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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#431

Post by kelnos »

kerkeslager wrote: post #338
recursivegirth wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. Your gut got you this far, but to be a profitable company you are going to need to consider the advice and concerns of your stakeholders. Based on your current description, you have two stakeholders (yourself + customers). If the venture fails, you will ask yourself if you listened enough. Be proactive, address concerns, do not put yourself in a defensive position. E…

> I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.

I think that statement is generally true for any random company, but I think for a company like Kagi, HN users are actually a lot more representative of their user base.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#433

Post by kelnos »

Zambyte wrote: post #117
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…

> I wish they dedicated more time to it. What changes you have in mind to search functionality? I feel like the core search is rock solid as is, but they address search quality reports on their feedback forums all the time. To me, the AI features (and specifically how they are only used when you opt in per query) are enhancing search, and the time they have been allocating to those features has continuously improved…

> I feel like the core search is rock solid as is

Certainly not. I still get a decent amount of AI-generated blogspam in my results. Yes, it's great that Kagi offers me the option to manually block sites I don't want in results, but that's a workaround, not a solution, to the AI-generated spam problem.

I don't know if it's possible to detect this sort of crap automatically, but IMO this is the biggest threat to web search today.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#434

Post by sleepybrett »

gspencley wrote: post #384
swatcoder wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a forum where people respond well to practical explanations from thoughtful founders. I don't know if the OP got what they needed from this reply, but I assume I'm not alone in being impressed by the humility and candor of the response and developed much greater affinity for Kagi from some of the specifics of what were said. I want more companies to have communicative, principled management that invites a sus…

Interesting take. It is valid and don't take my alternative interpretation as suggesting otherwise. I owned a business for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was my primary source of income. I valued feedback, tried my hardest to solicit as much of it as possible, and always took it to heart (though I had to always try and glean statistics from the sum of all feedback so that I was never spending resources on minorit…

.. and then the founder decided to harangue the author in email. Guy can't seem to stop stepping on his own dick.

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

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#435

Post by gentleman11 »

freediver wrote: post #258
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…

> 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…

Very interesting!

Quick (but difficult) question: do you foresee there arising a reasonably reliable way to filter out the coming wave of ai spam? I’m told that half of Twitter is bots talking to each other at this point, and I’m sure this is coming to other media as well. Eg, massive, massive waves of content marketing, sock puppets, etc.

Is there reason to be optimistic that you or other actors will be able to sift through it?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#437

Post by MichaelZuo »

swatcoder wrote: post #375
MichaelZuo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Serving optimally performing ads to billions of global users is a radically different problem than serving optimal search results and accessory features to a self-selected 50,000 or 500,000 customers.

Hence why I specifically said search quality without mentioning a large userbase...

Did you not see the last part on your end?

Plus, if anything a small userbase makes it more difficult for quality search because the long tail is still effectively infinitely large, relative to the competencies of a single decision maker, but now there is only have one user searching for any random super niche topic maybe once a month, in total.

So they can't even a/b test or rely on customers reporting in on the real situation because it is too sparse.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#438

Post by agos »

eddyzh wrote: post #374
freediver wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thanks for your response! Honestly I get the T-shirt part this way. You got to Doo crazy stuff as a start-up. I also get that you try ai stuff. As long as you keep up de search. However what scares me is the apparent lack of knowledge about privacy, gdpr and what is PII in a product that, to me, is all about privacy. Have one person in the company be an expert in privacy and GDPR etc and use their insights, since it…

I got the same impression - the lack of understanding of the basics of GDPR makes them look as amateurs, not professionals trying to raise the bar for privacy. I was considering using Kagi, but this is a massive turn off.

They'll likely discover that GDPR is not that optional as soon as a customer (or a competitor with a grudge!) reports them to their relevant national privacy/personal data protection authority, after which they'll get to have a very uncomfortable conversation where they will not be able to use those arguments

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#439

Post by throwaway67743 »

I actually gave Kagi a try the other day because Google has reached the point of total uselessness (a day I thought had come and gone, but I was wrong, it continued to decline) - but actually the search results for the same queries are worse, not that the content is worse, but that it returns the better/more appropriate content further down the page, the actual content is pretty much identical. Am I doing it wrong or does the tsunami of crap on the internet just mean search engines are fucked?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#440

Post by kelnos »

Dayshine wrote: post #105
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…

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?

False dichotomy. They should be plowing that money into more R&D, or, absent the current ability to do that, saving it for a rainy day.

As a paying customer, I want Kagi to succeed. I want Kagi's search offering to keep improving. Spending a couple hundred thousand of the company's money on t-shirts (one that I would receive, as I was a fairly early customer) sounds foolish to me, regardless of how much the founder is personally invested in the company, and regardless of whether or not he'll invest more of his own money to keep the company growing in the future, if needed.

I'm still bullish on Kagi's future, but things like this (and things mentioned in the linked article as a whole) make me a little worried.

> Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?

Probably! When I was at Twilio, we participated in GitHub's charity dodgeball tournament a few times (early last decade, I think). The cost of admission was $3000 per team, and would go to charity. After a couple years doing it, finance started getting uncomfortable with it. We were a private, unprofitable company (now Twilio is, of course, a public, unprofitable company), giving away money that our VCs had invested in us.

Initially I rolled my eyes, "just the bean-counters doing what they do best: whining about every bit of spend". But later, looking back, I realized they had a point. While $3000 wasn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of the company, what benefit was spending it actually providing the company? Ok, so 12 or so employees got to go and have a fun day at a rec center, boosting morale for them. We got our logo on the website for the tournament, which was maybe a little visibility/marketing. But was that really worth $3000 of our VC money? Maybe it was, but I don't think it's an obvious "yes".

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