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.
> 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 :)
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.
This is a very weird answer. People who are paying for your service want you to succeed, they want an alternative to Google search. Many of them (like the article above) explicitly say they don't want a t-shirt, they just want a better search product from you.
After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, money and energy you spent on those t-shirts. Your customers are complaining because they want you to succeed. If they didn't care about you, they'd just cancel the subscription and move on. And your response to it is "nah, what we did was right" and not "yeah, maybe we shouldn't have spent all that resources on a stupid t-shirt that nobody wanted"?
I just don't get it. And what are you gonna do when you hit 50K members? Are you planning to send an entire wardrobe (from undies to a suit) to all your 50K customers (assuming IF you ever hit that many customers)?
I remember Daniel King's PowerPlayChess channel recently started promoting Kagi, doesn't this count as paid advertising or is this deal something else?
Hi, Vlad. We've met before, I'm the person whose 70-year-old mother is using Kagi. I also have actively been trying to move people to Kagi for some time - even paying for their accounts. The biggest block I face is not brand recognition. It's a lack of An Android app.
To move my mother to Kagi, I had to install Brave Browser on her android cell phone, make it the default browser on Android, change Brave's default search engine and create a desktop shortcut to it.
Android is ubiquitous in Brazil. I won't be able to move much people to Kagi with a process this involved.
Happy to chat further about this topic if you wish, privately or publicly.
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.
I'm not a user, but you must have found a great market because your users are anxious about the company failing. The fact that they spinned the fact that you were able to create a company and a whole t -shirt operation on a marketing budget as a bad thing is telling. You're doing great. The t-shirt op is a great investment an will return a great value.
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.
Yesterday I realized I had 75 tabs open on my mobile web browser and decided to do some trimming. Anything I was confident would come up again and didn’t need to be held onto got closed, including a tab for Kagi. And now I find Kagi has come up again, and I really liked reading this message so now I’m opening the tab again and almost certainly subscribing
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
> 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.
I paid for the 1 year plan, because I was excited about a company that was only for search, and provided good search by nature of people paying for it (so no ads and fair ranking)
I have noticed the search has gotten worse in the ~7 months I've been using it, I started using Google more and more, and I was not planning to renew. I still use it, but after reading this article I'm definitely not going to use it again after my 1 year ends.
They aren't prioritizing the only feature I care about.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The founder posted comments on hn assuring that they take privacy seriously, and I believe him, but most commercial companies (including the big ones like Microsoft) also claimed to take privacy seriously. Look at what they are doing right now: Blatant violations and even more blatant lies.
Search is a deeply personal activity. It can reveal far more information about the user than financial statements, health records, privileged attorney information, or library reading lists. Kagi therefore must _at least_ meet the same sanctity, privilege, and protection standards afforded to those parts of life. At present, Kagi does not meet these standards through technical means, and governing laws certainly fall short of compelling Kagi to meet either.
So while I appreciate what Kagi is trying to do and wish them success, I cannot see myself using it in its current form. Local (private) LLMs and fact checking through search engines that aren't tied to my PII simply provide a superior experience. At present, it's simply impossible for people like me who want better search and are willing to pay for it to become customers of Kagi. I find that to be a real shame :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think that if he had different type of personality then he wouldn't start this company - a regular, humble, humiliated, developer would just tremble, sweat and shiver at the thought of starting business straight competing with core Google, MS products. He needs to be believer and confident to pull this.
Also almost all leaders of great and (now) big companies seem to be type of people that regular Joe not necessarily would enjoy to be friends with.
Some other posters are claiming Vlad is combative. He’s not, he’s just direct. I’ve given feedback on Kagi/orion and Vlad just asks for clarity pretty directly.
American culture and customer support likes to blow smoke up your ass while saying no. Other cultures and Vlad don’t do that.
.. 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.
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.
(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.
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...)
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).
> 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.
I had to, just to get past the first couple sentences.
Sadly no reader view can divine where paragraphs should be, but aren't. This is just lazy editing.
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.
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'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.
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.
> 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.
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.
^ 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:
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The author sounds unhinged. Also, their email address is kobld@proton.me, and Protonmail easily lets you block email addresses or entire domains. The author comes off as an attention-seeking baby.
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.
Readit News
- 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.
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 :)
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.
After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, money and energy you spent on those t-shirts. Your customers are complaining because they want you to succeed. If they didn't care about you, they'd just cancel the subscription and move on. And your response to it is "nah, what we did was right" and not "yeah, maybe we shouldn't have spent all that resources on a stupid t-shirt that nobody wanted"?
I just don't get it. And what are you gonna do when you hit 50K members? Are you planning to send an entire wardrobe (from undies to a suit) to all your 50K customers (assuming IF you ever hit that many customers)?
I remember Daniel King's PowerPlayChess channel recently started promoting Kagi, doesn't this count as paid advertising or is this deal something else?
To move my mother to Kagi, I had to install Brave Browser on her android cell phone, make it the default browser on Android, change Brave's default search engine and create a desktop shortcut to it.
Android is ubiquitous in Brazil. I won't be able to move much people to Kagi with a process this involved.
Happy to chat further about this topic if you wish, privately or publicly.
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.
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.
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?
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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.
Because of adverse selection?
Users that are users because of marketing are somehow different?
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.
Quality is there for the most part, IME, but I definitely agree that their local features need a LOT of work.
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.
- 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.
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.
I have noticed the search has gotten worse in the ~7 months I've been using it, I started using Google more and more, and I was not planning to renew. I still use it, but after reading this article I'm definitely not going to use it again after my 1 year ends.
They aren't prioritizing the only feature I care about.
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.
It's just a matter of focus with a team of that size.
Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
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.
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".
Yes.
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.
i’m glad they spent the time and effort on it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Presumably the tshirts are a marketing cost that they hope will lead to greater brand exposure and more subscribers.
If they fail with all of the free marketing they’ve been gifted by this community I can only shake my head.
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.
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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.
The founder posted comments on hn assuring that they take privacy seriously, and I believe him, but most commercial companies (including the big ones like Microsoft) also claimed to take privacy seriously. Look at what they are doing right now: Blatant violations and even more blatant lies.
Search is a deeply personal activity. It can reveal far more information about the user than financial statements, health records, privileged attorney information, or library reading lists. Kagi therefore must _at least_ meet the same sanctity, privilege, and protection standards afforded to those parts of life. At present, Kagi does not meet these standards through technical means, and governing laws certainly fall short of compelling Kagi to meet either.
So while I appreciate what Kagi is trying to do and wish them success, I cannot see myself using it in its current form. Local (private) LLMs and fact checking through search engines that aren't tied to my PII simply provide a superior experience. At present, it's simply impossible for people like me who want better search and are willing to pay for it to become customers of Kagi. I find that to be a real shame :(
And to continue down the road of AI proficiency, Kagi will need to retain a lot of data.
Very annoying being a hobbyist website in the middle of it I'll tell you that much
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.
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.
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.
Personally I think the t-shirts look great and I'd love one.
The only thing that concerned me in that article was the disregard and / or misunderstanding of GDPR.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People discuss Apple's commitment to privacy and if it is real or adequate.
There are costs other than direct monetary. We're still "paying" for it, just via ads, sponsored results, etc.
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)
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.
I think that if he had different type of personality then he wouldn't start this company - a regular, humble, humiliated, developer would just tremble, sweat and shiver at the thought of starting business straight competing with core Google, MS products. He needs to be believer and confident to pull this. Also almost all leaders of great and (now) big companies seem to be type of people that regular Joe not necessarily would enjoy to be friends with.
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American culture and customer support likes to blow smoke up your ass while saying no. Other cultures and Vlad don’t do that.
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.
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.
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...)
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).
I had to, just to get past the first couple sentences.
Sadly no reader view can divine where paragraphs should be, but aren't. This is just lazy editing.
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.
Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.
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.
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.
> 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.
What mood?
>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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Dead Comment
> 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.
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?
Narcissism.
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?
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.