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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#531

Post by CamperBob2 »

agos wrote: post #438
eddyzh wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, afte…

Kagi is a US company. GDPR is not a US law.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#532

Post by akudha »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #530
akudha wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very weird answer. People who are paying for your service want you to succeed, they want an alternative to Google search. Many of them (like the article above) explicitly say they don't want a t-shirt, they just want a better search product from you. After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, m…

I don't think it's that weird at all. Nor did they say the "customer" needs to think outside the box (what a great misrepresentation). They were just explaining their thinking process.

I never said they said the customer needs to think outside the box. They claimed that they had to think outside the box (as if no company had sent promotional t-shirts before and as if promotional t-shirts is some kind of groundbreaking idea). I did not misrepresent anything

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#533

Post by freedomben »

kerkeslager wrote: post #330
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…

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…

> there are often people posting here who say things like "I for one enjoy targeted ads"

You can find some people on HN who will say anything. That's the nature of a large distributed community.

But I also think the fact that there are people who would say that is a good thing. I despise ads, ad-tracking/privacy invasion, etc with a passion. I won't use anything that has ads. I won't even install most apps, even paid/premium, if they collect personal information. So you know my biases.

Their argument is a whole lot more nuanced (and better) than you are presenting it. The main point is that they find (or consider) ads to be useful for helping people find new products they might be interested in. And that does quite obviously happen sometimes (how often is very much up for debate though(. For them, the privacy tradeoff is worth it. I would guess that a portion of people who agree with that would fall into the "what do I have to hide if I'm not doing anythign wrong" camp. I think they're nuts, but it is an interesting viewpoint to consider that is a lot more nuanced and contextual then just "I enjoy targeted ads."

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#535

Post by green_dragon »

t8sr wrote: post #356
thorum wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As alternative perspective in terms of power dynamics: The Kagi CEO is a somewhat powerful figure as the CEO of a well-known tech company. The blog author is a random person from outside the tech startup culture. 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 would…

But you’re not talking about Tim Cook, this is a guy running a company of ~10 people. Someone on the internet, with a following and an audience, has written an essay about how Vlad is a bad person, and now is implying the latter is abusive for trying to have a conversation. This is psychotic behavior. There’s a huge spectrum between NY Times writing a sourced article about a powerful business magnate and someone disp…

[flagged]

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#536

Post by mkl »

vel0city wrote: post #402
danpalmer wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending t-shirts to existing users is unlikely to be an effective marketing strategy to grow/maintain the business. The way they did it was also inefficient and high-risk. It may reduce churn, but with 20k users there's a very low cap on how good a churn reduction can be vs bringing in new users.

I first heard about Stripe in it's early days because a friend of mine wore a stripe shirt to a LAN party. It's not the first time I've discovered something new by seeing a shirt or a hoodie or some other piece of clothing.

The Kagi T-shirts don't say "Kagi" on them [1], so that won't happen.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#537

Post by ibash »

lijok wrote: post #73

Lori seems (from the blog post and the subsequent email chain with the CEO) to be unnecessarily combative and most definitely too emotionally invested in Kagi. You're paying, what, 10, 25 USD - are you getting a good service for it? If not, unsubscribe, if yes, what's the problem? Sounds like they're profitable now, so little risk of the service dissapearing. Unnecessary drama by people who live for drama. My only ad…

Some other posters are claiming Vlad is combative. He’s not, he’s just direct. I’ve given feedback on Kagi/orion and Vlad just asks for clarity pretty directly.

American culture and customer support likes to blow smoke up your ass while saying no. Other cultures and Vlad don’t do that.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#538

Post by ibash »

ab_io wrote: post #399

I just cancelled my Kagi subscription over the weekend. Some of the ideas in the article resonate (the dev team seems spread way too thin) but I also decided that the main product just wasn't distinct enough. The lens and quick answers features were nice, but otherwise the search results were not that different from Google's -- Having just switched back, I haven't noticed a significant difference. I also think this p…

I churned from Kagi twice before sticking around as a long term customer, because the results were better than Google.

I’ll be curious if you come back to Kagi in a couple months too.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#539

Post by budding2141 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #531
agos wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, afte…

Kagi is a US company. GDPR is not a US law.

Does not really matter as long as they offer it in EU countries.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#540

Post by chipsrafferty »

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 paid for the 1 year plan, because I was excited about a company that was only for search, and provided good search by nature of people paying for it (so no ads and fair ranking)

I have noticed the search has gotten worse in the ~7 months I've been using it, I started using Google more and more, and I was not planning to renew. I still use it, but after reading this article I'm definitely not going to use it again after my 1 year ends.

They aren't prioritizing the only feature I care about.

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