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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#401

Post by amelius »

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…

Instead of giving away t-shirts, can't you make the AI tools open source? They are clearly not up to the task yet so you might as well build a nice AI community first.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#402

Post by vel0city »

danpalmer wrote: post #237
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…

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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#403

Post by freediver »

amelius wrote: post #401
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…

Instead of giving away t-shirts, can't you make the AI tools open source? They are clearly not up to the task yet so you might as well build a nice AI community first.

We are not developing LLM models.

AI tools that Kagi uses like vector database search and LLM connectors are already open source.

You can find these in our Github:

https://github.com/kagisearch/

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#404

Post by 65 »

I wouldn't trust this article. The author seems to be a terminally online person with crab mentality. The arguments aren't particularly persuasive and seem to be obsessive and emotional about a random paid search engine. Move along.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#405

Post by freediver »

Spivak wrote: post #376
freediver wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this comment is the one that finally made Orion click for me from a business perspective. Without it you're sharecropping on land owned by your direct competitors who fund their browsers through money coming in from search. If you ever encroach on their revenue even a little bit they'll fight you tooth and nail. I think it's a crazy ambitious bet but I can see why you're making it.

Lack of ambition was never a problem I had :)

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#406

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

65 wrote: post #404

I wouldn't trust this article. The author seems to be a terminally online person with crab mentality. The arguments aren't particularly persuasive and seem to be obsessive and emotional about a random paid search engine. Move along.

I wouldn't trust this comment. The arguments aren't particularly persuasive and seem to be dismissive and reactionary about a random person's opinion. Move along.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#407

Post by lolinder »

erickhill wrote: post #318
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 can't stand the randomness of how posts seem to be getting flagged more and more on HN. Seems like if a post is flagged and killed a reason should be given somewhere on the page by the flagger. Educate us on why our discussions should be off-limits, please. It would also be interesting to see if certain topics are always flagged by the same individuals and patterns emerge.

FWIW, this one got unflagged pretty quickly.

I didn't flag it, but I came close just because the tone of the piece is so sensational and needlessly aggressive. I left it put because it's the first negative Kagi piece I've seen and I didn't want to silence an alternative perspective, but the quality was definitely below what I hope to see on the front page.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#408

Post by FireBeyond »

Dayshine wrote: post #160
infecto wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I understand your comment, you are suggesting that they went and raised money to make t-shirts? Not upset in the slightest, I love Kagi search and want to see it continue. Merch is a solved problem and there was no reason to bring it in-house and make such a big announcement around it.

I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations. The difference they don't tell you about their internal accounting so you don't join the dots. Start ups burn money on silly things like offices way too nice for what they need all the time. That's much closer to unethical than a company with no…

> I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations.

Bradford Shellhammer (fab.com) wanting to speed run getting his United Global Services (invite only, elite tier, qualification criteria believed to be $50K annual base fare spend or 150K miles/year) so would fly back and forth between New York and Frankfurt every week, first class, while laying off employees left right and center.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#409

Post by freediver »

number6 wrote: post #306
freediver wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi CEO here. I'd concede that it was a bad choice of words but also the screenshot was taken out of context. What I meant to say is that anonymity and privacy are two different things and that most people really need just their privacy respected, not be truly anonymous in life. I also had a narrow view back then of what people considered by anonymity (for example considering VPNs as something giving them anonymity…

Your grasp of personal information management under GDPR seems to be lacking, particularly regarding the roles and responsibilities of data controllers and what personal information are under GDPR. If you're operating within this jurisdiction, I would strongly recommend consulting with a GDPR expert. Non-compliance can lead to significant fines. Additionally, if this user were located in Europe, and he already sounds…

You are correct and my confidence at the time came from the fact that we are not in the business of selling user data, do not collect it or ever need it so GDPR was not affecting us (in my mind).

I had no business discussing sophisticated policy matters on a public Discord, and yet I did it in good faith open to learning something new like it happened many times on our Discord. People do this all the time. The difference is when a CEO of a company does it, it has extra weight and this is why CEOs usually do not discuss these things with users. Lesson learned.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#410

Post by carlosjobim »

talldayo wrote: post #307
thisisjasononhn wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

My thoughts exactly. It's stomach-churning to hear people talk about improving search and privacy for all, before putting it behind a prohibitively expensive (and probably inordinately profitable) subscription. I'll just say the quiet part out-loud: expecting people to pay $10+/month for a search engine is a pipe-dream that rules out 95-98% of the world population. People buy food with that money, they pay rent, they…

> I'll just say the quiet part out-loud: expecting people to pay $10+/month for a search engine is a pipe-dream that rules out 95-98% of the world population.

So what? Why do you get upset about it, when nobody is forcing you to buy it? Most people will not be interested in paying for search, whether they can afford it or not. That's just what a niche product is, most people will not be interested. What I produce in my job is certainly uninteresting for 95-98% of the world population, and the same is probably true for your job.

> Kagi's payment-upfront mentality is unrealistic for everyone except the most well-paid Bay Area engineers.

It's ten dollars.

> At this point you really might as well just invest in your own Searx instance, it's plenty cheaper.

Yes, that might be a good solution for 95-98% of the world population.

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