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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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251–260 of 639 posts

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#251
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> I had Claude3 read it for claims about quality, security, privacy. It found none. You might want to consider actually reading things for yourself, rather than assuming the magic robots are telling the truth (the magic robot did not tell you the truth, here).

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#252

I wonder if the t-shirts were basically a way to siphon some investor money directly into their own pockets. Or if someone just thought they can do it cheaper and then ran into sunk cost fallacy.

Yes, of course they created a consumer product that outperforms the main product of the third largest company in the world just as a measure to cheat investors out of a couple of hundred thousand. That's why I won't buy Apple products either, because I'm sure all these iPhones and Macbooks are just a tricky plan to build up investor confidence so that they can cheat them out of money in the future. Useless snark asid…

> Useless snark aside, if the Kagi team wanted more "money directly into their own pockets" they could just raise their salaries. If their product is comparable to Google their salaries could be as well.

And they'd get the money for those massive salaries from what magic money tree? They're at best barely profitable, revenue is probably around $2m, and they only raised $670k in funding. This isn't a particularly money making enterprise.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#253
post #49

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Oh, ffs, is this going to be the new thing, now? People pretending to read articles by feeding them to an AI and believing whatever old nonsense it spits out? I do think the "humanity is doomed" angle with AIs is overplayed, but okay, yeah, if people are going to do that, maybe humanity _is_ doomed. If you read the article, you will discover that your magic robot is mistaken.

There was no presence. I said clearly that I did not read it and that I used Claude3.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#254
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…

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#255
post #49

[flagged]

Sounds like Claude3 was trained on Hacker News comment threads – read the first 3 paragraphs and believe you've got the gist of the whole article.

I read a lot more than three paragraphs before I delegated reading the rest. For most of the article, his complaints were distinctly not relevant to my interests.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important, and I thought it'd be amazing. So then take it seriously. If you need more funding then find a better pricing model. But it is a shame that a project so attractive feels like it's abandoned.

> But it is a shame that a project so attractive feels like it's abandoned. Can you clarify what makes you say that? Orion development is very active. Here is Orion's changelog in case you missed it: https://kagi.com/orion/updates/orion-release-notes.html

I installed it sometime (end of last year/ beginning of this year, can't recall). Was setting it up and imported bookmarks. Then tried to edit them and found out that renaming bookmarks and/or changing links messes up the bookmarks, they don't save/get reset. Some very odd behaviors and I have a hard time believing that they were not picked up by the team or other users. I think setting bookmarks with icon only was also not working. There were other issues and I just did not have the energy to navigate those and my work. So I decided to give it another few years. Using Safari now. But Orion being solid would make me come back.

I also don't want to be overly critical, and I am a paying Kagi user, love it and will eventually try to use the family plan, but maybe I'm just not at the point where I have time to deal with glitchy software anymore.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#257
post #49

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But your AI is... wrong. The article contains clear criticisms of search quality and privacy concerns around a CEO who says things like "people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably elss than a 100 in the entire world."

Not sure how that contradicts Claude's conclusions. Also, he's right. I might like anonymity but it is absolutely a 'want', not 'need'.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#258
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…

> 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 :)

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#259
post #19
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 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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#260
I got a little more than halfway through the post before I gave up. I honestly don't know of any other tech endeavor that is doing so much good only 16 people. You can diss their CEO all you want, but their product is heads above the rest.

And it's not just recycled google results. It's google's API, which means that it brings back into the light what google was best at before they decided to monetize it with echo chamber algos and toxic ads. I can find it in my heart hate Alphabet and yet pay to mainline their best product with a sprinkle of other vitamins and minerals like Wolfram.

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