied with
| the product (search results for a month) and so in your
| mind you are funding R&D of the product you would like
| (better search results for a month). In which case,
| getting upset is understandable, but assuming my analysis
| is correct, the mismatch is that you aren't buying for
| the product they are actually selling.
| monetus wrote:
| > _pretend they can please 7B people_
|
| I think the most positive aspect of freediver's response
| is the implied dismissal of the above. - that their
| stubborness is genuine, not a more robotic, seemingly
| hollow, response of concern. As a marketing approach, I'm
| wondering if maybe that would give you less reach and
| more impact in general.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| .. and then the founder decided to harangue the author in
| email. Guy can't seem to stop stepping on his own dick.
|
| https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > I work in CX, you should listen to your customers.
|
| ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative
| sample of their customers.
| silviot wrote:
| > ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative
| sample of their customers.
|
| I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here. I assume
| many people are on the same boat, so I wouldn't be so
| sure about that.
| rjbwork wrote:
| FWIW I'm a customer and had never read about it on HN
| until this post. I learned about it from a private
| Discord programmer community.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here.
|
| Perhaps I should have said "target customers" where I
| said "customers", I don't know. But it should not be
| surprising that "being an HN user" correlates strongly
| with "finds out about things on HN".
| alwa wrote:
| In fact, HN is the _only_ place I've heard anything about
| Kagi. I've done my best to evangelize to non-HN friends
| though :)
|
| If anything, I'm interested in what the evolution will
| look like as their customer base expands _beyond_ HN
| types...
| saagarjha wrote:
| Kagi has always explicitly gone after Hacker News readers
| as their target customer.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think that statement is generally true for any random
| company, but I think for a company like Kagi, HN users
| are actually a lot more representative of their user
| base.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| >I work in CX, you should listen to your customers.
|
| The only way a customer speaks is with money. If people
| like what you sell, you'll have more customers speaking
| with their wallet. If they don't then they tell you so by
| not purchasing what you sell. Internet commenters (such as
| myself) do not represent all customers or even a majority.
| People who are happy with a product usually see no reason
| to give feedback - especially when it's a small purchase.
| Likewise, people who hate your product wouldn't purchase it
| in the first place.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This sounds like a great argument for not listening to
| anyone, or improving your product or messaging at all.
| Make the obvious observation that the complainers are a
| minority (ignoring that vocal non-complainers are also a
| minority), that their public complaints don't represent
| the opinions of one or two orders of magnitude of people
| who won't ever complain (just silently drop), are not
| ever influential, and that the silent majority support
| every decision you've made.
|
| The cool part is that as people start leaving your
| product, complainers will become an even smaller
| minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself.
| Maybe blame it on bullying?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What people say they want is usually something completely
| different to their purchasing behaviour, and as a
| business you should listen little to what people say they
| want and listen much to how they spend their money.
|
| For just about any business, if they were to ask their
| customers or the public at large what they want, the
| answer is usually "We want free stuff!". Cool to do if
| you're a politician, but bad business practice.
|
| There's an old expression saying "the customer is always
| right", meaning that you can never blame the customers
| for how they spend or don't spend their money. If paying
| customers show a certain preference you better give it to
| them.
|
| People who don't complain but silently drop are speaking
| with their wallets and that has to be listened to, as I
| said in my previous post. A business has to listen to
| customer spending behaviour and not listen too much to
| complainers. Normal people will give hotels awful reviews
| if it was raining on their vacation and great reviews if
| the weather was good and they had fun with their friends.
| Complaining is a past time to release some stress for
| many, and a pathological problem for a few. But when it
| comes to actually spending money is where the truth comes
| out.
|
| Most people will not like your product and not buy your
| product, that's the large majority. That's why most
| normal businesses do not have the same reach as for
| example Apple or Toyota.
|
| > The cool part is that as people start leaving your
| product, complainers will become an even smaller
| minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself.
|
| You can be sure that nobody second guesses themselves
| more than business leaders - especially if sales drop or
| stagnate. That doesn't mean that every complainer is
| right in their complaints.
|
| As for Kagi there seems to be very many commenters online
| and in their feedback forums who believe that the main
| selling point of the service is privacy or extensive
| customisation. But I believe that the main selling point
| is search results quality and that everything else comes
| second. At least if they want to widen their customer
| base beyond computer hackers.
|
| If you take a look at the Kagi feedback forums, there's
| almost every week somebody starting a thread where they
| demand that Kagi implements a very niche feature and then
| threatens to unsubscribe if they don't do it. Or demands
| a niche feature or they won't sign up. You can't listen
| too much to these people, you have to follow your own
| vision and if people agree with your decisions you'll see
| it in sales. If not, then you were wrong in your vision.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| The problem is, there are many customers. You should
| listen, but that doesn't mean you have to agree with
| everything or submit to every demand. I for one find Orion
| useful and it would be a bummer if it was scrapped because
| of a single comment on HN. Also, "I lost faith in a company
| because it made T-shirts" sounds a bit hyperbolic to take
| seriously IMO.
| mda wrote:
| "Kagi does no paid advertising"
|
| I remember Daniel King's PowerPlayChess channel recently
| started promoting Kagi, doesn't this count as paid
| advertising or is this deal something else?
| freediver wrote:
| You are right, we started doing that last week so
| technically we are doing marketing now.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It really does seem like you're being a bit too unfocused
| Vlad.
|
| Delivering high-quality search over the entire Internet,
| higher quality than Google, is something so complex that
| even if you were literally the worlds smartest person and
| all the other Kagi employees were number 2 to number 26,
| there would still likely be stumbles at least once a year
| on something.
|
| Because there's like a million gotchas hidden along the
| path to just reliably matching Google search quality
| circa 2010 in the 2024 environment. Let alone delivering
| a high-quality browser, AI tools, etc., on top.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| I'm not convinced it's actually that complicated.
|
| Google search has been _bad_ for a long time. It 's clear
| they serve their customers (advertisers) quite well, but
| as a user of their search, they're not particularly
| impressive.
|
| The biggest problem is a problem of scale: being the
| biggest search provider means Google are targeted by SEO,
| so it's harder for Google to sift out the AI-generated
| garbage--Kagi just isn't involved in the arms race that
| Google is. But as a user that's not my problem; I'm not
| going to tolerate bad search results out of some sense of
| "fairness" to a corporation. And Kagi is delivering real
| user-centered features which are, frankly, obvious, i.e.
| Google should be embarrassed that they don't let you
| filter/prioritize domains or search within lenses like
| Kagi does.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Serving optimally performing ads to billions of global
| users is a radically different problem than serving
| optimal search results and accessory features to a self-
| selected 50,000 or 500,000 customers.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Hence why I specifically said search quality without
| mentioning a large userbase...
|
| Did you not see the last part on your end?
|
| Plus, if anything a small userbase makes it more
| difficult for quality search because the long tail is
| still effectively infinitely large, relative to the
| competencies of a single decision maker, but now there is
| only have one user searching for any random super niche
| topic maybe once a month, in total.
|
| So they can't even a/b test or rely on customers
| reporting in on the real situation because it is too
| sparse.
| swatcoder wrote:
| The point is that search quality is subjective, not
| objective, and the two companies are each structured to
| approach it very differently.
|
| In pursuing billions of global users across all
| demographics and trying to maximally monetize them
| through ads, Google is pursuing an entirely different
| measure of "search quality" than Kagi.
|
| Google delivers their version of search quality when a
| rice farmer in Thailand and financier in the Bay Area
| both reach for Google when they want to find something
| online and then get distracted by an ad.
|
| Meanwhile, Kagi gets their version right when they have a
| profitable base of happy customers. They can make
| different and more aggressive assumptions about the needs
| of their users, solicit and digest direct feedback about
| those assumptions, and optimize a product that delivers
| superb search quality _for their niche_.
|
| They're completely different technical problems that only
| occasionally intersect. Their engineering teams aren't
| competing with each other.
| RhysU wrote:
| > Kagi does no paid advertising
|
| Because of adverse selection?
|
| Users that are users because of marketing are somehow
| different?
| freediver wrote:
| I meant digital advertising, like ads in search engines and
| websites - stuff that has gone out of control and we are
| actively fighting against. I would consider a billboard or
| sponsoring a podcast for example.
| RhysU wrote:
| Billboards on inbound roads to major US tech hubs, beyond
| just SF/NYC targeting bedroom communities with families,
| seem worthwhile.
|
| As does some sponsorship a la the VPN ads my kids see
| constantly in content heavy educational videos.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Billboards are ethically and morally disgusting.
|
| It is trying at all cost to make drivers lose focus of
| the road to see your advert, putting themselves and the
| people around them at risk of a road crash.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Sounds like a cool place to work. I'll check back for an
| opening in TypeScript / Rust backend.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Keep going! Kagi is great. Years ago nobody thought Google
| could be challenged and that nobody would pay for search, yet
| here you are.
| AuthError wrote:
| do they have a decent subscriber base? i thought it was
| still very niche
| brewdad wrote:
| Somewhere between 20,000 (number of t-shirts sent out)
| and 50,000 (their stated next target). Not too bad for a
| startup but a drop in the proverbial ocean of search.
| elektor wrote:
| They have a live tracker of subscribers, 25,785 at time
| of posting comment.
|
| https://kagi.com/stats
| riku_iki wrote:
| how one can run search engine on 2-3M annual budget(with
| assumption avg subscription is $10/m)?..
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| Honestly I'm astonished there are only that many.
| Semaphor wrote:
| How? For the vast, vast majority of people, paying for
| search is insane. And that includes the people who pay
| for other services.
| abenga wrote:
| Judging from how often Kagi comes up here (HN), I
| actually thought they were far bigger than they are.
| Semaphor wrote:
| The percentage of HN users in their customer base is very
| probably far higher than the percentage of HN users in
| the general population. Many orders of magnitude ;)
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Why don't you read the post you're commenting on? The
| answer is in there.
| AuthError wrote:
| cause commenter was making claim that was not grounded in
| reality so i thought i missed something
| riversflow wrote:
| I prefer internet ads to Billboards. Billboards are
| disgusting.
| me_smith wrote:
| I agree there should be less billboards in this world.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I prefer billboards, but I think that's probably because
| they are exotic for me. We don't really have them in
| Germany (or at least where I am), so when I see them in
| South Africa, they are always this cool and interesting
| thing.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Please please please take Hacker News' opinions with a very
| large grain of salt. Many of Hacker News' users work at
| garbage AdTech companies and there are often people posting
| here who say things like "I for one enjoy targeted ads"
| (that's an actual quote). This place is not representative of
| your customer base.
|
| I love what you're doing and will continue to support you at
| your Professional tier as long as you continue doing what
| you're doing.
| shaneoh wrote:
| If HN is not representative of the customer base for a paid
| search engine, then what is?
| kerkeslager wrote:
| That's a difficult question, but I think we can pretty
| clearly say that a user base with a high concentration of
| AdTech workers is probably a bit biased against a company
| that is pretty clearly anti-AdTech.
|
| The number of times I've heard people extol the virtues
| of targeted ads on this site is absurd. I've even heard
| folks here say that Google ads are more helpful than the
| search results _as if that 's a good thing_. And these
| are far more common comments here than comments in favor
| of _actually returning good search results_ or aligning
| your income with user interests.
| brewdad wrote:
| I would think people in AdTech would be first in line to
| pay for a search engine that avoids AdTech. They
| understand how the sausage is made. They want the rest of
| us to use the AdTech products but they themselves are
| going to avoid them where possible.
|
| How often do you think the CEO pf Delta Airlines flies in
| first class versus on a private jet? My guess is only
| often enough to gin up a little PR.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Sure, but that doesn't translate into people telling the
| truth online.
|
| And to be clear, I'm not even talking about being
| intentionally dishonest. AdTech workers likely believe
| the pro-ad propaganda they spout because they have to in
| order to live with themselves.
| konschubert wrote:
| For my own business (epaper calendars), HN has been a great
| source of feedback from potential customers. People here
| are both direct and kind with their feedback.
|
| The thing you have to keep in mind is that HN is a very
| specific niche of the Internet. But for a slightly nerdy,
| not mass-market, product like mine (or Kagi) this niche is
| a great place to grow.
|
| You just have to be mindful to see the feedback through the
| lens of the fact that you're talking to a niche audience
| and keep an eye on what a broader market might be looking
| for if that's where you're planning to go
| eipi10_hn wrote:
| I agree. My look about HN for privacy-focused topics
| changed after YouTube's blocker war. I realized there are
| many privacy-truder-tech workers here, and their comments
| were largely structured smartly to lighten how awful those
| "tech industries" are.
| infecto wrote:
| HN is probably more representative of the customer base
| than your preconceived notions and hostility. I imagine a
| large base of the current 20+k users are via HN.
| eddyzh wrote:
| Thanks for your response!
|
| Honestly I get the T-shirt part this way. You got to Doo
| crazy stuff as a start-up. I also get that you try ai stuff.
| As long as you keep up de search.
|
| However what scares me is the apparent lack of knowledge
| about privacy, gdpr and what is PII in a product that, to me,
| is all about privacy. Have one person in the company be an
| expert in privacy and GDPR etc and use their insights, since
| it is critical for your right of existence.
| agos wrote:
| I got the same impression - the lack of understanding of
| the basics of GDPR makes them look as amateurs, not
| professionals trying to raise the bar for privacy. I was
| considering using Kagi, but this is a massive turn off.
|
| They'll likely discover that GDPR is _not_ that optional as
| soon as a customer (or a competitor with a grudge!) reports
| them to their relevant national privacy /personal data
| protection authority, after which they'll get to have a
| very uncomfortable conversation where they will not be able
| to use those arguments
| amelius wrote:
| Instead of giving away t-shirts, can't you make the AI tools
| open source? They are clearly not up to the task yet so you
| might as well build a nice AI community first.
| freediver wrote:
| We are not developing LLM models.
|
| AI tools that Kagi uses like vector database search and LLM
| connectors are already open source.
|
| You can find these in our Github:
|
| https://github.com/kagisearch/
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Very interesting!
|
| Quick (but difficult) question: do you foresee there arising
| a reasonably reliable way to filter out the coming wave of ai
| spam? I'm told that half of Twitter is bots talking to each
| other at this point, and I'm sure this is coming to other
| media as well. Eg, massive, massive waves of content
| marketing, sock puppets, etc.
|
| Is there reason to be optimistic that you or other actors
| will be able to sift through it?
| freediver wrote:
| Yes, significant part of our effort is to build technology
| that detects LLM spam. We have a working model that detects
| LLM generated text with 90% accuracy currently. The plan is
| to integrate in search results and make available as an
| API.
| infecto wrote:
| Appreciate the response. I hope while some of it, including
| mine might come off as critical or uninformed, it truly comes
| from a place of love for the search product.
|
| I still don't agree with the shirts and I think the
| overarching point is the shirts seem like a common theme of
| trying to do too much. I hope my thinking is not true and I
| wish the best success because I love Kagi.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| I'm actually looking forward for the t-shirt...
| erickhill wrote:
| I can't stand the randomness of how posts seem to be getting
| flagged more and more on HN. Seems like if a post is flagged
| and killed a reason should be given _somewhere_ on the page by
| the flagger. Educate us on why our discussions should be off-
| limits, please. It would also be interesting to see if certain
| topics are always flagged by the same individuals and patterns
| emerge.
| lolinder wrote:
| FWIW, this one got unflagged pretty quickly.
|
| I didn't flag it, but I came close just because the tone of
| the piece is so sensational and needlessly aggressive. I left
| it put because it's the first negative Kagi piece I've seen
| and I didn't want to silence an alternative perspective, but
| the quality was definitely below what I hope to see on the
| front page.
| claytongulick wrote:
| I'm a deep technical nerd, but I approach Kagi from a basic
| user perspective.
|
| Things I _love_ and can 't live without:
|
| - When I search for something, I don't have to deal with weeks
| of whatever I searched for coming up in ads on every web page I
| visit.
|
| - I don't feel like "the man" is snooping on me in some sort of
| weird dark social credit score thing. (I literally got a call
| from Google once offering me a job based on what I'd been
| searching for. Flattering, but totally freaked me out)
|
| - The quality is good for non-local things
|
| - I'm the customer, not the product
|
| - That makes things like blocking or enhancing sites possible
|
| What I'd like to see improve:
|
| - I don't want AI. I don't want summaries, I don't want
| hallucinations, I don't want assistants. I don't want it.
|
| - Local results and map integration. When I click on a local
| result, actually having the map go to the result I clicked on.
| Currently this doesn't work well.
|
| - Hours for local businesses.
|
| I find myself still going to google for these things, and while
| it doesn't seem like a lot, aside from work stuff those kinds
| of searches are probably 80% of what I need. Where can we go
| for dinner tonight that's near by and still open? Who has all-
| you-can-eat deals near by? Where can I find some floating
| shelves to put in my office near by?
|
| Those are all examples of things that Google does really well,
| and I don't have much luck with on Kagi.
|
| I agree with the author that I'd rather see the quality there
| improve before AI features.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Personally I love the AI tools. The summary tool is what got
| me converted from the trial to a paying user.
|
| Quality is there for the most part, IME, but I definitely
| agree that their local features need a LOT of work.
| sirdvd wrote:
| I've been using Kagi only for a couple of months, so I'm still
| very much in the honeymoon phase. Perhaps they're still
| searching for their identity. Very much hope they rest
| independents and good at web searches.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| (1) I helped somebody start a hobby shop years ago, he was having
| trouble getting the bank loans to start it and I asked him if
| he'd consider raising equity, the next day he asked if I was
| serious, I told him I would put something in if he found some
| other investors and that was what happened.
|
| He was successful about building a community around the store but
| not successful at the paperwork so it turned out we had not paid
| the sales tax for a few years which led the state to put up signs
| in front of the store, thankfully he was able to scrape up the
| money. Boy it was a near death experience.
|
| (2) If you are working on search in 2024 and you are serious
| you're going to be using A.I.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| > (2) If you are working on search in 2024 and you are serious
| you're going to be using A.I.
|
| Pretty sure Marginalia doesn't use AI and to the best of my
| knowledge Viktor hasn't written about plans to do so. But maybe
| he's not serious because it sure seems like he's having fun!
| maleldil wrote:
| Isn't Marginalia playing a completely different game from
| Kagi? AFAIK, Marginalia isn't trying to be a general-purpose
| search engine.
|
| PS: Lovely username =)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| (1) Marginalia can get away with it because it is searching
| a smaller collection over which it is easier to manage
| spam. On the other hand, Matt Cutts became a hero at Google
| not because he built models for filtering unwanted content
| but because he figured out how to motivate people to make
| the labels to train that sort of model.
|
| (2) One of the most depressing experiences of my life was
| reading through the first ten years or so of TREC
| conferences looking for something useful to improve the
| search engines I was building. Eventually I found a volume
| that revealed the handful of useful results that they got
| in the first ten years (here
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262220736/trec/)
|
| Advances in search quality are _rare_ and come along about
| once a decade; BM25 was such an advance, on paper. Even
| though BM25 is in Elasticsearch and a lot of other products
| very few people are taking advantage of it because they don
| 't want to do the parametric tuning it requires to get
| superior results.
|
| https://sbert.net/
|
| is a similar once-in-decade advance that actually works out
| of the box with relatively little tuning. It doesn't
| address all the issues of search and should be integrated
| with more traditional search, but if you are building a
| search engine in 2024 you can expect to wait another 10
| years for another advance like that.
|
| (3) Marginalia particularly interests me because it is a
| small collection and the problems of search over a small
| collection are very different from those over a large
| collection. Gerald Salton started IR research with a deck
| of punch cards and he thought 80 documents was a lot and
| with 80 documents you are going to be very concerned about
| missing relevant documents because you didn't pick the
| right word. If you have 80,000,000,000 documents you have a
| very different problem. My take is SBERT and related
| techniques are particularly effective against small
| collection problems.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I wonder if the t-shirts were basically a way to siphon some
| investor money directly into their own pockets. Or if someone
| just thought they can do it cheaper and then ran into sunk cost
| fallacy.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Interesting to think about/play with
|
| "why pay for shirts or advertising when we can own it?"
|
| Anyway, that's how I felt it happened. Build over buy.
| Siphoning is an interesting thought
|
| It's mind blowing. The earliest internet ventures were selling
| shirts that somebody else made for huge margins.
|
| Why take on the costs in-house, lol. Either way: by making it
| yourself or dealing with problematic suppliers, it's not worth
| the hassle.
|
| Shirts aren't their business and for those still in it, the
| margins are razor thin. Madness.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, Occam's razor says they were just naive and didn't
| realise what a huge pain doing stuff like that is. There's a
| reason that pretty much everyone uses a third party for this.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes, of course they created a consumer product that outperforms
| the main product of the third largest company in the world just
| as a measure to cheat investors out of a couple of hundred
| thousand. That's why I won't buy Apple products either, because
| I'm sure all these iPhones and Macbooks are just a tricky plan
| to build up investor confidence so that they can cheat them out
| of money in the future.
|
| Useless snark aside, if the Kagi team wanted more "money
| directly into their own pockets" they could just raise their
| salaries. If their product is comparable to Google their
| salaries could be as well.
| marcinzm wrote:
| > Useless snark aside, if the Kagi team wanted more "money
| directly into their own pockets" they could just raise their
| salaries. If their product is comparable to Google their
| salaries could be as well.
|
| And they'd get the money for those massive salaries from what
| magic money tree? They're at best barely profitable, revenue
| is probably around $2m, and they only raised $670k in
| funding. This isn't a particularly money making enterprise.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What I'm saying is that they could take all the investor
| money as salaries for themselves if they wanted, and easily
| motivate it by comparing to industry compensation for
| similar work. They don't need to invent any Yugoslavian
| scheme to put "money directly into their own pockets."
| arghwhat wrote:
| Aaand, trying to delete your account you get:
| Error: Server Error The server encountered a temporary
| error and could not complete your request.
| Please try again in 30 seconds.
| catapart wrote:
| Yikes.
| malnourish wrote:
| I use Kagi and will continue to do so until it no longer suits my
| needs. Frankly, it's still the best search engine. I temporarily
| subscribed to the AI tier and found the expert assistant
| genuinely useful.
|
| The t-shirt thing is inexplicable.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| Yeah, the AI is good (too expensive IMO) - it's really nice
| being able to choose between the best models from all the
| providers.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| > too expensive IMO
|
| Except it's less expensive than just going for the providers.
| Which is puzzling to say the least.
| iowahansen wrote:
| Happy Kagi user here. I'm gladly paying $25 per month because of
| all their AI features, which work well for me overall. Yes, I
| could set up API keys on OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Mistral
| and get a similar experience for less, but I prefer the
| convenience of their interface and have clean search results
| bundled into the experience. I will continue to recommend them
| and hope that T-Shirt becomes available soon.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| Me too and I also happily support Orion and using the RC as a
| default browser.
|
| Kagi is for a subset of the internet and specifically for the
| part that has content. The good parts of cyberspace if you
| like. OP seems to be looking for something bigger like someone
| they can trust to replace Google and save the internet as well.
| For that search I say _good luck sailor_
|
| (see, that is the good thing in Kagi too - you can downvote ;)
| thisisjasononhn wrote:
| Or you could spend $25 a month on a dedicated server and run
| SearxNG or Yacy? Good lord what an excessive amount of money
| that is to _search the web_...
| theshrike79 wrote:
| If either of those was even close to the quality of Kagi
| searches, ever would start a new search engine startup
| talldayo wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. It's stomach-churning to hear people
| talk about improving search and privacy for all, before
| putting it behind a prohibitively expensive (and probably
| inordinately profitable) subscription.
|
| I'll just say the quiet part out-loud: expecting people to
| pay $10+/month for a search engine is a pipe-dream that rules
| out 95-98% of the world population. People buy _food_ with
| that money, they pay rent, they live lives that aren 't
| tethered to a search engine in a meaningful way. Google
| "wins" their traffic because they don't care, and every bit
| of friction in-between them and their content is extra work.
| Kagi's payment-upfront mentality is unrealistic for everyone
| except the most well-paid Bay Area engineers.
|
| That's not to say I don't understand the "avoid ads at all
| costs" concept. I _do_ oppose to using anti-advertising
| sentiments as a populist rallying cry so people will line up
| at your Search SaaS kiosk and pay you whatever you ask for.
| At this point you really might as well just invest in your
| own Searx instance, it 's plenty cheaper. And you can't even
| "dropbox comment" me since there have been third-parties
| providing search for free since before HN was a website.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > I'll just say the quiet part out-loud: expecting people
| to pay $10+/month for a search engine is a pipe-dream that
| rules out 95-98% of the world population.
|
| So what? Why do you get upset about it, when nobody is
| forcing you to buy it? Most people will not be interested
| in paying for search, whether they can afford it or not.
| That's just what a niche product is, most people will not
| be interested. What I produce in my job is certainly
| uninteresting for 95-98% of the world population, and the
| same is probably true for your job.
|
| > Kagi's payment-upfront mentality is unrealistic for
| everyone except the most well-paid Bay Area engineers.
|
| It's ten dollars.
|
| > At this point you really might as well just invest in
| your own Searx instance, it's plenty cheaper.
|
| Yes, that might be a good solution for 95-98% of the world
| population.
| talldayo wrote:
| > So what? Why do you get upset about it, when nobody is
| forcing you to buy it?
|
| Because this isn't a solution. Kagi doesn't save people
| from advertising, it creates a premium workaround and
| sells it at an arbitrary price per-customer. It's
| software-as-a-service, a SAAS, built more for the 1,000
| true fans rather than the 100,000,000,000 clueless web
| users. That's just another business - perhaps a kinder
| and more transparent business - but a sinkhole of
| regressive moneygrubbing all the same.
|
| > It's ten dollars.
|
| Which is ten dollars more (per month!) than most people
| pay for a search engine. If you're the sort of person
| that just flippantly subscribes to that, then yes, you
| have lost track of the value of a dollar in my eyes. Like
| I said - you can host your own search engine and pay for
| your own top-level domain at that kinda price. It's
| absurd, I'd protest it on-principle even if I was upset
| with my current search provider.
|
| There's room for this sort of startup in the world, but
| they've already lost if they don't offer a free tier.
| Google will hoover up their potential customers like
| nobody's business until they take the 98% seriously.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > That's just another business
|
| It is a business, what did you think? That's why they
| charge money for their service. Like millions of other
| businesses, they will never get any significant part of
| the world's population as users. Why is that a problem to
| you?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Holy ****, how much drugs does it take for a search startup of 8
| people trying to compete with Google to do this:
|
| Kagi: "The process from here involves setting up a business
| entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a
| warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the
| world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a
| back-end database. So, we basically ended up owning a merch
| production operation end-to-end, just so that we could ensure
| premium quality of these t-shirts!
|
| Now, you may ask, why did we go through all this trouble and
| allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce
| and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts? We would
| not be here without our early adopters (you!) and we deemed it
| important to pause, reflect and show gratitude. We
| acknowledge that our journey is a marathon, not a sprint. With a
| long road ahead, supporting our member community is both
| rewarding and meaningful. Simply put, wearing the Doggo
| t-shirt is an incredibly awesome experience."
|
| That's a classic stimulant-fueled side quest bender
| resfirestar wrote:
| I don't find anything outlined in the post particularly bad, but
| what does bother me is that it seems like Kagi's founder cares a
| lot about what people think on Discord. Like the author said,
| most people never touch it and don't know or care what is said on
| there. If you want to engage with people, why not do it in a more
| open space? The closed nature of Discord chats means the only way
| to reference them is through screenshots, and that breeds drama
| as we're seeing here.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| They do also have a feedback forum that Vlad is very active on:
| https://kagifeedback.org
| yreg wrote:
| I've read the first third of the article and I didn't get what's
| the author's problem with Kagi. What do they care how many
| employees Kagi has or how much they spend on t-shirts.
|
| Then I scrolled through the rest of it and read the very last
| screenshot. That one looks pretty bad.
|
| > 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)
|
| - Kagi CEO
| newzisforsukas wrote:
| he should run his discord posts through a LLM for an _unbiased_
| summary of who he is as a person.
| kklimonda wrote:
| For me, and probably a lot of other people who moved from other
| search engines, long-term viability of Kagi is important -
| heck, that's the reason I've decided it's worth paying some
| money for search. Given that, I'd expect them to be very frugal
| with their spendings. Burning money on T-shirts, on another
| Browser, AI "improvements", Kagi Email (wtf? first time I've
| heard of it) show that they have incredibly startupy mindset,
| and will end up like every other company that takes VC money -
| bloated, money focused and deaf to their community.
| Terretta wrote:
| Every entrepreneur obsesses about some competitor or some
| business model.
|
| You can see various baubles glint in Vlad's eye.
|
| If you are a collection of 10x devs, you can afford to make
| multiple bets and test for traction. You can sample the Brave
| waters, or try to head off Proton claiming ownership of
| privacy first, or get in front of perplexity and phind.
| Arguably, only products you've shipped can tell you the truth
| about product market fit.
|
| Which is to say, I don't think these "let 1000 flowers bloom"
| experiments are a bad thing... so long as the core product
| has no appearance of inattention and never goes backwards in
| usability or quality while "net promotion" is still part of
| the growth plan.
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| > What do they care how many employees Kagi has or how much
| they spend on t-shirts.
|
| Spending a third of your round on t-shirt manufacturing
| equipment is possibly not the best sign of the focused
| leadership that will bring your company success in a difficult
| market.
| yreg wrote:
| True, but what do I as a customer care? It's not like I'm
| building some business on their APIs or anything.
|
| If they go down, I will switch to another search engine... no
| need to do so preemptively from my PoV.
| mbStavola wrote:
| Because "going down" doesn't necessarily mean _shutting_
| down-- it could be a sale as well. Considering the stated
| attitude towards privacy, that should worry you if privacy
| is your concern.
| JohnFen wrote:
| All search engines are problematic in terms of privacy.
| mbStavola wrote:
| One of the main selling points of Kagi is privacy. It's
| featured on the main landing page, they have a page
| dedicated to it, and it's mentioned in pretty much every
| sales pitch they will make. Kagi's audience is also
| comprised of people who have that value as paying for a
| search engine means divesting from adtech surveillance.
|
| So, it does not matter that "all search engines are
| problematic in terms of privacy"-- this one is marketed
| to _not_ be. That 's _why_ people have concerns about how
| serious they 're taking that committment and _why_ people
| would hold them to a higher standard. It 's also why a
| sale to a company which does not respect privacy is
| potentially a major issue, _especially_ if current
| customer data isn 't being handled in the manner they had
| expected.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Sure, I get that. I'm one of the more privacy-sensitive
| people you're likely to meet.
|
| The complaint is about the marketing for sure. But that's
| not so different from the other "privacy-oriented"
| engines I'm aware of.
|
| I'm not saying Kagi is (or is not, I don't know) being a
| good actor here. I'm just saying that if you want to use
| a search engine at all, you're effectively having to
| choose the lesser of evils.
|
| Kagi may not be a saint, but since there aren't better
| options, I'm willing to settle with a search engine that
| actually gives me useful search results and isn't totally
| egregious on privacy issues.
| laborcontract wrote:
| It you want to know when Evernote went downhill, it's
| precisely the moment they started selling backpacks.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Every tech company I've ever seen has had free t-shirts
| to give out at some point. While I don't think it was a
| smart use of limited funds, it's certainly not a major
| pivot to physical products like Evernote.
| beretguy wrote:
| Definition of "criminal" can change depending on perspective. A
| journalist is a criminal from a perspective of an authoritarian
| government.
| mr_machine wrote:
| It can also change after an election, and the impact can be
| retroactive.
|
| Vlad needs to walk that "criminal" comment WAY the hell back.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| > unless they are criminals, in which case we don't care they
| don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
|
| Christians can be labeled criminals in China. Young women try
| to get a 1st trimester abortion in Texas.
|
| What the hell is he talking about? Anyone with even a basic
| understanding of human liberty and dignity knows anonymity and
| free speech are bedrocks. Especially disturbing coming from
| someone trying to run a search engine which can collect very
| detailed and targeted information from users via their search
| history!
| Terretta wrote:
| I have been a proponent of kagi from near inception, and have
| interacted with Vlad by email as well as Discord, including
| getting change/feature made. The core search product was (for
| the longest time*) a breath of fresh air, as were these
| interactions**.
|
| That "criminals" comment flipped my advocacy off like a light
| switch, for all the reasons described here in this thread.
| Perhaps it will get walked back.
|
| * Lately, the results seem more Bing-like, and I've even had
| to !g things for the first time in a year to find a non-spam
| result. The core product has to be 10x for people to advocate
| and people to switch, not just more of the same or slightly
| better.
|
| ** Although, I couldn't convince him to make a team plan that
| would effectively let me pay _full price_ (pro or ultimate)
| per employee for everyone registering from a domain. I cannot
| fathom why he wouldn 't let a company pay him for double or
| triple digit employees, it's free money. Plus, those
| employees that use it for free at the office, will get
| frustrated at home, and buy the family option and tell their
| friends... Refusing to let me cover my employee base is a
| weird flex for someone still counting subscribers trying to
| get to 25,000.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Those who have "nothing to hide" still close their curtains at
| night and shut the door to the bathroom when on the toilet.
|
| Granting and fiercely protecting privacy is a simple matter of
| respect for your fellow human beings. Doing so also has the
| side effect of slowing descents into various forms of
| totalitarianism.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >Whenever there's a conflict, the logic of security will
| trump the right to privacy.
|
| -- Eric Schmidt, 2013
| nunez wrote:
| He's right though (or at least I agree with him).
|
| Full anonymity is hard to achieve.
|
| Kagi is aiming for more privacy, I.e. a search engine and
| browser that doesn't track your habits or sell them to data
| brokers to identify you. Kagi does that very well.
| Closi wrote:
| Eh, a founder that effectively says 'we don't care if we give
| away the identity of our users if they are criminals' is not
| totally in line with my definition of an organization focused
| on privacy.
|
| At least not a definition of privacy I really care about.
|
| It's very Mark Zuckerberg 2004.
| 34679 wrote:
| Anonymity should be the default. I don't have any right to
| come peeking into your windows, or to tap your phone, even if
| there's a market for whatever I discover. The same should be
| true for online activity.
|
| And his comment about needing privacy? Name one person that
| needs privacy while taking a shit. Just because your desire
| for privacy doesn't rise to the level of need, that doesn't
| make it any less valid.
| tokai wrote:
| Ouch. I have been on the fence about paying for Kagi for some
| time now. Will definitely not touch any project presided over
| by someone with such a viewpoint.
| 34679 wrote:
| > unless they are criminals, in which case we don't care they
| don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
|
| People helping other people escape slavery were criminals.
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi CEO here.
|
| I'd concede that it was a bad choice of words but also the
| screenshot was taken out of context. What I meant to say is
| that anonymity and privacy are two different things and that
| most people really need just their privacy respected, not be
| truly anonymous in life.
|
| I also had a narrow view back then of what people considered by
| anonymity (for example considering VPNs as something giving
| them anonymity online).
| number6 wrote:
| Your grasp of personal information management under GDPR
| seems to be lacking, particularly regarding the roles and
| responsibilities of data controllers and what personal
| information are under GDPR. If you're operating within this
| jurisdiction, I would strongly recommend consulting with a
| GDPR expert. Non-compliance can lead to significant fines.
| Additionally, if this user were located in Europe, and he
| already sounds salty, were to report this to a privacy
| watchdog, there's a high likelihood it could result in a
| penalty. It might be beneficial to revisit GDPR guidelines to
| ensure compliance and avoid such risks.
| freediver wrote:
| You are correct and my confidence at the time came from the
| fact that we are not in the business of selling user data,
| do not collect it or ever need it so GDPR was not affecting
| us (in my mind).
|
| I had no business discussing sophisticated policy matters
| on a public Discord, and yet I did it in good faith open to
| learning something new like it happened many times on our
| Discord. People do this all the time. The difference is
| when a CEO of a company does it, it has extra weight and
| this is why CEOs usually do not discuss these things with
| users. Lesson learned.
| lamontcg wrote:
| I really don't want to use a VPN and a fake e-mail address
| with Kagi to get the kind of anonymity that DDG at least
| claims to offer.
|
| [It would also be selling point to offer at least GDPR levels
| of privacy to everyone -- embrace it and do it right for the
| EU and don't fuck over people in the rest of the world just
| because you aren't required to do it here]
| catapart wrote:
| Yikes. I'm happy to stay away from Kagi, now. I find that
| platform strategy and that founder's attitude to be hideous, so I
| appreciate you bringing that to light.
| dantondwa wrote:
| I personally haven't lost faith, because search is still the best
| out there. I'm really happy with it, no complaints and I'm not
| planning on cancelling.
|
| Speaking about their whole business, I think three things left me
| a negative impression:
|
| - the tshirts were really unnecessary. I didn't understand that.
| I am not sure the world needed more trash being produced and for
| sure it was not a good use of their money.
|
| - I think AI as a tool has a place in their offering (Quick
| Answer, Summarizer). I don't think the Assistant stuff makes
| sense for a search engine.
|
| - the apparent lack of care for privacy that appears in the
| quotes in the blog posts are not good and I hope Vlad changes his
| mind and addresses that properly. Everyone needs privacy.
| Moreover, GDPR is no joke and it should be followed properly.
| 19h wrote:
| Maybe they needed a German company to receive money from the BND
| for their user data without the US knowing :-D
|
| But in all seriousness, I've been a subscriber ever since they
| started and I'm an ultimate subscriber still, and I'd be sad if
| they went bankrupt due to mismanagement of the funds.
| andy99 wrote:
| I stopped reading once I realized it was just a rant about their
| business. Why would I care? Their search is better, it's worth
| what I pay, if it stops being worth the money I'll stop paying. I
| could care less how their business is run. If I was investing I
| might look closer, until then, the maximum I have at risk is the
| $100 or so it costs a year, which I'm comfortable with. Did I
| miss something more damning later in the article?
| someone7x wrote:
| > Did I miss something more damning later in the article?
|
| Yes. The part where the CEO claims that of all the people
| seeking anonymity that less than 100 of them aren't criminals
| o_O
|
| Check out the last discord screenshot.
| andy99 wrote:
| The comment is weird but I think it's out of context. I don't
| want to defend it but also don't think it particularly
| affects me as a Kagi user.
| jjice wrote:
| I completely agree. I use products because they're useful, not
| because I'm invested (financially or emotionally) in the
| business creating said product.
| RGamma wrote:
| This is disheartening to hear... Especially wrt. AI I was hoping
| for them to use it to _classify_ the web and not aiming for yet
| another GPT frontend. Or in general developing tools that are a
| match for the state of the information space that exists today.
|
| And whatever the heck is going on with all the other stuff.
| There's no way one should stretch oneself this thin.
| paradite wrote:
| The real lesson here is that as a founder, don't spend too much
| time discussing with your users on discord.
|
| Gathering feedback good. But getting involved in philosophical
| discussion or how to run the company looks like a bad idea.
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi founder here. I am probably 'guilty' of reading and
| responding to every comment on discord, our feedback forum and
| I still respond to support tickets.
|
| This does invite trouble but interacting with users of the
| product I am building is also the only way I know how to do it
| and is keeping me sane. Not to mention it helps build a great
| product, as users probably 'built' half of it with feedback.
|
| I never thought that talking too much with the customers can be
| bad but it also may be true that full openness approach becomes
| a burden at some point and that it would be healthier to
| separate from it a bit.
| theothermelissa wrote:
| I think it's a matter of scale. The principles and instincts
| that guide us in small-group conversations don't always
| translate well in large groups -- especially in conversations
| with an imbalance of emotional investment in the
| conversation. As the founder, you have a lot more riding on
| every exchange than any user does (even ardent, investing
| users). And as your user base grows, both the number of those
| interactions and their visibility and potential impact on
| your company is growing. So they're increasing in both number
| and stakes.
| paradite wrote:
| Sometimes they also drive you insane, especially if you are
| over-attached to them:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33455853
| davidgerard wrote:
| also not repeatedly emailing when they've already asked you
| to stop might be worth considering maybe
| BadHumans wrote:
| > Oh and they own a t-shirt factory.
|
| Maybe I'm being pedantic but Kagi doesn't own a T-shirt factory
| and presenting it as such is a bad faith argument that does make
| me question the author. They very clearly point out that they
| worked with a print shop in Serbia to make the shirts.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Idk about "bad faith argument," because even if Kagi doesn't
| technically own the thing, they literally said "we basically
| ended up owning a merch production operation end-to-end."
| BadHumans wrote:
| I know I'm being pedantic but there is a difference between a
| factory and a fulfillment service. When I read "they own a
| T-shirt factory" I interpret it as a place where T-shirts are
| made which is a much bigger cost than renting a warehouse for
| fulfillment.
| asadotzler wrote:
| owning a merch production operation end-to-end is not
| owning a fulfillment service. it says production operation
| end to end. read that again. do you know what "production"
| means?
| BadHumans wrote:
| But they don't own a production operation end to end.
| They partnered with a print shop, imported the shirts
| from Serbia, rented space in a warehouse, built a backend
| service to track it all.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| That makes a whole lot more sense considering Vlad is from
| former Yugoslavia
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| It also explains why people have it out for him.
| dooglius wrote:
| To any of this, so what? As long as Kagi makes a good product,
| and they do, I'll keep paying. As for privacy, my main goal is to
| protect myself from advertising, which Kagi does excellently.
| drizze wrote:
| I was a Kagi subscriber for about 5 months. I had noticed a
| slight improvement for random software development related
| content vs my previous search engine (bing). After cancelling 6
| months ago I don't miss Kagi at all.
|
| The thing that made me cancel my subscription was one specific
| interaction.
|
| One day I was trying to buy tickets to a podcast tour, the sales
| for tickets was set to open at a specific time and I was
| searching for the purchase page at the moment of opening. I
| frantically searched "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets", the first search
| failed to bring relevant results. I tried "$SHOW_NAME $CITY
| tickets $YEAR", nothing.
|
| I tried many searches for about a minute along these lines and
| thought maybe their site just wasn't public and I needed a
| specific link. Then I typed my original "$SHOW_NAME $CITY
| tickets" query into bing and got the exact correct webpage on the
| first try.
|
| Bought the tickets I wanted and immediately cancelled my
| subscription to Kagi.
| logro wrote:
| I don't use Kagi, but this post reads much more like a PR smear
| campaign than anything else.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The whole tshirt thing is straight out of an episode of Silicon
| Valley or the WUPH episode of The Office.
|
| If they go down that direction they should at least make some
| Kagi branded condoms like Ryan did.
|
| _> > Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for
| free._
|
| This guy is a total Ryan Howard.
| boesboes wrote:
| Bad faith arguments and personal attacks. 0/10 woulnd't read
| again
| lijok wrote:
| Lori seems (from the blog post and the subsequent email chain
| with the CEO) to be unnecessarily combative and most definitely
| too emotionally invested in Kagi.
|
| You're paying, what, 10, 25 USD - are you getting a good service
| for it? If not, unsubscribe, if yes, what's the problem? Sounds
| like they're profitable now, so little risk of the service
| dissapearing.
|
| Unnecessary drama by people who live for drama. My only advice
| for Vlad would be to not get caught up in it.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| For a second there, I thought you were talking about Vlad!
|
| Based on the exchanges, Vlad is both extremely combative and
| unwilling to accept the possibility that he is wrong (which he
| is here).
|
| Being aggressively wrong is no way to go through life. Vlad
| should be more humble, and open to being wrong, rather than
| being unnecessarily belligerent.
| lolinder wrote:
| I don't get the sense that Vlad is combative, just
| (over)confident. There are no personal attacks, no
| aggression, no flaming or flamebait. He just is very
| confident in his approach and doesn't slow down to listen to
| criticism. Not the best approach as a founder, but not
| combative.
| davidcbc wrote:
| If someone says "please don't email me about this anymore"
| and you continue to email them you are being combative
| catapart wrote:
| This comment, taken as a response to the parent or just
| as general advice about life, is so entirely bereft of
| anything objectionable, and is so intrinsically
| reasonable that its status as 'downvoted' (assumed from
| the grey text color) is a blemish on HN's commentariat.
|
| Put more simply: it takes a weird, broken logic to find
| fault in the idea that a person who won't stop emailing
| you, after being told to, isn't "combative".
| sianemo wrote:
| The further responses from Vlad may be ill advised, and
| maybe he should've realized those emails were going to be
| unproductive, but they aren't combative.
|
| The email Lori sends explicitly asking him to stop
| emailing is then followed up with some last-wordism "for
| the record" nonsense. Only on the extremely online
| internet do people consider someone the aggrieved party
| after they write a screed against a product or business,
| then close the conversation with representatives of that
| business with essentially a don't @ me and some last-
| wordism. It's terrible journalistic practice. It's a net
| negative in social and community engagement. I don't see
| why doing it over online spaces gives the author a pass
| here.
| catapart wrote:
| thank you for this example.
| drunkan wrote:
| If someone say "please don't email me about this anymore"
| after writing a hit piece on someone and there company
| without giving them an opportunity to respond they are
| being provocative, goading and a troll.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Lori isn't writing a 'hit peice' she is writing a short
| post that is in effect a review of the service and the
| company and the founder.
|
| If the founder wants to respond they can write a
| respectful blog post and put it on the fucking homepage.
| They don't have a right to harangue the author via email.
| piafraus wrote:
| If your intention to stop communication - you can block
| someone.
|
| Or if that's the words that would've been chosen - I
| would agree to you.
|
| But if you mix those words with extra message, then no. A
| reply to this new message is warranted.
|
| E.g. if you add a reason and that reason is unreasonable
| - it's warranted to address that and reply to you. Either
| do a request without attached strings, or block. Don't
| write extra conditions/reasoning and then complain that
| someone doesn't agree with you on those and kept
| messaging.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Sure, or if you're being polite, or even short in a
| reasonable way "I'd rather not discuss this privately,"
| that is fine.
|
| Lori's emails are deliberately designed to goad Vlad into
| replying, just to act indignant when he does.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| > "Thanks for reaching out, but no, I would not. I am not
| interested in being cornered into a call by the owner of
| a business because I made a blog post about it."
|
| This is not goading, this is telling someone to fuck off
| into the sun. If he wants to respond he can respond on
| his product with a blog post. His audience already dwarfs
| hers anyways, he Streisand-effect'ed himself because he's
| clearly got some narcissism issues.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Combative in this case means treating the exchange as
| combat: a fight to win; rather than an opportunity to be
| humble and listen to others and learn.
|
| The exchanges all read like Vlad derives a lot of self-
| esteem from being right, which isn't as good as deriving it
| from ability to learn when wrong.
| alemanek wrote:
| Wouldn't the same apply to Lori in that exchange. They
| just put the company on blast and aren't willing to even
| hear the other side of things. That email exchange made
| me lose a ton of respect for them.
|
| But, Vlad definitely should have stopped when Lori
| responded that they didn't want to have a conversation at
| all. If for no other reason than they were a lost cause.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The one who "needs to hear the other side of things" is
| rarely the customer, and this is a good case study in
| why: no matter how much this customer "hears", they are
| right and Vlad is wrong with regards to the GDPR. By
| insisting that the customer needed to "hear the other
| (wrong) side of things" he looked worse than if he had
| just _listened to the customer_.
|
| The customer isn't always right, but often is, like in
| this case. If you're a CEO, best to just pipe down, be
| humble, and _listen to customers_. Being open to being
| wrong is a nice plus, but either way, people will like
| you more if you appear to listen instead of argue. Even
| when you 're right!
|
| tl;dr: this isn't an internet argument between two
| otherwise-equal random strangers, this is a CEO talking
| down to a customer while being objectively wrong, which
| is 2x bad.
| kelnos wrote:
| The problem is that Vlad seems objectively wrong about
| his interpretation of the GDPR and what is and is not
| PII. (I mean, jesus, "email address isn't PII because you
| can use a burner"? What, no, that's not how it works).
|
| Instead of actually educating himself, he just argues
| that he's not wrong. I could easily see Lori being sick
| of the frustration of having to deal with that and just
| say "ok, nope, this conversation is done".
|
| > _They just put the company on blast and aren't willing
| to even hear the other side of things._
|
| I don't think that's what actually happened?
| drunkan wrote:
| If someone say "please don't email me about this anymore"
| after writing a hit piece on someone and there company
| without giving them an opportunity to respond they are being
| provocative, goading and a troll.
| fckgw wrote:
| It's not a hit piece, it's someone's personal experiences
| on their own personal blog.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| People pay $0 to Google/Meta/Twitter/TikTok for their base
| level offerings, and their privacy policy is valid to discuss
| and criticize. Does it somehow become less important just
| because they are also getting paid money?
|
| People discuss Apple's commitment to privacy and if it is real
| or adequate.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > People pay $0 to Google/Meta/Twitter/TikTok for their base
| level offerings
|
| There are costs other than direct monetary. We're still
| "paying" for it, just via ads, sponsored results, etc.
| mac-attack wrote:
| And I think that the inability to explicitly confirm
| relationships w/ Stripe et al are ways that users cannot
| determine whether they are paying w/ their data on top of
| their monthly costs.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > People pay $0 to Google/Meta/Twitter/TikTok for their base
| level offerings
|
| people pay with wasted time and "cognitive load" because of
| the interstitial ads, and to decipher biases in presented
| data, though, too.
|
| (i see a sibling comment is similar, but didn't mention
| wasted time, so leaving this here)
| sleepybrett wrote:
| .. to emotionally invested. She saw some stuff on their discord
| from the founder that was honestly .. weird if not just plain
| neglegent (the gdpr arguments, he's wrong for the record) ..
| the tax stuff. She posted an article.
|
| He reached out to her via email to set up a call. She demurred
| and asked him to stop contacting her, he persisted and wrote a
| petulant novella of an email. She asserted that he stop
| contacting her again. He seems to have finally taken the hint.
|
| This is a guy who seems like he can't stand to be wrong about
| anything, not a business I would bet on with my wallet.
| neoromantique wrote:
| The way I see it, she has posted a blog post with factually
| wrong information, effectively slandering the business. CEO
| got in touch to bridge the gap and amend possible
| misunderstandings, there's absolutely nothing wrong in that,
| her email responses are just unhinged, and after reading the
| mother-of-echo-chambers that is her mastodon instance I think
| I understand why.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I didn't know about the T-shirt thing and I didn't know about
| Brave either. The email stuff is also new to me and I have zero
| interest in it.
|
| At the end of the day, Kagi was a way for me to filter out
| certain sites and raise/lower others. To be honest I've
| considered turning off the ranking modifications, I often have to
| scroll to find the business I'm searching for's website because
| I've up-ranked SO/GitHub/HN and the like. It's more frustrating
| than useful. I wish there was a way to up-rank the "definitive
| website for a brand" when I search.
|
| Furthermore, the lack of local results is painful. I just have to
| go to Google to find the restaurant/business in my town since
| Kagi seems unable/unwilling to do that. And in that vein, all my
| !bangs seems to have disappeared which is frustrating, even more
| so since on mobile it won't save new ones (last time I tried) and
| manually going to Google gets redirected to Kagi due to the way
| their extension (has to?) works.
|
| I've been paying for a while now and while the AI doesn't bother
| me (I don't use it) the Brave stuff turns me off massively. I
| don't know how I'll decide but I found this post (and the emails
| the founder sent) very informative.
| go88faxme wrote:
| That is why I pay duckduckgo which include vpn. I also run my own
| searxng. I used to subscribe Kagi last year. But after
| researching I came to the same conclusion as Tomte. Nothing
| unusual. Just business. DDG already is Kagi with solid business
| and proven privacy (almost anyway, I know about their Microsoft
| connection). DDG interface need improvement though.
| Tomte wrote:
| Just a small correction: I'm not the article's author, I don't
| really have a conclusion, and I don't see the mail exchange as
| quite so damning as most commenters here. Although you should
| really stop mailing when someone asks you to.
|
| I was posting this mostly to get a sense what others think
| about this, since I have only heard good things about Kagi so
| far, and thought about subscribing last month (but didn't,
| yet).
| Terretta wrote:
| DDG was certainly privacy oriented, but for various reasons in
| recent years I was not able to maintain conviction on the
| alignment of revenue sources / financial incentives with that
| mission. (It's still the one I set any time I help someone with
| their machine, unless they're willing to pay, then it's been
| kagi.)
|
| The latest all-in-one privacy subscription may be a course
| correction to have more revenue directly from those who care
| about their own privacy, to better align the incentives.
| plutokras wrote:
| > 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.
|
| > 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.
|
| I agree that Kagi should focus their efforts on delivering the
| best possible search experience (the image search is horrendously
| slow at times). But as for the above-mentioned AI tools, I love
| and use daily. For a short question style query, most of the
| time, the quick answer is all I need. Universal Summarizer is
| excellent at summarizing the uncountable YouTube videos that my
| friends send to me.
|
| > 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).
|
| Why is the so hard to accept for some people that not everything
| should push a message? If I want to know about a controversial
| topic, I need results about it, not a lecture. Their
| responsibility is to serve me good results.
| lolinder wrote:
| The T-shirt thing is dumb and a waste of funds, but TFA
| describing it as "owning" a T-shirt factory is an exaggeration
| that makes me question most of the framing of the rest of the
| article. They partnered with an existing entity in Serbia, what
| they did set up was the means to distribute them. Still not a
| great look and definitely still a waste of funds, but if every
| criticism takes this same form--take a legitimate criticism and
| blow it out of proportion with exaggerated language--then it's
| important to take the article with plenty of salt.
|
| My own experience has been that what I get month to month is
| worth what I pay. If the project is sustainable, then I'll get to
| enjoy it into the future. If not, I'll get to enjoy it while I
| can.
|
| A search engine isn't like an email provider or even a web
| browser, there's basically no lock in that makes transitioning
| later difficult if something changes for the worse.
| mfiro wrote:
| > If not, I'll get to enjoy it while I can.
|
| Sure, but what happens with your information after that is also
| very important. What's for me very concerning after reading the
| article is not a T-Shirt factory or burning budget, but the
| their attitude towards privacy.
| lolinder wrote:
| For my part, I trust that they aren't logging my searches and
| I don't put any sensitive information into the fields that
| are persistent. If someone eventually buys Kagi then they'll
| be able to learn that I block Pinterest and boost MDN, which
| is _way_ less information than Google collects and stores
| about me, and it 's information I'm happy to divulge to get
| the service I want.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I trust that they aren 't logging my searches_
|
| I did trust that, before reading this article. The
| founder's attitude toward privacy -- based on what he's
| said in the Discord -- worries me, and some of that trust
| has been eroded.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It's so silly. Google/Bing are wasting money too but the
| difference is you don't see it. And yes, we're "paying" to use
| those services too, just not with our own money.
| jchw wrote:
| Good write-up, I am taking it somewhat with a grain of salt since
| I am not really invested in this enough to try to verify it for
| myself, but unfortunately it doesn't really feel like a huge
| shock either.
|
| Kagi Search is at the very least intriguing, though I honestly
| didn't find the results very impressive; they seemed alright, but
| nothing spectacular. The thing that is frustrating is, Google has
| a _massive_ index, but searching it is an exercise in frustration
| because it feels like it is basically rewriting your query. Even
| using "" and + no longer seems to be good at ensuring certain
| things appear in the results, and so I sometimes try, in
| desperation, to simply repeat the term I want to emphasize
| multiple times in the query, which finally sometimes allows me to
| find things I already know exists. God forbid you wanted to find
| something you didn't know existed, because in that case, you
| might never realize Google is fucking up what you're looking for;
| it has the answer, but it's hidden in a sea of Google-funded
| blogspam. What a mess.
|
| Will there ever again be a profitable search engine that works as
| well as Google used to? The answer might be no, and this bums me
| out.
|
| > And he is very, very much the type that believes "not
| everything is political"
|
| Well, at least we agree on one thing, I have always felt the
| "everything is political" angle was one of those semantic
| technicalities, kind of like saying "actually, the glass is
| always full, just sometimes it's full of air". The lack of a
| well-defined boundary between "political" issues and non-
| political issues should not be used as an excuse to drive
| politics and politically-charged discussion into otherwise rather
| mundane and apolitical things. I suppose it's not really that
| important, but this is one of those Internet-era brainrot issues
| I dislike most. Of course, maybe this is actually trying to make
| a more nuanced point, but it being phrased like this activated my
| "uhm, actually" response impulse.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Yeah the everything is politics take is nonsense. Certainly
| anything _can_ be made to be about politics, but it doesn't
| have to be (and shouldn't be).
|
| Also, anyone who can say with a straight face that their
| preferred political party is aligned with the truth, while the
| opposition is aligned with lies loses credibility. People lie
| about anything whenever it suits them, and in politics and the
| news that is rather often.
|
| It just so happens that they like what the one side is saying
| and not what the others are saying. So the one side must be
| good and telling the truth, and the other is bad and full of
| liars.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What I sense here is the same phenomena as when a famous artist
| gets a fan that turns into a hater that maybe turns into a
| stalker, but this time it is a small company that gets this kind
| of attention and zeal.
|
| There's some kind of psychological instinct that makes some
| people think that they are owed something and have some kind of
| personal relation to somebody famous or in this case a company, a
| kind of familiarity that is just one way. The author of course
| wouldn't direct this kind of attention towards Google or any
| other huge company, because they understand that there is no
| relationship between him and them. But now when it's a small
| company, there is a short circuit. Just like stalkers usually
| direct their attention to female performers, and not to gangster
| rappers or a rock band.
|
| Of course there will be nothing that Kagi as a company, or the
| people behind Kagi could do to please the author. When in "hater
| mode", exactly everything the other part does or says will be
| turned and twisted into something bad. Just read the e-mail
| exchange that was posted.
|
| With that said, Kagi is still the best search engine around and
| if they someday won't be, it's as easy as unsubscribing.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Did you read the post? I know this sort of fan/hater type, and
| this post comes across to me as very much not that.
|
| I think Kagi have a lot of things to answer for, in particular,
| a large tax bill, possible GDPR violations, and potentially a
| future inability to pay their hosting bill in t-shirts.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Jesus this approach to privacy is just awful. "it's not data
| collection if the user volunteers it" I mean wtf. "emails aren't
| PII because you can use a burner".
|
| GDPR was designed to protect consumers from companies like this.
| keiferski wrote:
| I am increasingly convinced that the successor/replacement to
| Google will not be a more clever, AI-powered search engine, but a
| hyper-curated collection of links, selected by people who
| understand what good content is. Sort of like Yahoo in the pre-
| Google days.
|
| I think this is only going to become more apparent once AI-
| generated content takes over the web.
| internetter wrote:
| I'm working on a pinboard competitor (that is, essentially,
| just reviving development of it)
|
| One thing I want to look into is ranking algorithms based on
| individual engagement. So, if you save lots of stories from a
| site, it ranks higher. If lots of people save stories from a
| site, it also ranks higher, ect
| nottorp wrote:
| And... when the bots come and "engage", what will you do?
| internetter wrote:
| 1. Voting rings are one of the easiest types of spam to
| detect. Of course, the bigger the service the better the
| bots, but that problem specifically is a later issue
|
| 2. Zero tolerance to bots
|
| 3. The service is not free
|
| 4. Individuals have very little impact on the rankings of
| other users, so you need to pay for a lot of bots
|
| I believe that the true problem with bots on, say, twitter,
| is that they have perverse incentives to 'boost engagement'
| and whatever by allowing the bots to run rampant.
| nottorp wrote:
| > The service is not free
|
| That may fix things on its own ;)
|
| Now would I pay to see what other people 'engage' with?
| I'd probably associate it with the likes of
| facebook/twitter/other social networking crap and I'd
| just move along...
| gandalfgreybeer wrote:
| Very tangential but your description is exactly why I've
| dropped most streaming services except for the Criterion
| Channel.
| sph wrote:
| I agree but we need to wait the next AI Winter, right now
| everybody is on the LLM hype train.
| abenga wrote:
| This assumes the breadth of "things I will ever want to search
| in the future" is contained in whatever these "people" consider
| to be useful knowledge. Should we create such a group and have
| them thoughtfully consider every present and past field of
| knowledge, language, place on earth, political/religious
| viewpoint, and so on.
| darrmit wrote:
| I did pay briefly for Kagi, but ultimately just didn't see the
| benefit over DDG. Google seems to be too far gone to be useful,
| but DDG still consistently finds what I need. Other than that,
| the main issue I have with Kagi from a business perspective is it
| will always be extremely niche. Even among "tech" people, the
| idea of paying for a search engine will always be a single digit
| percentage of the overall market.
|
| I view Fastmail in a similar manner, but the difference with them
| is they have a real business market for those wanting an
| alternative to Google or Microsoft.
| coldpie wrote:
| Yeah, I signed up for the free Kagi trial because of all the
| praise on here, and I think I've used it... twice? It felt
| exactly like DDG and Google. I think I just don't use search
| engines very often.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| That's ok. Faith is what you need for Google.
| mr_machine wrote:
| I'm a subscriber simply because their search is far better than
| any available alternative. That's the primary thing I want from
| them and so far they're delivering it at a cost I consider fair.
|
| Their other projects are not interesting or useful to me, but so
| far I can simply ignore them. Yes, on some level I wish they'd
| focus and quit wasting money and energy on things I don't care
| about, but that's really not my affair.
|
| The one growing reservation I have is with regard to
| Vlad's/Kagi's actual, boots-on-the-ground approach to privacy.
| Kagi necessarily has the ability to know more about me than
| almost any other company. I want to see them demonstrate strong
| and unwavering commitment to respecting and protecting my privacy
| - through policy, technology, and careful and continuous vetting
| of partners. Expressed disinterest in collecting or capitalizing
| on my data is not enough, and seeing Vlad's communications in
| which he casually shrugs or responsibility-shifts to a third-
| party heightens my concern.
|
| For now, I remain a customer - but a wary one. I've stopped
| actively recommending Kagi personally and professionally because
| as a privacy advocate, it increasingly feels irresponsible to do
| so.
| garciansmith wrote:
| I've been curious about Kagi but the idea of running all my
| searches through one company while logged in worries me. Yes, I
| realize most people do that with Google and could care less,
| but I do. For me to try Kagi I'd need a much firmer commitment
| to user privacy, not the wishy-washy hand-waving portrayed
| here.
| flakeoil wrote:
| For google it probably does not matter if you are logged in
| or not. They know who you are anyway when you do your
| searches.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Yup, I also find it an awkward point that Kagi is a pro-privacy
| company but they're sitting on top of an information gold mine.
| Google has to infer who you are whereas Kagi just knows. Your
| credit card too.
|
| And to continue down the road of AI proficiency, Kagi will need
| to retain a lot of data.
| binarymax wrote:
| I don't have the full story on the t-shirts, but isn't this a
| typical "we want to give tshirts to our supporters" without
| realizing that it's crazy expensive and complicated? They
| probably didn't intend to spend 1/3 of their round on tshirts,
| but this is pretty much a microfunding cliche at this point.
| Kickstarters often reel at their tshirt promise after the fact,
| and I believe there's even a YC company or two that started just
| to solve the problem of sending supporters their promised swag.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
|
| ... What?
|
| Has this person ever visited a review site? I mean, it varies
| fairly dramatically, and there are some niches where 3/5, 5/10
| etc has a fairly defined meaning (for instance, for TV reviewers
| it means "meh", for gadget reviewers it means "this will catch
| fire as soon as you plug it in"), but really, I mean, what?
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| The author seems to deliberately misunderstand the language
| that a non-native English speaker is using, for the purposes of
| maximizing outrage. There isn't any citation, but I doubt Vlad
| said anything like that. If I had to guess, I'd assume it was a
| more nuanced take like "3-star reviews are less likely to be
| biased than 5-star reviews."
|
| For example, Kagi very clearly does not own a t-shirt factory,
| and this worst-faith take makes me distrust the entire post.
| edude03 wrote:
| (this articles formatting was super hard to read, I love the web
| 1.0 "just get it out there" vibe but man I wish CSS had a good
| "reasonable default" for lots of text)
|
| I'm a huge fan of kagi and have been paying for it for as long as
| paying for it has been possible - that said, I think the author
| is spot on about the long term viability of the project
| considering their limited funding, limited employees, very wide
| (yet unproven) interests AND a leader who's maybe not so
| receptive to feedback.
|
| For example I was part of the Orion beta and I left feedback in
| the discord that it took ~30 seconds on the then top of the line
| iPhone (13 Pro Max?) to load the interface which made it hard to
| use and I thought it was unreasonably slow and he said something
| like "that's not slow it's totally reasonable" and since then I
| decided it wasn't worth leaving any more feedback and have since
| left the community.
| catapart wrote:
| FWIW, my assumption here is that people who publish like this
| page are expecting users to use a "reader view" and they're
| trying not to introduce any styles at all, so as not to
| conflict with the styles that the reader view will apply.
|
| Otherwise, ' "reasonable default" for lots of text ' _is_
| something that browsers provide, using the "system" fonts.
| Applying a font-family to the entire html or body tags will do
| the job, because system fonts don't need to download or load
| into the browser. And since you can even specify the specific
| system font you want to use, you have a few options like serif
| or sans-serif.
|
| All of that aside, if I applied a system font and your screen
| reader applies a different one, what was the point of the extra
| css? So that's my guess as to why people do this because, like
| you, I find it very hard to read.
|
| If you're curious, though, Firefox has a built-in reader mode
| and I _think_ Safari does, too. Last I checked, Chrome 's was
| behind a flag. And then, of course, there are extensions (but
| extensions to read plain HTML docs seems exactly backwards,
| so...)
| drcongo wrote:
| Using reader view would discard all CSS anyway though right?
| catapart wrote:
| Depends on the reader view, especially for fonts (some
| people have a visual-related reason to enforce specific
| fonts).
| shadowgovt wrote:
| But the default is objectively awful, at least in Chrome.
|
| Seriously: no margins on the images and the images all
| different widths. No human being would lay out a mixed-media
| document like this on purpose if they expected other human
| beings to consume it easily.
|
| (This reflects not so much on the author as on how
| fascinatingly _bad_ the UX of unstyled HTML is. I remember
| when things looked like this and we were just used to it
| because there wasn 't anything else on the web).
| keyboardJones wrote:
| OP's Mastodon post on Vlad's follow up:
| https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
| resolutebat wrote:
| Vlad does not appear to be aware of the first rule of holes: if
| you're in one, stop digging.
|
| I'm a happy, paid Kagi subscriber and have been one for a long
| time, but I've been uneasy for a while about their lack of
| focus (the T-shirt fiasco being only the latest example) and
| the post demonstrates clearly that the issue is systemic.
| You're trying to compete in search against Google and Microsoft
| with 12 people! Stop doing irrelevant bullshit that's no going
| to improve your bottom line!
| mst wrote:
| > 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
|
| User scripts are doable on Firefox for Android.
|
| For iOS, somewhat ironically, I think you'd need Orion.
| sph wrote:
| As a paying user since day 1, I do not give a rat's arse about
| AI. In fact, I have moved away from Google because they have
| focused so much on AI their search got worse to the point of
| being useless.
|
| I paid for a good search engine that respects my queries and does
| not try to outsmart me. The more Kagi focuses on AI, and making
| an """intelligent""" search engine, basically replicating
| Google's missteps, is the day I stop giving them money. I've
| already been noticing some of my keywords are being ignored or
| reinterpreted. Please stop that.
|
| I don't care about email either. I am paying Fastmail for it, and
| I certainly know better than to attach my search history to my
| email account, especially when it's from an AI company. Is the
| goal here to copy Google?
|
| To all startup owners: there is more to software quality and user
| experience than trying to fit the AI buzzword in anything you do.
| Stop following the hype and focus on building a damn good
| product.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| 100% agreed. I was disappointed when Kagi launched their AI
| thing but I had hoped it was just a small side project or
| something. If it's truly a major focus for them I'll be
| ditching my subscription. Also not jazzed about their browser
| and email etc.
| acureau wrote:
| I did not know all of this about the org. The t-shirt situation
| is just unfathomably stupid, that last line about anonymity might
| convince me to cancel.
|
| I still do like the product they offer, though. It'll be
| difficult to give up their bullshit result filtering. I also
| cancelled my ChatGPT plan because I could use GPT4 through Kagi.
| They also provide access to Gemeni, Mistral, and Claude. Probably
| actually an unsustainable value.
| zirtec wrote:
| > Kagi does not collect any personal information
|
| > Our payment processor does, and you can ask Stripe for that
|
| - Kagi CEO
|
| > The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the
| _controller_ (...) access to the personal data (...)
|
| - Art 15 GDPR
|
| > Controllers are responsible for complying with SARs, not
| processors.
|
| - ICO https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-
| re...
|
| Kagi = controller / Stripe = processor
|
| So no Vlad, that is not how the GDPR works.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I really love using Kagi Search. It's awesome. I think Arc is
| becoming very similar with all their AI features that are kind of
| boring, but that their team is obviously focusing on.
|
| It is quite strange that they are doing all these other things
| that I basically don't use at all though. Classic entrepreneur
| chase shiny objects and get bored with the core idea. In their
| defense though, people do believe that search is going towards an
| ai future.
|
| But I do want to say that Kagi Search is really awesome and I
| hope it works and I won't go back.
| Mockapapella wrote:
| > and they have fully bought into AI being the future of search
|
| Good, because as far as I can tell it is. I use their "Quick
| Answer" feature very often in my searches, to the point where
| it's the first thing I click when searching. It's fantastic on
| mobile so I don't have to go trawling through ad-ridden websites.
| I am a happy customer because of this feature.
|
| > 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
|
| At least with "Quick Answer" it links to their sources used. This
| is a non-issue.
|
| > 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)
|
| Really? Providing a summary of someone who willingly posts
| publicly is the stuff of nightmares? This is not a serious person
| and their opinion should not be taken seriously.
|
| > And he is very, very much the type that believes "not
| everything is political" and "we don't get into politics"
|
| Because not everything is political. I have never met a stable or
| amicable person who has thought that everything is political.
| Every time they have had a coarse personality that has a warped
| perception of reality. If I had a discord channel for my product
| and people were going into it mucking it up by trying to make
| everything political, they would get a swift ban. Keep that shit
| on Twitter.
|
| I see a lot of their extra features as just that, extra. I don't
| buy Amazon Prime because I want to use "Twitch Prime" and "Amazon
| Music" as well, I buy it because I want faster shipping times.
| The rest is just extra and is of no concern to me.
|
| A third of their investment on free t-shirts aside (which ain't
| good AFAICT), most of what Vlad is talking about comes off as
| reasonable. The only thing I do take concern with is his stance
| on <100 people on earth who really need anonymity. That does not
| inspire confidence.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I'm using Orion and I pay for Kagi. Orion works great (despite a
| few glitches I had run into over year or two, miles ahead of
| competition).
|
| Like others, I think that they had to raise money is a worrying
| signal they are not sustaining themselves. However, that's only a
| signal.
|
| I may not think the CEO is a particularly nice guy (though he was
| not too pleasant when responding to tickets, which yes he
| apparently does himself (unless it's a shared account?), he was
| not rude either), but realistically can I demand that from him?
| Push comes to shove, can't really claim I'm extremely nice
| either, and I have achieved less.
|
| Regarding the use of ML or Kagi being originally an AI company, I
| don't think it necessarily condemns the project.
|
| Kagi Email drama seems ridiculous, but is very new to me.
|
| Unless there are some further bad revelations about the company
| or the CEO, I will reserve my judgement for now...
| stzsch wrote:
| My perspective as a subscriber for ~6 months:
|
| Search just works, 90%+ of my searches are on kagi. Much better
| than google, bing, ddg, etc. Worth the $10.
|
| I do use fastgpt and the summarizer sometimes. As with any of
| these AI tools, you have to get a feel for what suits it and when
| to use it.
|
| The unbiased review idea _sounds like_ it would be ultimately
| fruitless as the requirements get philosophical, but it may very
| well lead to more useful tools in the process.
|
| The GDPR perspective is unfortunate. I'm willing to wait and see
| if they eventually accept it.
|
| Overall, I like their focus on user experience, customization,
| fast and light websites, and search quality. Sure it might not as
| objective as it's portrayed, but it is giving me great tools
| _today_.
| nunez wrote:
| I use Kagi heavily. I don't make time to follow their Discord but
| have submitted some bugs to their feedback forum. I also paid for
| Kagi+ because Orion is a cool project and I want very badly for
| it to replace Safari as my main line browser.
|
| Honestly, this gave me the impression that Kagi is a move fast
| and break shit kind of company, with Vlad as a benevolent
| dictator type. Finances are often (I think) a disaster at these
| kinds of companies that gets fixed later. The t-shirt thing is
| sus but those shirts look really cool and I might buy one. Vlad
| being flippant about getting sold is better than lying about
| "nothing will change; we will find a buyer that agrees with our
| values" while looking for the highest bidder, values be damned.
| The email thing makes sense technically (they're basically trying
| to be a Google alternative) and seems like too much, but, hey,
| it's Vlad's money (I believe he bootstrapped this? If so, the
| investments they got were probably more donations than
| investments) and if the devs want to do it, more power to them!
|
| Vlad is "my way or the highway" unless you convince him that the
| highway is actually better. I've seen this happen with many
| feature requests, like them improving WebAuthN support or
| integrating support for Apple's iCloud Keychain extension, both
| in the Orion browser.
|
| Also, while Kagi seems to have pivoted from an AI answering
| service to search, it seems like a really logical pivot and
| comments like this:
|
| > 1 AI should be used to the extent that it enhances our
| humanity, not diminish it (AI should be used to support users,
| not replace them)
|
| give me the impression that they're at least trying to be
| responsible with this tech.
|
| Everything in this article is mildly concerning, but the
| alternative (going back to Google Search and embracing a mono-
| browser future) is so much worse. I don't regret supporting their
| mission at this time.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > 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
|
| I don't even like the dog mascot.
| tombert wrote:
| I don't know that I agree with all these complaints.
|
| Making a bunch of free shirts is something DuckDuckGo did too, I
| have one. Is it a bit weird they incorporated their own factory
| for it? Yeah, but I guess I just figured that that was part of
| their marketing budget. How many cool products have we seen die
| just because their marketing was crappier than their competitors?
|
| I do think that building their own browser is a waste of
| resources, but I think that the AI tools also are kind of
| marketing. People utilizing the universal summarizer gets the
| name out there, and allows people to see the Kagi branding more
| frequently. Are they spreading themselves too thin? Maybe, but
| simultaneously I do feel like the second that someone has to
| reach for Google to do anything, that's going to whittle away at
| their potential market share. I think the fear is that people are
| going to say "if I have to do X using Google anyway, why should I
| stick with Kagi, especially since Google is free?"
|
| It's tough to say, I've been a paying Kagi user for about a year,
| I like it, it's a product that I actually think is better than
| vanilla Google. I really want them to succeed, so maybe I'm
| viewing what they are doing with rose-colored glasses, but most
| of the complaints in this blog post didn't seem completely
| horrible to me.
| jmull wrote:
| This is a great argument against the kind of blog where you just
| drop your stream of consciousness into a publicly available
| document, which may be archived and searchable. Uptake on a site
| like HN may seem like a win now, but it also means there will be
| no hiding from it.
|
| This is the kind of thing that comes up when you're trying to
| form new relationships (whether personal or career/business) so
| you may not want to put your worst side forward.
|
| (I have no opinion on Kagi, BTW, since I know virtually nothing
| about it.)
| graemep wrote:
| A lot of this seems to be "I do not like Vlad".
|
| The only issue that has been brought up here that concerns me is
| privacy, and the important thing there is that whether search
| history data is stored and can be linked to and account. Some
| things like personalisation features require it, but what about
| the rest? It does concern me that I have to take their word for
| it.
| figassis wrote:
| I noticed Orion is very very buggy, and I found it odd from a
| revenue oriented company. I was desperately looking for a way out
| of the chromium world and also avoiding Firefox, so when I found
| Orion I thought this is where I'd settle and maybe help
| development. But the bugs are so counter productive, that you
| can't even manage bookmarks. Something was off with that
| browser's team.
| freediver wrote:
| It is very hard to build a browser from scratch. Yes Orion is
| still in beta and buggy, but there are hundreds of people who
| paid $150 for a lifetime license for this browser, which makes
| me hopeful that there is a space for a browser we pay for and
| is built with users' best interest in mind. That is incredibly
| important for Kagi's mission.
| figassis wrote:
| It is important, and I thought it'd be amazing. So then take
| it seriously. If you need more funding then find a better
| pricing model. But it is a shame that a project so attractive
| feels like it's abandoned.
| freediver wrote:
| > But it is a shame that a project so attractive feels like
| it's abandoned.
|
| Can you clarify what makes you say that?
|
| Orion development is very active. Here is Orion's changelog
| in case you missed it:
|
| https://kagi.com/orion/updates/orion-release-notes.html
| figassis wrote:
| I installed it sometime (end of last year/ beginning of
| this year, can't recall). Was setting it up and imported
| bookmarks. Then tried to edit them and found out that
| renaming bookmarks and/or changing links messes up the
| bookmarks, they don't save/get reset. Some very odd
| behaviors and I have a hard time believing that they were
| not picked up by the team or other users. I think setting
| bookmarks with icon only was also not working. There were
| other issues and I just did not have the energy to
| navigate those and my work. So I decided to give it
| another few years. Using Safari now. But Orion being
| solid would make me come back.
|
| I also don't want to be overly critical, and I am a
| paying Kagi user, love it and will eventually try to use
| the family plan, but maybe I'm just not at the point
| where I have time to deal with glitchy software anymore.
| freediver wrote:
| Is it fair to say that building a browser from scratch is
| very hard, multi year process, and that one interaction
| with it half a year ago and encountering some bugs does
| not mean the project is abandoned?
|
| I use it as a daily driver and many other people do and
| while there are many issues still (we have over 2000 open
| issues on oriofeedback.org) Orion has never been better
| and I encourage you try it again.
| figassis wrote:
| I intend to, thanks.
| Closi wrote:
| Yes - but why do it is the main point?
|
| Why not focus on doing one thing properly?
|
| Although you seem to obviously be attracting enough money so
| it's up to you how to spend/burn it :)
| freediver wrote:
| Because I think you can not succeed as a search company
| without a browser. And I think that both and Orion and Kagi
| have proper focus. There are bugs yes, but they are not
| there due to lack of focus, otherwise every product out
| there has lack of focus.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think this comment is the one that finally made Orion
| click for me from a business perspective. Without it
| you're sharecropping on land owned by your direct
| competitors who fund their browsers through money coming
| in from search. If you ever encroach on their revenue
| even a little bit they'll fight you tooth and nail.
|
| I think it's a crazy ambitious bet but I can see why
| you're making it.
| freediver wrote:
| Lack of ambition was never a problem I had :)
| rc_mob wrote:
| Kagi uses Google products under the hood for everything. So you
| are not really avoiding Google/Alphabet when you use Kagi. The
| pay Google a lot on money for various services and index data and
| such.
| davikr wrote:
| they 100% don't own a T-shirt factory. this feels like finding a
| reason to seethe over them using genai&llm.
| EricAski wrote:
| I am surprised that nobody mentioned Kagi Maps so far. To me this
| is the largest waste of energy possible, building an Apple/Google
| Maps competitor is a project too ambitious and time consuming for
| a 12 person company which is also developing a search engine (and
| a browser, and AI assistants, etc.). Kagi should nail their
| search engine first and only then start side projects like that.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > I am surprised that nobody mentioned Kagi Maps so far. To me
| this is the largest waste of energy possible, building an
| Apple/Google Maps competitor
|
| Kagi maps seems to just be Apple maps otherwise I don't see why
| they would put Apple maps logo in the bottom left corner.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Maybe a little off topic, but regarding Orion: Can someone
| explain to me why every search engine feel like they need to
| build their own browser, and by build I mean jiggle the handles
| on Chromium a bit?
|
| It seems pointless. I can sort of see why Microsoft would do it,
| but that's Microsoft wanting a modern browser for their operating
| system, not DuckDuckGo, Kagi or Ecosia wanting a browser for
| their search box.
|
| Why this is pretty much just a weird rant about Kagi, I do agree
| with the questioning of the investment in maintaining a browser.
| JopV wrote:
| Orion is based on WebKit, not on Chromium. The Mac version of
| DuckDuckGo's browser is based on WebKit too.
| mrweasel wrote:
| You're right, it doesn't negate the question though.
| eipi10_hn wrote:
| On iOS it is not simple to switch to other search engines
| on Safari that's not in their list:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38937619
|
| The thing is they can't control the stability of
| alternative methods on Safari. It's up to Apple.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Because controlling the browser means you control the default
| search engine, and that is valuable. If all it takes to do that
| is repackage chrome then so be it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I get where he's coming from, but I don't really find those
| arguments to be a huge problem. Probably because my "ideal"
| search engine doesn't exist. I have to choose out of the
| offerings on the market, and Kagi is the least objectionable of
| them for me.
|
| In terms of letting me find what I'm looking for, Kagi is the
| best search engine I've tried. At worst, it's no less "private"
| than the alternatives.
|
| The AI stuff is irrelevant to me until it starts degrading the
| search results I get. I just ignore their AI-related features. No
| big deal, and certainly no worse than others.
|
| All the other criticisms (t-shirts, etc.) don't matter at all to
| me. What matters is search quality.
| rdl wrote:
| I use them and none of this stuff really matters; they basically
| have deep pockets available to them and in the current operating
| model can continue indefinitely.
|
| I'd love to see more focus on their own search engine/results, as
| well as technical means of ensuring anonymity/unlinkability
| within their infrastructure, but they're well worth the $250/yr
| for a pro subscription today.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| There is absolutely no reason to trust Vlad on GDPR when they
| didn't even pay sales taxes
| prh8 wrote:
| From this and other things, Vlad has seemed to have a heavy Elon
| Musk vibe, which is unfortunate.
|
| My partner works in mental healthcare. There are absolutely more
| than 100 people who need anonymity. Far more than 100 people who
| have patients show up at their residence with bad intentions. I
| think men are also more predisposed to think that "most people"
| don't have anything to worry about with their personal safety.
|
| All I want is a search engine that
|
| 1. ignores junk 2. allows me to up/down/pin rank certain sites 3.
| efficiently gets me to what I'm looking for
|
| Kagi was that, and still mostly is, but all the AI stuff is
| pretty distracting, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to
| be willing to support a company with a good piece of tech but bad
| human leadership.
| emushack wrote:
| I really don't understand why people are so upset about the
| T-shirts. Like in the grand scheme of things, who cares? If I
| invested money (I didn't) in Kagi, I would expect some of that
| money to be spent on marketing. Marketers often do experiments,
| some of which go well, and others that don't. Only time tells.
|
| This take feels more like being upset about one individual's
| (Vlad) personal opinions about privacy and politics. But in my
| opinion, it fails to realize that assigning one person's views to
| an entire organization is a fallacy. Even if they are the leader.
|
| As a service, I like Kagi. Both in principle, and in practice. I
| find the "summarize this page" feature to be very useful. I also
| like the idea of paying for value, rather than being forced to
| feed the advertising beast. So I pay for value. If it stops being
| valuable, I will stop paying. I care about privacy, but I also
| realize that we live in a world where there are serious limits on
| the amount of privacy that can be expected. So I have to just do
| the best I can with what is available. Kagi is at least an
| improvement on the standard "eyeballs are the product" business
| model.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Sending t-shirts to existing users is unlikely to be an
| effective marketing strategy to grow/maintain the business. The
| way they did it was also inefficient and high-risk. It may
| reduce churn, but with 20k users there's a very low cap on how
| good a churn reduction can be vs bringing in new users.
| lolinder wrote:
| As a counterpoint, nearly all of Kagi's growth so far can be
| directly attributed to word-of-mouth marketing from those 20k
| early adopters. I can see a rational case to be made that
| making those vocal early adopters feel appreciated will pay
| off in the long run as they continue to advocate for Kagi in
| places like HN.
| danpalmer wrote:
| That's fair, but many of them may also prefer to see the
| money spent on the service (or other marketing). If I was
| paying $20 a month for a service on the basis of creating a
| sustainable paid search business, I think being sent a
| "free" t-shirt would call into question the sustainability
| and make it harder to justify the cost - can I pay $15 for
| a service that doesn't send t-shirts?
|
| More generally though, word of mouth is a good place to
| start but it maxes out quickly, especially for niche
| products. There will need to be some support from other
| channels. Even just putting the name of the company on the
| t-shirt would have supported it a bit.
| vel0city wrote:
| I first heard about Stripe in it's early days because a
| friend of mine wore a stripe shirt to a LAN party. It's not
| the first time I've discovered something new by seeing a
| shirt or a hoodie or some other piece of clothing.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I mean, the main value proposition for Kagi is privacy. They
| need to be really focused on maintaining trust when privacy is
| their brand. I won't condemn the company based on some out of
| context quotes from the founder, but those screenshots weren't
| reassuring either. Not paying taxes and focusing on adding AI
| to your search doesn't make me _more_ confident that they 're
| protecting my data. It makes me more likely to think "someday
| they will need a little cash infusion to keep the lights on; at
| that point they'll begin to consider collecting my data and
| selling it".
| eloisius wrote:
| I don't think privacy was ever Kagi's value prop. That's
| Brave. Kagi's value prop is that it's search that actually
| works.
| karaterobot wrote:
| It's both. Their marketing copy states it as "search which
| is aligned with what's best for you", which they say
| includes both personalized search, no advertisements, and
| being "100% privacy-respecting". Privacy is definitely
| spoken of every time they talk about the product.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| > This take feels more like being upset about one individual's
| (Vlad) personal opinions about privacy and politics. But in my
| opinion, it fails to realize that assigning one person's views
| to an entire organization is a fallacy. Even if they are the
| leader.
|
| And Vlad didn't even say anything that crazy from a political
| perspective. "News should not only be about politics" is super
| reasonable, and I found myself agreeing with him much more than
| the person he was talking to.
| asmor wrote:
| It'd be reasonable if it was achievable. News are always
| colored by politics. And usually the people who want
| "apolitical" news are just defending the status quo they've
| internalized as the baseline (which especially in the US is
| by no means a commonly understood one).
| __loam wrote:
| All news is political.
| Teever wrote:
| Simply put it's bikeshedding.
|
| t-shirts are something that people think they can understand,
| so they speak most at length about it compared to the other
| things Kagi is doing.
| infecto wrote:
| I do not believe this is a good example of bikeshedding. They
| made what I would consider a pretty long post and
| announcement about shirts but there is a fairly sizeable
| paying user base that worry its a distraction. I agree that
| some of the specific nitpicks are probably unfair but we love
| the products but see tshirts as a repeated problem of maybe
| doing too much. We are all armchairing the problem though and
| its up to Vlad to do his own thing.
| slackfan wrote:
| Kagi is not a product I'd use, nor do I get the hype around it.
|
| The company has apparently made a significant amount of bad
| business decisions.
|
| The author is a politically-obsessed weirdo who gets upset when
| people deny their delusions.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > And he is very, very much the type that believes "not
| everything is political" and "we don't get into politics".
|
| Seems like a feature, not a bug. The only politics I care about
| from my tech products is whether they will collect/sell my
| personal data or not. Too many tech companies use a veneer of
| support for various political causes to take attention away from
| their own misdeeds. At this point it's a red flag when a company
| talks more about their politics than about their product.
|
| Thus the quotes at the end are quite bad:
|
| > people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less
| than a 100 in the entire world. definitely not typical hKagi
| users (edited)
|
| > unless they are criminals, in which case we don't care they
| don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
|
| Women seeking abortions in the US weren't criminals two years ago
| and now, in some places, they are. I don't think he's thought
| about this position very carefully.
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I started turning away from Google when they implemented this a
| few years ago, because the "answers" they selected always came
| from bullshit sites. Looking up Excel formulas for example,
| you're more likely to see a lightly disguised sales pitch page
| from an Excel barnacle company like AbleBits or ExtendOffice than
| the many forum posts and tutorial blogs that would actually
| answer my question.
| Crontab wrote:
| Is Kagi actually running their own search engine or are they just
| representing the outputs of other company's search engines?
|
| I ask because I am considering a subscription.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| I think they do have their own index but they are also heavily
| reliant on other search engines.
| troyvit wrote:
| I got a little more than halfway through the post before I gave
| up. I honestly don't know of any other tech endeavor that is
| doing so much good only 16 people. You can diss their CEO all you
| want, but their product is heads above the rest.
|
| And it's not just recycled google results. It's google's API,
| which means that it brings back into the light what google was
| best at before they decided to monetize it with echo chamber
| algos and toxic ads. I can find it in my heart hate Alphabet and
| yet pay to mainline their best product with a sprinkle of other
| vitamins and minerals like Wolfram.
| kodarna wrote:
| Kagi Ultimate user here.
|
| This article comes across so unhinged it almost works as an
| advertisement, except for the founder dismissing privacy
| issues...
|
| I'm happy to hear Kagi are creating an e-mail service though,
| I've been looking to get away from Microsoft 365 since I'm not
| really using the meat of it. I hope they allow multiple aliases
| per users and perhaps add a masking service as well.
| green_dragon wrote:
| It absolutely does work as an advertisement. I hadn't heard of
| it and immediately signed up for it.
| starsep wrote:
| I am Kagi subscriber because I think their search is great. I
| would like them to focus on it.
|
| I don't care about closed-sourced browser nor their AI offering
| luuurker wrote:
| I don't know if I'll ever use Kagi, if their founder fully
| understand privacy laws, if I agree with him clarifying anything
| when clearly this person doesn't want to discuss it, etc... but
| after reading the post and some stuff on Mastodon, I'm glad I
| don't have to deal directly with customers. I'd hate to have
| people like this using my service.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't know why this is flagged into oblivion. I'm sure most HN
| users won't agree because Kagi is very popular here but I don't
| think the arguments are bad or overblown.
|
| Personally I don't use Kagi for 2 reasons: It's not significantly
| better than what I already have (SearXNG private instance) and I
| don't really subscribe to the "everything must be paid on the
| internet". I'm much more comfortable running some dockers and
| putting a privacy barrier between myself and google, as I do for
| my searches, for my phones, computers etc. Of course this kind of
| tech solution is not an option for everyone, but I don't care
| about everyone :) $10 is a lot of money for me and I rather spend
| that on something I control like 2 VPSes.
|
| Also I think that once things go commercial eventually they will
| reach a scale where they will want our data too. After all, data
| is like free money. A business will never say no to free money.
| By due diligence law they're not even allowed to. Kagi has that
| luxury now, but once they become big and own half a northern
| californian town for their campus they no longer will. That's the
| idea of enshittification.
| rixthefox wrote:
| My only reason for not using SearXNG is it seems like the
| complete opposite of what you want for a search engine
| replacement. The one shining point of using Kagi, Google, Bing
| or DDG is that only ONE search engine is getting my search
| query. With SearXNG you've now taken your search query and sent
| it all over the place which I don't personally believe is
| better. My goal is to get my searches OUT of other companies
| hands, not thrust it directly to all of them all the time.
|
| Additionally, by running a private instance you have
| effectively given all these companies a spotlight onto YOU.
| Only your searches are going to come from that instance and
| these companies already have enough information they can figure
| out WHO is making that search pretty much right after you click
| through the first result.
|
| Just from the available public instances you can quickly see
| that other search engines may block your requests for one
| reason or another but your server will be constantly retrying
| to query them from time to time. Last thing I want is to find
| my IP addresses on some sort of "naughty list" because I wasn't
| honoring some 403 error my server was getting every time I
| searched something.
|
| There is nothing that says other search engines won't wise up
| and figure out how to stop searx from "abusing" their search
| functions so it almost feels like the only sure way to ensure
| search privacy is to run your own crawler, for better or worse.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah my goal in using SearXNG is really getting better
| results, not privacy, that's more secondary for me. It's
| pretty good at filtering out the clickbait crap. I guess
| every engine promotes its own clickbait.
|
| And of course I block cookies and ads heavily, bypass
| paywalls, the works. I'm sure I'm pretty trackable anyway
| with so many addons. Also I'm probably one out of 10 that
| uses my specific OS/browser combo. So with fingerprinting
| they have got me anyway.
|
| I run it on a VPS so I don't really care, that one is not
| used for exit traffic of any other kind except an IRC
| bouncer. And if I really need to I can just switch to another
| IP :P
| drunkan wrote:
| Honestly after reading this guys follow up rant about the CEO
| contacting him directly for an opportunity to address any of the
| points made in this post, this comes off as nothing more than a
| hit piece. Just saying ive said my piece and I have no interest
| in hearing any follow up or rebuttals is just classic modern day
| social media journalism. Suprised the CEO stayed so cool in his
| follow ups with this guys attempt to goad the CEO into loosing
| his cool in a private email so he could plaster it all over the
| web - he comes accross as nothing more than a drama troll.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Kagi is really given a LOT of space on HackerNews for something
| that doesn't even have 25,000 users.
| voiceblue wrote:
| I was also shocked to see this number given how frequently the
| product is mentioned on here. Makes me wonder what the Venn
| diagram of HN and Kagi users is like.
| cube2222 wrote:
| From my own experience, the AI built-in to Kagi is excellent. I
| frequently suffix my query with a question mark to trigger their
| AI responder (it responds based on the content of a few top
| results, with citations), and the results are almost always
| great, and spare me the need to open each of the sites
| individually and look through them.
|
| I don't care about Orion and Email, but what I'm getting right
| now in terms of search experience is definitely worth the cost.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > I frequently suffix my query with a question mark to trigger
| their AI responder
|
| Didn't even know that existed, thanks for sharing.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I recommend following their changelog:
| https://kagi.com/changelog
| knoebber wrote:
| Fair criticisms, but at the end of the day, Kagi offers a better
| search experience then all the alternatives for a fair price, so
| I pay for it. I don't really need to have 'faith' in it, though I
| do hope it sticks around.
|
| Also, can't wait to get my tshirt! (closed beta user here)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Exactly this, it's a product, not a religion. I like that it
| exists. I pay for it. It feels worth it to me. Certainly more
| useful to me than the Netflix sub I had hanging around forever
| but barely used.
|
| I don't get why random punditry is of any relevance here, or
| why Vlad felt the need to respond. He needs a PR person, I
| think
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Exactly this, it 's a product, not a religion._
|
| Could have fooled me!
| recursive wrote:
| I'm a kagi subscriber, and this is the first I'm hearing of the
| t-shirt thing. I'll be happy as long as the search is good.
| segasaturn wrote:
| VERY ironic to me that a web search company has its community
| platform hosted on Discord, which is un-indexable. Honestly,
| companies having their community platform on Discord is a huge
| red flag for me.
| klabb3 wrote:
| I also have my reservations and in particular the lack of
| indexability is a big problem. However, a red flag is an
| overstatement. You have to pick your battles.
|
| Discord is an excellent place to collaborate. It's easy to use
| for non-techies. The level of community is consistently high,
| better than old Reddit imo. Being realtime it's conducive to ad
| hoc chatter.
| andriamanitra wrote:
| The Discord seems to be mostly casual, unimportant discussion
| and notifications about updates. If you bring up an issue or a
| feature request they very quickly ask you to post on the
| feedback site (https://kagifeedback.org/) instead.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Yeah every time they mention AI I am more sure that I do not care
| about them.
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| I've been suspicious of and disconcerted by the amount of AI-
| related news coming out of Kagi. I unapologetically hate the
| current AI craze and am turned off whenever I see it appear in
| one of the products I use.
|
| I've also already stopped using Kagi on mobile, because they made
| the experience of editing the search field terrible with some JS.
| In particular moving the text cursor in the search field in Kagi
| on mobile Safari is an exercise in frustration that's not
| replicated by any other text field in any other search engine,
| website or anything at all on iOS.
|
| This confirmation about their core focus being LLM stuff seals
| the deal for me and I'm cancelling my subscription. I fully agree
| with this sentiment from TFA:
|
| _> 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._
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| I've been using Kagi since the early in the beta, and I've been
| happy with it. I think most of this article is maybe a bit
| overblown, but there are a few things that give me pause.
|
| On the positive side, I still think Kagi's search results are,
| practically speaking, better than other search engine's results.
| I don't make heavy use of filters, but used sparingly they've had
| a really positive impact on my experience. Same with the AI
| integrations- I don't use them much, but sometimes I do and I'm
| glad I have the option.
|
| The investment in AI seems totally sensible to me. I'm not "all
| in" on AI, but it seems obvious to me that AI both clearly
| compliments document retrieval for a search engine, and
| integrating AI services fits well with the idea of putting
| together a service backed by things like Google or OpenAI's APIs
| (and maybe slowly replacing those dependencies as you grow).
|
| I'm not a mac user, and Orion on iOS was super buggy so I stopped
| using it, but I guess I can see an argument that it's a
| worthwhile investment if it's an effective funnel to get people
| into Kagi. Apple users seem more likely than other groups to pay
| for things (like a kagi subscription), and if there aren't other
| ways of getting Kagi added as a default search engine in Safari
| or Chrome then it seems like a plausible investment I suppose.
| Maybe not the choice I'd have made, but not something that really
| makes me question the company either.
|
| Email seems to fit the same narrative as Orion to me. If I were
| in charge I'm not sure I'd prioritize it, but Google has
| normalized bundling of email and search for a lot of users, and I
| can definitely see a plausible argument that people who are
| already logging into google to use their gmail account would be
| more likely to churn than people who stay in the Kagi ecosystem.
|
| I had no idea the tshirt thing happened, and sure, it seems like
| a weird choice but whatever, I don't think it's worth getting up
| in arms about either.
|
| All that said, the privacy angle does concern me a fair bit. I'm
| going to give Vlad a bit of the benefit of the doubt here on
| email. As a fairly privacy conscious person I still pay Google to
| host my email. Why? Because email is really only as private as
| the counterparty you are emailing with. The vast majority of
| people I correspond with are already using Google for email, so
| keeping my side of the conversation private has a lower ROI than
| a lot of other things I could spend effort on.
|
| I do worry a lot about other areas of privacy with Kagi though,
| especially in light of the "let's not get political" comments.
| We're only getting one side of the conversation, but it had very
| "right leaning dogwhistle" type vibes to me. Of course with only
| a few screen shots of a discord conversation it's very hard to
| know how accurate those vibes might be. I suppose for the moment
| I'd just say that it gives me pause, and makes me think about how
| I could recommend Kagi to people who might not be technically
| savvy enough to understand the potential consequences of their
| online behavior. Without a much stronger idea of privacy, I would
| very much worry about anyone using Kagi to search for information
| related to, e.g. pregnancy if even something as innocuous as
| searching for pregnancy tests could be used as evidence in a
| criminal trial against someone accused of a felony for having an
| abortion- as is the direction many US states are headed.
| Similarly, I would wonder if I could, in good conscience,
| recommend people use Kagi to search for any LGBT related material
| today because they are significant concerns that such searches
| could be used to persecute people today in many countries,
| including some US states today and possibly many more US states
| in the near future.
|
| I'm not likely to cancel my subscription or stop using Kagi over
| this today. I'm still getting value out of the product, and I
| think the basic idea that we should have an option for things
| like search where users are the customer and not the product is a
| fundamentally sound and important one. The very fact that a lot
| of people commenting in this thread about privacy concerns are
| customers and not the product is a great opportunity to
| demonstrate why it's an important idea.
| jlarocco wrote:
| So he's mad they bought promotional t-shirts after a hitting a
| subscription goal?
|
| If it's deeper than that, I'd recommend adding a summary. It's a
| big ask to expect strangers to read a ranting wall of text.
| mrmetanoia wrote:
| Kagi just works for me. I pay a monthly bill and I get a good
| search engine. Until they do something that disrupts that
| relationship or signals a disruption to that relationship, the
| things in this post don't strike me as that, I don't have much
| patience for posts like these. It's like a child making a "dead
| game" post for a game that made a change they didn't like.
| theyinwhy wrote:
| There is a great saying nowadays: Customers are not kings
| anymore. They are dictators.
| AirMax98 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Holy shit
| ab_io wrote:
| I just cancelled my Kagi subscription over the weekend. Some of
| the ideas in the article resonate (the dev team seems spread way
| too thin) but I also decided that the main product just wasn't
| distinct enough. The lens and quick answers features were nice,
| but otherwise the search results were not that different from
| Google's -- Having just switched back, I haven't noticed a
| significant difference.
|
| I also think this product might be a bit too late. GPT4 has been
| out for over a year now, and it's changed how I look for answers.
| I tried FastGPT but like the author I found it lacking. As it
| stands, Perplexity feels more like the future of search than
| Kagi.
| 65 wrote:
| I wouldn't trust this article. The author seems to be a
| terminally online person with crab mentality. The arguments
| aren't particularly persuasive and seem to be obsessive and
| emotional about a random paid search engine. Move along.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| I wouldn't trust this comment. The arguments aren't
| particularly persuasive and seem to be dismissive and
| reactionary about a random person's opinion. Move along.
| voiceblue wrote:
| I don't have a horse in this race, but from using Google's AI
| search previews I am not bullish on the future of search being
| LLMs even with RAG or MoE (though of course, there is plenty of
| AI to be had apart from these, and I am bullish on AI in
| general). Even simple things, such as asking about setting up a
| Starbucks "franchise" (you can't), are met with enthusiastic,
| affirmative, and blatantly incorrect answers.
|
| Anyone who is thinking of putting LLM output directly in front of
| customers (no HITL) had better think twice about this.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Fair points and a reason not to get personally invested.
|
| > Is the search good? I mean...it's not really much better than
| any other search
|
| It is absolutely fantastic as a search engine. The few times I
| find myself on DDG or Google I am reminded how terrible the
| alternatives are. For this alone I am happy to pay for however
| long as possible.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| TLDR: Kagi should rebrand as `Trust me, bro`
| joshfee wrote:
| After a recent mention on HN I gave Kagi a try and subscribed for
| a few months. But after using it I'm really not sure why it get
| so much for the core "search", I found it so underwhelming that I
| would instinctively use the !g bang to just go right to Google.
|
| It turns out that even though I can't stand the number of ads,
| Google is still much better at getting me an answer quickly
| (usually with the quick answer modules).
|
| I was also surprised at the number of times Kagi came up with 0
| search results, and while one of the draws for me was to have
| higher quality results instead of quantity, I still found a _ton_
| of results for AI generated crappy top-10-list sites trying to
| sell me something.
|
| Love the idea, and will probably check back in from time to time,
| but so far the execution just isn't there for me.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Wrong opinion to have, but I never really found the difference
| between Kagi results and DDG results to be different enough to
| warrant paying for something that doesn't even work on my phone
| without hacks. FWIW I agree google search is now unusable, only
| comparing to DDG
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| What sort of phone do you have where using kagi requires hacks?
| corytheboyd wrote:
| iPhone
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I use it in my iphone with no trickery. Perhaps it's
| easiest to use Orion...i've found it very nice.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Mastodon thread wherein the author of this article gets pestered
| by the owner of kagi:
| https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
| throwaway67743 wrote:
| I actually gave Kagi a try the other day because Google has
| reached the point of total uselessness (a day I thought had come
| and gone, but I was wrong, it continued to decline) - but
| actually the search results for the same queries are worse, not
| that the content is worse, but that it returns the better/more
| appropriate content further down the page, the actual content is
| pretty much identical. Am I doing it wrong or does the tsunami of
| crap on the internet just mean search engines are fucked?
| lukev wrote:
| I'm a Kagi user.
|
| None of this is relevant to me except the allegation that privacy
| isn't taken seriously.
|
| And yet Kagi's terms of service clearly state that they do not
| even log user searches. So unless the assertion is that Kagi is
| wantonly not adhering to its own terms of service... this seems
| fine?
| tdeck wrote:
| > They have "FastGPT", where their focus is having a ChatGPT
| style service that is focused on being fast, not accurate.
|
| How could someone come up with this idea and think it was good?
| For a search engine whose user base is so interested in better
| quality results they're willing to pay for them?
| andriamanitra wrote:
| I've been using Kagi as my primary search engine for over 2
| years. The search is much more customizable than anything else
| out there, and the results are usually slightly better than
| Google's. I don't find their current AI offerings useful but I
| don't mind the experimentation because I do think there is
| potential for big improvements to be discovered there. I just
| turn the AI features off until they figure out something that
| really works.
|
| I share the concerns about wasting time and money on the other
| silly side projects (t-shirts, email, maps..), but as long as
| they don't negatively affect the search product or sink the
| entire company I don't truly care.
|
| I do not like that their promise of privacy relies entirely on
| aligned incentives and trust, but it is no worse than the
| alternatives that all rely on ad-tech money.
| shufflerofrocks wrote:
| "No one wants full anonymity unless they are criminals, and we
| don't want customers as criminals" is a yikes.
|
| I don't mind the financial misplay(?), the possibly unsustainable
| diversification, the lil bit of corporate hypocrisy, or the AI -
| they're endeavours that can't be avoided while trying to make a
| compaany profitable - as long as they do what they can do best,
| WHILE maintaining the stance & spirit taken for forming the
| company.
| asmor wrote:
| After exchanging about 15 emails with Vlad, I can confirm "appear
| measured and willing to change opinion, but zero budge". It was
| frustrating to be told I provide "high quality" discussion while
| many points remained unaddressed or just evaded into boring "we
| can't know intentions of search users" as if he was building a
| government.
|
| For instance, he claimed both that a search engine shouldn't
| judge someone for searching how to commit suicide, because they
| _might_ just want the equivalent of legal euthanasia in a place
| where it 's unavailable and a global search engine should be
| value neutral for it can't possibly know all cultural norms, but
| also said "it wouldn't work" as a backup argument that was
| promptly ignored when I provided a study contrary to it.
|
| I ended up feeling like Vlad has a lot of implicit beliefs that
| are rooted in free speech absolutism, but will rationalize via
| other unfalsifiable arguments (like scope creep / too many
| unknowns) while appearing like he'd be open to be convinced. I
| still use Kagi, but I'm ready to jump ship at the first
| opportunity.
| nmstoker wrote:
| I like and pay for Kagi but for me, outside of search, the rest
| of largely ignored fluff (aeema to chime with several other
| customers commenting here, eg on AI features).
|
| The search is generally good enough, often really good, and the
| killer feature is FOREVER hiding results from low grade sites and
| boosting results from sites you respect, without the tonne of
| commercial rubbish that Google feeds into results.
|
| Where I see an area to improve is image search - Google is
| usually better and it's usually just laziness that I don't do all
| image searches in Google.
|
| I wish Kagi luck and certainly hope to continue to be a customer.
| graphememes wrote:
| After reading through all of the founders comments, going through
| the discord and looking at the context and conversations that
| happened _after_ the screenshots. This person is blowing this
| completely out of proportion with exaggerated language and cherry
| picked examples to fit their biases.
| firexcy wrote:
| I am a paying Kagi user and it seems to me that the post is from
| an over-zealous user venting after their unsolicited advice was
| rejected. Reading through the post without finding a single
| mention of search quality is quite telling about its content.
|
| There is no reason for Kagi to remain "pure" and avoid AI
| features as suggested by hardcore AI haters. I am not a fan of AI
| hype either, but I am pleased to see that Kagi has integrated
| some moderate capabilities such as the summarizer and search-
| based generation, which are natural extensions of a modern search
| engine. (I do hope they improve the expert mode soon, as it is
| currently far inferior to Perplexity, but that does not
| invalidate the general point.)
|
| Email-based account management may not be perfect from a privacy
| perspective, but registering with a privacy email alias has
| mostly resolved my concerns. As for GDPR, let's not pretend that
| it is disproportionately burdensome for startups. I value the way
| a company operates much more than the privacy theatres (banners,
| opt-outs, legaleses) enforced by GDPR.
|
| Other criticisms regarding operational details range from
| nitpicking to trivial. I do hope that the founder was less
| insistent on arguing with and lecturing zealous users like the
| author.
| salad-tycoon wrote:
| I subscribe to Kagi. Begrudgingly. I wish them well but it does
| seem all a bit fractured and when push come to shove and the
| money runs out what are they going to do to safeguard my
| information? Because it's easy to talk high morals when things
| are fine but when it's your last drop of life blood maybe the
| moral and ethic equation suddenly changes to get that one last
| infusion/injection.
|
| Is there a common thread amongst search engine founders? The guy
| from you.com also gives interesting vibes. Here he is with 10
| shill accounts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344999
|
| Edit: I think Vlad is a true believer in what he preaches. I
| detect no subterfuge in him. But he takes negative comments
| personally as if people have a duty to love his vision and
| product. A true believer but seems like that would be a tough
| trait to have when you cater to a very opinionated audience.
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