341–350 of 639 posts
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That reminds me of the faster horses quote I'm afraid. Or you know, that all cell phones had to have a physical keyboard. Until they suddenly didn't. [Never tried Kagi, but let the man do his thing.]
Maybe customers were wary of having 1 ton of steel barreling down the street. And there's no ergonomics in phones. Their prime quality is portability. Ergonomics has been sacrificed to convenience.
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…
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.
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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?
The internet levels the playing field so the random person has the power to post criticism of the more powerful person and be heard. It doesn’t make sense to compare with the offline world because this wouldn’t be able to happen outside the internet.
In response the CEO is attempting to force them into a different context where he once again has power. The author recognizes this and therefore refuses.
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> 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 an…
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 continu…
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Even without seeing Vlads comments it was already disheartening to see them investing in AI features of questionable utility rather than focusing on the core search product. Trying to make a new search engine is already a difficult enough task without spreading themselves even thinner, and diluting the value of the subscription for those who just want search because they only offer unlimited searches in conjunction w…
What do you mean? The unlimited tier didn't come with AI last time I checked. That's the ultimate tier which costs 2.5x as much to pay for the ai?
Maybe a little off topic, but regarding Orion: Can someone explain to me why every search engine feel like they need to build their own browser, and by build I mean jiggle the handles on Chromium a bit? It seems pointless. I can sort of see why Microsoft would do it, but that's Microsoft wanting a modern browser for their operating system, not DuckDuckGo, Kagi or Ecosia wanting a browser for their search box. Why thi…
Orion is based on WebKit, not on Chromium. The Mac version of DuckDuckGo's browser is based on WebKit too.
VERY ironic to me that a web search company has its community platform hosted on Discord, which is un-indexable. Honestly, companies having their community platform on Discord is a huge red flag for me.
Discord is an excellent place to collaborate. It’s easy to use for non-techies. The level of community is consistently high, better than old Reddit imo. Being realtime it’s conducive to ad hoc chatter.
I don't know why this is flagged into oblivion. I'm sure most HN users won't agree because Kagi is very popular here but I don't think the arguments are bad or overblown. Personally I don't use Kagi for 2 reasons: It's not significantly better than what I already have (SearXNG private instance) and I don't really subscribe to the "everything must be paid on the internet". I'm much more comfortable running some docker…
Additionally, by running a private instance you have effectively given all these companies a spotlight onto YOU. Only your searches are going to come from that instance and these companies already have enough information they can figure out WHO is making that search pretty much right after you click through the first result.
Just from the available public instances you can quickly see that other search engines may block your requests for one reason or another but your server will be constantly retrying to query them from time to time. Last thing I want is to find my IP addresses on some sort of "naughty list" because I wasn't honoring some 403 error my server was getting every time I searched something.
There is nothing that says other search engines won't wise up and figure out how to stop searx from "abusing" their search functions so it almost feels like the only sure way to ensure search privacy is to run your own crawler, for better or worse.
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You are right, we started doing that last week so technically we are doing marketing now.
It really does seem like you’re being a bit too unfocused Vlad. Delivering high-quality search over the entire Internet, higher quality than Google, is something so complex that even if you were literally the worlds smartest person and all the other Kagi employees were number 2 to number 26, there would still likely be stumbles at least once a year on something. Because there’s like a million gotchas hidden along the…
Google search has been bad for a long time. It's clear they serve their customers (advertisers) quite well, but as a user of their search, they're not particularly impressive.
The biggest problem is a problem of scale: being the biggest search provider means Google are targeted by SEO, so it's harder for Google to sift out the AI-generated garbage--Kagi just isn't involved in the arms race that Google is. But as a user that's not my problem; I'm not going to tolerate bad search results out of some sense of "fairness" to a corporation. And Kagi is delivering real user-centered features which are, frankly, obvious, i.e. Google should be embarrassed that they don't let you filter/prioritize domains or search within lenses like Kagi does.
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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.
I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations. The difference they don't tell you about their internal accounting so you don't join the dots. Start ups burn money on silly things like offices way too nice for what they need all the time. That's much closer to unethical than a company with no…