They lost my faith when they partnered with brave
I’d rather them lean on Brave than Google or Bing
I Lost Faith in Kagi
121–130 of 639 posts
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#122I'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 t…
> 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!
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#123Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
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.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#124I'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 t…
Definition of “criminal” can change depending on perspective. A journalist is a criminal from a perspective of an authoritarian government.
It can also change after an election, and the impact can be retroactive.
Vlad needs to walk that "criminal" comment WAY the hell back.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#125I 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…
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?
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.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (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!
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 =)
(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.
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.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#127I 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 v…
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.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.
It you want to know when Evernote went downhill, it’s precisely the moment they started selling backpacks.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 says "please don't email me about this anymore" and you continue to email them you are being combative
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#130Subsequently: 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'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.