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

281–290 of 639 posts

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#281

Post by wetpaws »

tokai wrote: post #192
yreg wrote: post #29

I've read the first third of the article and I didn't get what's the author's problem with Kagi. What do they care how many employees Kagi has or how much they spend on t-shirts. Then I scrolled through the rest of it and read the very last screenshot. That one looks pretty bad. > people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than a 100 in the entire world. definitely not typical Kagi users > unless t…

Ouch. I have been on the fence about paying for Kagi for some time now. Will definitely not touch any project presided over by someone with such a viewpoint.

Why do you care about a viewpoint of CEO if the product is good?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#282

Post by catapart »

sumeno wrote: post #129
lolinder wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the sense that Vlad is combative, just (over)confident. There are no personal attacks, no aggression, no flaming or flamebait. He just is very confident in his approach and doesn't slow down to listen to criticism. Not the best approach as a founder, but not combative.

If someone says "please don't email me about this anymore" and you continue to email them you are being combative

This comment, taken as a response to the parent or just as general advice about life, is so entirely bereft of anything objectionable, and is so intrinsically reasonable that its status as 'downvoted' (assumed from the grey text color) is a blemish on HN's commentariat.

Put more simply: it takes a weird, broken logic to find fault in the idea that a person who won't stop emailing you, after being told to, isn't "combative".

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#283

Post by RhysU »

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…

> Kagi does no paid advertising

Because of adverse selection?

Users that are users because of marketing are somehow different?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#284

Post by WirelessGigabit »

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…

Sounds like a cool place to work. I'll check back for an opening in TypeScript / Rust backend.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#285

Post by ravenstine »

Sakos wrote: post #19
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…

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 maybe that's because it just doesn't scale. Nevertheless, I would find a lot more value in a search engine that returns exact matches. Someone will probably reply saying that Kagi, DDG, or The Google do exact matches with quotes, but this is not true. When it works, you've just gotten lucky. At best, it will filter out inexact matches, but that doesn't mean it will actually return every exact match in the index.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#286

Post by eloisius »

karaterobot wrote: post #241
emushack wrote: post #227

I really don't understand why people are so upset about the T-shirts. Like in the grand scheme of things, who cares? If I invested money (I didn't) in Kagi, I would expect some of that money to be spent on marketing. Marketers often do experiments, some of which go well, and others that don't. Only time tells. This take feels more like being upset about one individual's (Vlad) personal opinions about privacy and poli…

I mean, the main value proposition for Kagi is privacy. They need to be really focused on maintaining trust when privacy is their brand. I won't condemn the company based on some out of context quotes from the founder, but those screenshots weren't reassuring either. Not paying taxes and focusing on adding AI to your search doesn't make me more confident that they're protecting my data. It makes me more likely to thi…

I don’t think privacy was ever Kagi’s value prop. That’s Brave. Kagi’s value prop is that it’s search that actually works.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#287

Post by Dayshine »

jacekm wrote: post #233
Dayshine wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Would you be upset if they just paid themselves a higher salary?

Do you think they charge too much?

Do they charge more than you think it's worth?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#288

Post by freediver »

RhysU wrote: post #283
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…

> Kagi does no paid advertising Because of adverse selection? Users that are users because of marketing are somehow different?

I meant digital advertising, like ads in search engines and websites - stuff that has gone out of control and we are actively fighting against. I would consider a billboard or sponsoring a podcast for example.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#289

Post by theshrike79 »

thisisjasononhn wrote: post #223
iowahansen wrote: post #23

Happy Kagi user here. I'm gladly paying $25 per month because of all their AI features, which work well for me overall. Yes, I could set up API keys on OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Mistral and get a similar experience for less, but I prefer the convenience of their interface and have clean search results bundled into the experience. I will continue to recommend them and hope that T-Shirt becomes available soon.

Or you could spend $25 a month on a dedicated server and run SearxNG or Yacy? Good lord what an excessive amount of money that is to search the web ...

If either of those was even close to the quality of Kagi searches, ever would start a new search engine startup

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#290

Post by MichaelZuo »

freediver wrote: post #273
mda wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Kagi does no paid advertising" I remember Daniel King's PowerPlayChess channel recently started promoting Kagi, doesn't this count as paid advertising or is this deal something else?

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 path to just reliably matching Google search quality circa 2010 in the 2024 environment. Let alone delivering a high-quality browser, AI tools, etc., on top.

Post reply on HN