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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#471

Post by prewett »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #450
theturtletalks wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get OP's take, but freediver is essentially saying that Orion and their other ventures are a part of the vision. To OP and others, it may seem like a side-mission or a waste of resources, but I trust the guy bootstrapping the company with his own money. Hell, Orion is the first Webkit browser where FireFox and Chrome plug-ins work on iOS. If may seem like a misstep, but I see it as calculated. If Kagi search hopes…

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…

How is this different from Hershey funding a school for orphans from its profit, or Microsoft funding Internet Explorer with some of the price you paid for Windows (theoretically), or any business that uses income from its stable products to fund new products? The only thing I can think is that you are not actually satisfied with the product (search results for a month) and so in your mind you are funding R&D of the product you would like (better search results for a month). In which case, getting upset is understandable, but assuming my analysis is correct, the mismatch is that you aren't buying for the product they are actually selling.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#472

Post by themoonisachees »

mrweasel wrote: post #215

Maybe a little off topic, but regarding Orion: Can someone explain to me why every search engine feel like they need to build their own browser, and by build I mean jiggle the handles on Chromium a bit? It seems pointless. I can sort of see why Microsoft would do it, but that's Microsoft wanting a modern browser for their operating system, not DuckDuckGo, Kagi or Ecosia wanting a browser for their search box. Why thi…

Because controlling the browser means you control the default search engine, and that is valuable. If all it takes to do that is repackage chrome then so be it.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#473

Post by _cenw »

andrewmutz wrote: post #383
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…

> This take feels more like being upset about one individual's (Vlad) personal opinions about privacy and politics. But in my opinion, it fails to realize that assigning one person's views to an entire organization is a fallacy. Even if they are the leader. And Vlad didn't even say anything that crazy from a political perspective. "News should not only be about politics" is super reasonable, and I found myself agreei…

It'd be reasonable if it was achievable. News are always colored by politics. And usually the people who want "apolitical" news are just defending the status quo they've internalized as the baseline (which especially in the US is by no means a commonly understood one).

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#474

Post by talldayo »

carlosjobim wrote: post #410
talldayo wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So what? Why do you get upset about it, when nobody is forcing you to buy it?

Because this isn't a solution. Kagi doesn't save people from advertising, it creates a premium workaround and sells it at an arbitrary price per-customer. It's software-as-a-service, a SAAS, built more for the 1,000 true fans rather than the 100,000,000,000 clueless web users. That's just another business - perhaps a kinder and more transparent business - but a sinkhole of regressive moneygrubbing all the same.

> It's ten dollars.

Which is ten dollars more (per month!) than most people pay for a search engine. If you're the sort of person that just flippantly subscribes to that, then yes, you have lost track of the value of a dollar in my eyes. Like I said - you can host your own search engine and pay for your own top-level domain at that kinda price. It's absurd, I'd protest it on-principle even if I was upset with my current search provider.

There's room for this sort of startup in the world, but they've already lost if they don't offer a free tier. Google will hoover up their potential customers like nobody's business until they take the 98% seriously.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#475

Post by soraminazuki »

recursivegirth wrote: post #264
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…

I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. Your gut got you this far, but to be a profitable company you are going to need to consider the advice and concerns of your stakeholders. Based on your current description, you have two stakeholders (yourself + customers). If the venture fails, you will ask yourself if you listened enough. Be proactive, address concerns, do not put yourself in a defensive position. E…

The problem is, there are many customers. You should listen, but that doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything or submit to every demand. I for one find Orion useful and it would be a bummer if it was scrapped because of a single comment on HN. Also, “I lost faith in a company because it made T-shirts” sounds a bit hyperbolic to take seriously IMO.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#476

Post by Valodim »

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.

How much would you drop for a lifetime license of a product like this?

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#477

Post by voiceblue »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #321

Kagi is really given a LOT of space on HackerNews for something that doesn't even have 25,000 users.

I was also shocked to see this number given how frequently the product is mentioned on here. Makes me wonder what the Venn diagram of HN and Kagi users is like.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#478

Post by infecto »

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 think the difference being that the niche customer based with Kagi is what will keep the lights on going forward. People share these feelings because they love the product and want to see it continue. Instead of taking it as hostile, it really comes from a place of love and wanting to see success. Very little to do with how you see it.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#479

Post by Semaphor »

a_vanderbilt wrote: post #465
elektor wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a live tracker of subscribers, 25,785 at time of posting comment. https://kagi.com/stats

Honestly I'm astonished there are only that many.

How? For the vast, vast majority of people, paying for search is insane. And that includes the people who pay for other services.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#480

Post by infecto »

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…

Appreciate the response. I hope while some of it, including mine might come off as critical or uninformed, it truly comes from a place of love for the search product.

I still don't agree with the shirts and I think the overarching point is the shirts seem like a common theme of trying to do too much. I hope my thinking is not true and I wish the best success because I love Kagi.

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