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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#591

Post by whilenot-dev »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #512
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a stretch to justify paying for search, but I do it. To find out I actually pay for a bunch of stuff I don't care about when search is still a work in progress, naw bro, I'm good. I don't go to a restaurant that has a partial menu to fund a race team. Cool that was your reason for opening the place, you sunk a ton of money into something you think it super cool, but I'm actually here for the food and ignored you…

If this if your reaction, you may not know how a bunch of companies work.

...such a weird response given freedivers announcement of "thinking out of the box".

The vision of a company shouldn't be much of a concern to paying customers of an existing product.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#592

Post by michaelcampbell »

catapart wrote: post #156
edude03 wrote: post #115

(this articles formatting was super hard to read, I love the web 1.0 "just get it out there" vibe but man I wish CSS had a good "reasonable default" for lots of text) I'm a huge fan of kagi and have been paying for it for as long as paying for it has been possible - that said, I think the author is spot on about the long term viability of the project considering their limited funding, limited employees, very wide (ye…

FWIW, my assumption here is that people who publish like this page are expecting users to use a "reader view" and they're trying not to introduce any styles at all, so as not to conflict with the styles that the reader view will apply. Otherwise, ' "reasonable default" for lots of text ' is something that browsers provide, using the "system" fonts. Applying a font-family to the entire html or body tags will do the jo…

> FWIW, my assumption here is that people who publish like this page are expecting users to use a "reader view" and they're trying not to introduce any styles at all, so as not to conflict with the styles that the reader view will apply.

I had to, just to get past the first couple sentences.

Sadly no reader view can divine where paragraphs should be, but aren't. This is just lazy editing.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#593

Post by lupire »

balex wrote: post #562
sleepybrett wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. 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

This was difficult to read. Not a hint of empathy on that thread.

It really does call into question everything in the origt blog post. The emails from the CEO are such a breath of fresh air. Even the typos are endearing. It reads like an immediate, frank, unfiltered reaction, giving an honest expression of his values. and he didn't lose his cool while being repeatedly taunted by the blog author who only wanted a one-way attack amd the last word without listening to a rebuttal.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#594

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

pxtail wrote: post #563
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a second there, I thought you were talking about Vlad! Based on the exchanges, Vlad is both extremely combative and unwilling to accept the possibility that he is wrong (which he is here). Being aggressively wrong is no way to go through life. Vlad should be more humble, and open to being wrong, rather than being unnecessarily belligerent.

> Being aggressively wrong is no way to go through life. Vlad should be more humble, and open to being wrong, rather than being unnecessarily belligerent. I think that if he had different type of personality then he wouldn't start this company - a regular, humble, humiliated, developer would just tremble, sweat and shiver at the thought of starting business straight competing with core Google, MS products. He needs t…

I think the image you paint of a "regular" person explains why some folks view this blog post as a opportunity for Vlad to learn, and others view it as a "hit piece" that he must "get a chance to respond to", as if this were combat (and as if he didn't get tens of chances to respond more effectively in the discord conversations we see).

There is a great strength in "I might be wrong here, I'd like to learn more" than makes even the most hardheaded wrongness look weak, and if you look at the history of effective CEOs, you'll likely notice that inability to entertain the possibility you might be wrong tends to be a liability.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#595

Post by lupire »

freediver wrote: post #497
gentleman11 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, significant part of our effort is to build technology that detects LLM spam. We have a working model that detects LLM generated text with 90% accuracy currently. The plan is to integrate in search results and make available as an API.

10% of infinity is infinity.

That's as good as 0% accuracy.

And AI text will keep changing.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#596

Post by smitty1e »

The tension between free software, ethics, and running a business continues to fascinate.

If there were a way for an FSF-adjacent company to have a user-owned business model that could both:

a) maintain fidelity with FSF goals and ethics

b) also do the hard-nosed business decisions that are needful.

As a decades-long FSF member, I'd cheerfully support subscribing to a set of email/search services, assuming technical heft.

The two mindsets seem hard to harmonize.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#597

Post by Closi »

freediver wrote: post #280
Closi wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - but why do it is the main point? Why not focus on doing one thing properly? Although you seem to obviously be attracting enough money so it's up to you how to spend/burn it :)

Because I think you can not succeed as a search company without a browser. And I think that both and Orion and Kagi have proper focus. There are bugs yes, but they are not there due to lack of focus, otherwise every product out there has lack of focus.

Why though? That doesn’t really answer the question.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#598

Post by antifa »

jorvi wrote: post #571
carlosjobim wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. The only way a customer speaks is with money. If people like what you sell, you'll have more customers speaking with their wallet. If they don't then they tell you so by not purchasing what you sell. Internet commenters (such as myself) do not represent all customers or even a majority. People who are happy with a product usually see no reason to give feedback – esp…

Terrible take. A complaint is worth twice a compliment because complaints are actionable. And both are worth more than silence. That doesn’t mean a business needs to acquiesce to every little demand. But “just listen to the money” is a horrible path for product improvement.

> because complaints are actionable

plenty of actionable complaints are just wild goose chases to nowhere.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#599

Post by aembleton »

lttlrck wrote: post #351
dustincoates wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Kagi, I'm an early paying subscriber, but I think the quality of their results is overstated. Anytime you get past result #5 or so, the results just get _weird_. If you have to do deep research on something, you'll often get pages that seemingly have nothing to do with the query, or these class of pages that seem to be poor answers to common queries aggregated together.

DDG is like that. If it can't find any more matches it seems to spam random results. I tried Kagi and really enjoyed it but the pricing tier doesn't sit right with me, it's not that much better than DDG for my purposes . All these monthly subs start to add up. I'd be happier if there was a lifetime tier.

> DDG is like that.

DDG and Kagi both use Bing data. That could be the reason

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#600

Post by rrrix1 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #420
silviot wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers. I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here. I assume many people are on the same boat, so I wouldn't be so sure about that.

> I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here. Perhaps I should have said "target customers" where I said "customers", I don't know. But it should not be surprising that "being an HN user" correlates strongly with "finds out about things on HN".

Kagi does zero advertising, only word of mouth (or from social news sites).

I would strongly bet their primary source of customers came via a HN referral.

We are literally their Target Customers.

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