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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#161

Post by OccamsMirror »

Sakos wrote: post #101
iamacyborg wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#162

Post by daft_pink »

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#163

Post by daft_pink »

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 agree with a lot of your sentiments, but we’re just in peak ai I think.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#164

Post by Mockapapella »

> 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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#165

Post by t8sr »

nebulous1 wrote: post #37
smcleod wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comes off as fairly unhinged here.

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?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#166

Post by sithadmin »

jonpurdy wrote: post #27
Sakos wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#167

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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…

> 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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#168

Post by sph »

Tomte wrote: post #4

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

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?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#170

Post by laborcontract »

fluentbyfire wrote: post #149
carlinm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked too deeply into perplexity yet. What do you find much better about it?

On any query, you get a summary answer from the latest LLMs (Claude 3, ChatGPT 4 Turbo, Mistral Large) and the list of sources. Very thorough, highly efficient, and no ads.

Honestly I’ve tried perplexity and it was great at first but I find the results exhausting. Imagine reading all that and realizing it’s not what you’re looking for. Also, at the end of the day you have to trust that it can find stuff better than you.

I prefer finding my own sources and querying from there.

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