Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Lost Faith in Kagi

d-shoot.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 639 posts

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#541

Post by chipsrafferty »

ravenstine wrote: post #285
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 agree, but not necessarily that AI will make results better. Search engines already rely heavily on heuristics, and I really doubt that LLMs or vector databases are going to improve results in any combination. At best, they will overfit results to the lowest common denominator. What I want is a search engine that supports full-text queries with exact matches. This quite literally no longer exists anywhere, and mayb…

Agreed, I want that + the page ranking that Kagi has, and literally don't care about any other features.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#542

Post by MichaelZuo »

swatcoder wrote: post #452
MichaelZuo wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is that search quality is subjective, not objective, and the two companies are each structured to approach it very differently. In pursuing billions of global users across all demographics and trying to maximally monetize them through ads, Google is pursuing an entirely different measure of "search quality" than Kagi. Google delivers their version of search quality when a rice farmer in Thailand and financi…

Even if the entire customer base was limited to only HN users with karma exceeding X amount there will still be thousands of searches per day in obscure niches, just each one in a different niche.

So I don't see how Kagi can avoid having to deliver quality search results in millions of niches. Just at a very low frequency compared to Google.

Or are you suggesting to not bother with search quality past a certain lower threshold?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#543

Post by nicce »

eviks wrote: post #58
WA wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vlad is not discussing, he is lecturing. The author of the blog post seems right. Vlad defends his position "lol email is not PII" repeatedly, despite being obviously and completely wrong. He has no understanding that it doesn't matter that a user could enter fake information. His business collects email addresses, which is a process. Under GDPR, this process must be documented, users must be given their data on requ…

he explicitly said in his email that "Personal emails are PII.", so how is that a defence of his previous position?

It does not matter in this context, because it is still incorrect.

> Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII.

Company has no means to identify what is the difference between personal or random email. Everything can be and must be treated equally from privacy perspective.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#544

Post by nicce »

iamacyborg wrote: post #134
WA wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I re-read again. You are right, he says "personal emails are PII" in this email. In the original post however he dismisses the whole GDPR data request process as "we don't need this, because you can provide fake data". Point is: if the business requests an email address, many people will provide their real email adress and your business needs to document this process under GDPR. I just checked. The signup form doesn'…

>If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like user settings and so on. I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've never received one that contained my user settings, so that seems pretty normal. The whole PII convo seems incredibly asinine though, "PII" is not a thing in the GDPR. Personal data is[1], but that's not the same thing. If Kagi keep a record of search…

> I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've never received one that contained my user settings, so that seems pretty normal.

That is odd because the user has right to get ALL the data they want that is stored about them in the service.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#545

Post by CamperBob2 »

budding2141 wrote: post #539
CamperBob2 wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Even so, it doesn't matter unless the CEO ever sets foot in the EU, I suppose.

(Do you regularly check to make sure you're obeying laws in countries you don't ever intend to visit? No? Then why should Kagi?)

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#546

Post by MichaelZuo »

kerkeslager wrote: post #349
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…

I'm not convinced it's actually that complicated. 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 inv…

I could see Kagi being able to sidestep maybe 95% of the 'arms race'.

But even the remainder will trip them up every now and then.

If these periods last only a few minutes it probably won't matter but if it lasts a few days or more then it's very likely to impact customer retention.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#547

Post by indil »

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.

Um, no. In general, if you tell someone to stop messaging you, they get to send one more message to react to that and tie up the conversation. "OK. You still haven't addressed points A, B, and C, so I still disagree. Let's wrap it up here then." That's perfectly reasonable and polite.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#548

Post by voiceblue »

jchw wrote: post #79

Good write-up, I am taking it somewhat with a grain of salt since I am not really invested in this enough to try to verify it for myself, but unfortunately it doesn't really feel like a huge shock either. Kagi Search is at the very least intriguing, though I honestly didn't find the results very impressive; they seemed alright, but nothing spectacular. The thing that is frustrating is, Google has a massive index, but…

Do you still have the same complaints when selecting “Verbatim” under search tools on Google?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#549

Post by aendruk »

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.

A shirt that looks less like an ad is one I’d actually wear.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#550

Post by Aeolun »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #290
freediver wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Because there’s like a million gotchas hidden along the path to just reliably matching Google search quality

I don’t know about you, but the reason I’m paying for Kagi is because their search results are reliably better than Google.

That may be because all the spam optimizes for Google, but noneless they’ve already done the thing you say they should focus on.

As long as the search quality isn’t compromised it doesn’t matter to me what they do with my money.

Post reply on HN