Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Lost Faith in Kagi

d-shoot.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 639 posts

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#21

Post by llm_trw »

Tomte wrote: post #4

Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#22

Post by malnourish »

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#23

Post by iowahansen »

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#24

Post by WA »

smcleod wrote: post #17
Tomte wrote: post #4

Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

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.

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#25

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

smcleod wrote: post #17
Tomte wrote: post #4

Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

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.

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#26

Post by reducesuffering »

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

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#27

Post by jonpurdy »

Sakos wrote: post #19
infecto wrote: post #8

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…

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…

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#28

Post by _23sd »

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#29

Post by yreg »

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

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#30

Post by infecto »

Sakos wrote: post #19
infecto wrote: post #8

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…

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…

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.
Post reply on HN