They lost my faith when they partnered with brave
What a stupid statement. You do realize that they partnered with Microsoft Bing for their search results from the very beginning, right? In what world is Brave worse than Microsoft?
I Lost Faith in Kagi
81–90 of 639 posts
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#82Jesus this approach to privacy is just awful. "it's not data collection if the user volunteers it" I mean wtf. "emails aren't PII because you can use a burner".
GDPR was designed to protect consumers from companies like this.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#83> Oh and they own a t-shirt factory. Maybe I'm being pedantic but Kagi doesn't own a T-shirt factory and presenting it as such is a bad faith argument that does make me question the author. They very clearly point out that they worked with a print shop in Serbia to make the shirts.
That makes a whole lot more sense considering Vlad is from former Yugoslavia
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#84I'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…
> What do they care how many employees Kagi has or how much they spend on t-shirts. Spending a third of your round on t-shirt manufacturing equipment is possibly not the best sign of the focused leadership that will bring your company success in a difficult market.
True, but what do I as a customer care? It's not like I'm building some business on their APIs or anything.
If they go down, I will switch to another search engine… no need to do so preemptively from my PoV.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#85Earlier 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.
Tldr: you can't just spread a very negative opinion about someones hard work and then plug your ears shut for any kind of non-symathetic interaction.
In my eyes this rationale would make sense if there was no backstory to this. If there was no preceeding blogpost, I'd consider Vlads messages pure spam.
But the context here is different: The author wrote a very critical, and clearly opinionated blogpost. There was clear intention in engaging with this subject.
Now the author seems to want to avoid responsibility, while Vlads attempt to react to a public hit piece with a respectful conversation was honestly the best way to handle this.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#86I 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…
> 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.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#87I am increasingly convinced that the successor/replacement to Google will not be a more clever, AI-powered search engine, but a hyper-curated collection of links, selected by people who understand what good content is. Sort of like Yahoo in the pre-Google days.
I think this is only going to become more apparent once AI-generated content takes over the web.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#88Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
Wow, strong Tommy Tallarico vibes there.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#89Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
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.
This post suggests the author has tried this already, has had these discussions and has reached the natural end of that process.
I've also had a similar discussion with Vlad on comments here, he definitely doesn't try to view things from other people's perspectives.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#90I use Kagi and will continue to do so until it no longer suits my needs. Frankly, it's still the best search engine. I temporarily subscribed to the AI tier and found the expert assistant genuinely useful. The t-shirt thing is inexplicable.
Yeah, the AI is good (too expensive IMO) - it's really nice being able to choose between the best models from all the providers.
> too expensive IMO
Except it's less expensive than just going for the providers. Which is puzzling to say the least.