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 always been kind of clunky and not something I want to pay for.
- AI tools, I get the multiple pivots and I do believe that more recent advancements in ML/AI will make search a better experience but I do wish they had a little more focus.
- 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.
- I don't care about email, I don't care about other tools, make a great search experience first. Release all of the AI enhancements that you think will make sense, focus, focus, focus.
Edit: As I was adding my comment this post flagged and marked dead. Sometimes HN is weird.
> 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 and giving away 20,000 t-shirts for its users.
- Kagi is not a typical VC funded startup.
- It is company I bootstrapped by going all in (meaning I put millions of dollars of my money into it).
- After all these years building it, we are lucky to have such incredibly passionate user community.
- That community is 100% responsible for Kagi's growth as a business through word of mouth (Kagi does no paid advertising).
- We are also famously taking a firm stance against ad-tech, so conventional advertising is not something I want to do.
- To do something as crazy as to start a company that builds a paid search engine and browser you obviously need to be thinking out of the box.
So combine all of this together and I thought that sending a t-shirt to all the people who supported us along the journey made a lot of sense.
The only thing I did not count on is how difficult will be to pull this off as I did not want to settle with less than premium quality for these t-shirts. As a result they will be delayed (my best guess is July/August) and I apologize for that to our users. In hindsight, we probably should have opted out for something easier to pull off (someone mentioned a billboard on 101, that would certainly be much easier).
This did not jeopardize Kagi's finances in any way at any point, nor I would do anything like that ever (as I said I am all in and have everything to lose, so I run a fiscally responsible business). In fact, Kagi has turned profitable recently.
This has also not impacted our ability to hire (we went from 10 people twelve months ago to 25+ now) and it did not impact our ability to ship a great product (check Kagi and Orion changelogs). I would venture to say that most Kagi users agree that Kagi is getting better and better every week with great speed.
So would I do it again? Well let's wait and see what we have in store for hitting 50,000 members mark :)
I'm a deep technical nerd, but I approach Kagi from a basic user perspective.
Things I love and can't live without:
- When I search for something, I don't have to deal with weeks of whatever I searched for coming up in ads on every web page I visit.
- I don't feel like "the man" is snooping on me in some sort of weird dark social credit score thing. (I literally got a call from Google once offering me a job based on what I'd been searching for. Flattering, but totally freaked me out)
- The quality is good for non-local things
- I'm the customer, not the product
- That makes things like blocking or enhancing sites possible
What I'd like to see improve:
- I don't want AI. I don't want summaries, I don't want hallucinations, I don't want assistants. I don't want it.
- Local results and map integration. When I click on a local result, actually having the map go to the result I clicked on. Currently this doesn't work well.
- Hours for local businesses.
I find myself still going to google for these things, and while it doesn't seem like a lot, aside from work stuff those kinds of searches are probably 80% of what I need. Where can we go for dinner tonight that's near by and still open? Who has all-you-can-eat deals near by? Where can I find some floating shelves to put in my office near by?
Those are all examples of things that Google does really well, and I don't have much luck with on Kagi.
I agree with the author that I'd rather see the quality there improve before AI features.
What changes you have in mind to search functionality? I feel like the core search is rock solid as is, but they address search quality reports on their feedback forums all the time.
To me, the AI features (and specifically how they are only used when you opt in per query) are enhancing search, and the time they have been allocating to those features has continuously improved Kagis utility to me.
Note: I subscribe to Kagi Ultimate, so I use some AI features that are not available in the base plans.
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 set money on fire.
I've been using Kagi only for a couple of months, so I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase. Perhaps they're still searching for their identity. Very much hope they rest independents and good at web searches.
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.
I'm a subscriber simply because their search is far better than any available alternative. That's the primary thing I want from them and so far they're delivering it at a cost I consider fair.
Their other projects are not interesting or useful to me, but so far I can simply ignore them. Yes, on some level I wish they'd focus and quit wasting money and energy on things I don't care about, but that's really not my affair.
The one growing reservation I have is with regard to Vlad's/Kagi's actual, boots-on-the-ground approach to privacy. Kagi necessarily has the ability to know more about me than almost any other company. I want to see them demonstrate strong and unwavering commitment to respecting and protecting my privacy - through policy, technology, and careful and continuous vetting of partners. Expressed disinterest in collecting or capitalizing on my data is not enough, and seeing Vlad's communications in which he casually shrugs or responsibility-shifts to a third-party heightens my concern.
For now, I remain a customer - but a wary one. I've stopped actively recommending Kagi personally and professionally because as a privacy advocate, it increasingly feels irresponsible to do so.
As a paying user since day 1, I do not give a rat's arse about AI. In fact, I have moved away from Google because they have focused so much on AI their search got worse to the point of being useless.
I paid for a good search engine that respects my queries and does not try to outsmart me. The more Kagi focuses on AI, and making an """intelligent""" search engine, basically replicating Google's missteps, is the day I stop giving them money. I've already been noticing some of my keywords are being ignored or reinterpreted. Please stop that.
I don't care about email either. I am paying Fastmail for it, and I certainly know better than to attach my search history to my email account, especially when it's from an AI company. Is the goal here to copy Google?
To all startup owners: there is more to software quality and user experience than trying to fit the AI buzzword in anything you do. Stop following the hype and focus on building a damn good product.
100% agreed. I was disappointed when Kagi launched their AI thing but I had hoped it was just a small side project or something. If it's truly a major focus for them I'll be ditching my subscription. Also not jazzed about their browser and email etc.
The T-shirt thing is dumb and a waste of funds, but TFA describing it as "owning" a T-shirt factory is an exaggeration that makes me question most of the framing of the rest of the article. They partnered with an existing entity in Serbia, what they did set up was the means to distribute them. Still not a great look and definitely still a waste of funds, but if every criticism takes this same form—take a legitimate criticism and blow it out of proportion with exaggerated language—then it's important to take the article with plenty of salt.
My own experience has been that what I get month to month is worth what I pay. If the project is sustainable, then I'll get to enjoy it into the future. If not, I'll get to enjoy it while I can.
A search engine isn't like an email provider or even a web browser, there's basically no lock in that makes transitioning later difficult if something changes for the worse.
Sure, but what happens with your information after that is also very important. What's for me very concerning after reading the article is not a T-Shirt factory or burning budget, but the their attitude towards privacy.
It's so silly. Google/Bing are wasting money too but the difference is you don't see it. And yes, we're "paying" to use those services too, just not with our own money.
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 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.
As a service, I like Kagi. Both in principle, and in practice. I find the "summarize this page" feature to be very useful. I also like the idea of paying for value, rather than being forced to feed the advertising beast. So I pay for value. If it stops being valuable, I will stop paying. I care about privacy, but I also realize that we live in a world where there are serious limits on the amount of privacy that can be expected. So I have to just do the best I can with what is available. Kagi is at least an improvement on the standard "eyeballs are the product" business model.
> 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 agreeing with him much more than the person he was talking to.
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 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 think "someday they will need a little cash infusion to keep the lights on; at that point they'll begin to consider collecting my data and selling it".
Lori seems (from the blog post and the subsequent email chain with the CEO) to be unnecessarily combative and most definitely too emotionally invested in Kagi.
You're paying, what, 10, 25 USD - are you getting a good service for it? If not, unsubscribe, if yes, what's the problem? Sounds like they're profitable now, so little risk of the service dissapearing.
Unnecessary drama by people who live for drama. My only advice for Vlad would be to not get caught up in it.
People pay $0 to Google/Meta/Twitter/TikTok for their base level offerings, and their privacy policy is valid to discuss and criticize. Does it somehow become less important just because they are also getting paid money?
People discuss Apple's commitment to privacy and if it is real or adequate.
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.
Some other posters are claiming Vlad is combative. He’s not, he’s just direct. I’ve given feedback on Kagi/orion and Vlad just asks for clarity pretty directly.
American culture and customer support likes to blow smoke up your ass while saying no. Other cultures and Vlad don’t do that.
.. to emotionally invested. She saw some stuff on their discord from the founder that was honestly .. weird if not just plain neglegent (the gdpr arguments, he's wrong for the record) .. the tax stuff. She posted an article.
He reached out to her via email to set up a call. She demurred and asked him to stop contacting her, he persisted and wrote a petulant novella of an email. She asserted that he stop contacting her again. He seems to have finally taken the hint.
This is a guy who seems like he can't stand to be wrong about anything, not a business I would bet on with my wallet.
(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 (yet unproven) interests AND a leader who's maybe not so receptive to feedback.
For example I was part of the Orion beta and I left feedback in the discord that it took ~30 seconds on the then top of the line iPhone (13 Pro Max?) to load the interface which made it hard to use and I thought it was unreasonably slow and he said something like "that's not slow it's totally reasonable" and since then I decided it wasn't worth leaving any more feedback and have since left the community.
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 job, because system fonts don't need to download or load into the browser. And since you can even specify the specific system font you want to use, you have a few options like serif or sans-serif.
All of that aside, if I applied a system font and your screen reader applies a different one, what was the point of the extra css? So that's my guess as to why people do this because, like you, I find it very hard to read.
If you're curious, though, Firefox has a built-in reader mode and I think Safari does, too. Last I checked, Chrome's was behind a flag. And then, of course, there are extensions (but extensions to read plain HTML docs seems exactly backwards, so...)
I think a lot of this can be ascribed to "startups don't always do the right thing" and you have to learn a lot over time.
That's said, I've been a customer for a while and the t-shirt debacle is one of the dumbest things I've seen a small company do. Even if you try and call it marketing cost (no name on the shirt makes that hard), there's no way it was the most efficient use of money for marketing.
And setting up infrastructure for it wreaks of "I'm bored with search let's do t-shirts." it completes goes against "do one thing really well" and just seems like a waste. If I were one of those investors and my money got spent on that I'd be really upset.
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.
My two cents on Kagi raising the price of their subscription to cover their back taxes:
- Businesses that’ll eventually need to collect sales tax should add sales tax automation software to their stack from the beginning (even if they don’t expect to hit the threshold in a given jurisdiction anytime soon). Compliance can get really complicated really quickly -- and what founder wakes up and prefers doing taxes over actually building their product?
- Avalara is probably the most well-known one (Box uses them) but they have an implementation fee that we couldn’t stomach as a bootstrapped business https://www.avalara.com/us/en/index.html
- We ended up going with a fellow startup called Kintsugi because they had a free option that connects to Stripe and didn’t have an implementation fee. We probably won’t even hit any thresholds to need to file until 2025 (cross your fingers it’s earlier!!) but they said they’ll email us when we do, here’s their page https://trykintsugi.com/
- Anything related to compliance makes me anxious so this is great because I don’t even have to think about it until I actually need to, though hopefully not under the same circumstances as Kagi :)
I 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.
This assumes the breadth of "things I will ever want to search in the future" is contained in whatever these "people" consider to be useful knowledge. Should we create such a group and have them thoughtfully consider every present and past field of knowledge, language, place on earth, political/religious viewpoint, and so on.
I’m working on a pinboard competitor (that is, essentially, just reviving development of it)
One thing I want to look into is ranking algorithms based on individual engagement. So, if you save lots of stories from a site, it ranks higher. If lots of people save stories from a site, it also ranks higher, ect
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.
I just cancelled my Kagi subscription over the weekend. Some of the ideas in the article resonate (the dev team seems spread way too thin) but I also decided that the main product just wasn't distinct enough. The lens and quick answers features were nice, but otherwise the search results were not that different from Google's -- Having just switched back, I haven't noticed a significant difference.
I also think this product might be a bit too late. GPT4 has been out for over a year now, and it's changed how I look for answers. I tried FastGPT but like the author I found it lacking. As it stands, Perplexity feels more like the future of search than Kagi.
I don't find anything outlined in the post particularly bad, but what does bother me is that it seems like Kagi's founder cares a lot about what people think on Discord. Like the author said, most people never touch it and don't know or care what is said on there. If you want to engage with people, why not do it in a more open space? The closed nature of Discord chats means the only way to reference them is through screenshots, and that breeds drama as we're seeing here.
From my own experience, the AI built-in to Kagi is excellent. I frequently suffix my query with a question mark to trigger their AI responder (it responds based on the content of a few top results, with citations), and the results are almost always great, and spare me the need to open each of the sites individually and look through them.
I don't care about Orion and Email, but what I'm getting right now in terms of search experience is definitely worth the cost.
I was a Kagi subscriber for about 5 months. I had noticed a slight improvement for random software development related content vs my previous search engine (bing). After cancelling 6 months ago I don't miss Kagi at all.
The thing that made me cancel my subscription was one specific interaction.
One day I was trying to buy tickets to a podcast tour, the sales for tickets was set to open at a specific time and I was searching for the purchase page at the moment of opening. I frantically searched "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets", the first search failed to bring relevant results. I tried "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets $YEAR", nothing.
I tried many searches for about a minute along these lines and thought maybe their site just wasn't public and I needed a specific link. Then I typed my original "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets" query into bing and got the exact correct webpage on the first try.
Bought the tickets I wanted and immediately cancelled my subscription to Kagi.
This article comes across so unhinged it almost works as an advertisement, except for the founder dismissing privacy issues...
I'm happy to hear Kagi are creating an e-mail service though, I've been looking to get away from Microsoft 365 since I'm not really using the meat of it. I hope they allow multiple aliases per users and perhaps add a masking service as well.
Holy ****, how much drugs does it take for a search startup of 8 people trying to compete with Google to do this:
Kagi: "The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database. So, we basically ended up owning a merch production operation end-to-end, just so that we could ensure premium quality of these t-shirts!
Now, you may ask, why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts?
We would not be here without our early adopters (you!) and we deemed it important to pause, reflect and show gratitude.
We acknowledge that our journey is a marathon, not a sprint. With a long road ahead, supporting our member community is both rewarding and meaningful.
Simply put, wearing the Doggo t-shirt is an incredibly awesome experience."
That's a classic stimulant-fueled side quest bender
Good write-up, I am taking it somewhat with a grain of salt since I am not really invested in this enough to try to verify it for myself, but unfortunately it doesn't really feel like a huge shock either.
Kagi Search is at the very least intriguing, though I honestly didn't find the results very impressive; they seemed alright, but nothing spectacular. The thing that is frustrating is, Google has a massive index, but searching it is an exercise in frustration because it feels like it is basically rewriting your query. Even using "" and + no longer seems to be good at ensuring certain things appear in the results, and so I sometimes try, in desperation, to simply repeat the term I want to emphasize multiple times in the query, which finally sometimes allows me to find things I already know exists. God forbid you wanted to find something you didn't know existed, because in that case, you might never realize Google is fucking up what you're looking for; it has the answer, but it's hidden in a sea of Google-funded blogspam. What a mess.
Will there ever again be a profitable search engine that works as well as Google used to? The answer might be no, and this bums me out.
> And he is very, very much the type that believes "not everything is political"
Well, at least we agree on one thing, I have always felt the "everything is political" angle was one of those semantic technicalities, kind of like saying "actually, the glass is always full, just sometimes it's full of air". The lack of a well-defined boundary between "political" issues and non-political issues should not be used as an excuse to drive politics and politically-charged discussion into otherwise rather mundane and apolitical things. I suppose it's not really that important, but this is one of those Internet-era brainrot issues I dislike most. Of course, maybe this is actually trying to make a more nuanced point, but it being phrased like this activated my "uhm, actually" response impulse.
[+] [-] infecto|1 year ago|reply
- 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 always been kind of clunky and not something I want to pay for.
- AI tools, I get the multiple pivots and I do believe that more recent advancements in ML/AI will make search a better experience but I do wish they had a little more focus.
- 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.
- I don't care about email, I don't care about other tools, make a great search experience first. Release all of the AI enhancements that you think will make sense, focus, focus, focus.
Edit: As I was adding my comment this post flagged and marked dead. Sometimes HN is weird.
[+] [-] freediver|1 year ago|reply
Kagi founder here and I want to clarify the train of thoughts around Kagi printing and giving away 20,000 t-shirts for its users.
- Kagi is not a typical VC funded startup.
- It is company I bootstrapped by going all in (meaning I put millions of dollars of my money into it).
- After all these years building it, we are lucky to have such incredibly passionate user community.
- That community is 100% responsible for Kagi's growth as a business through word of mouth (Kagi does no paid advertising).
- We are also famously taking a firm stance against ad-tech, so conventional advertising is not something I want to do.
- To do something as crazy as to start a company that builds a paid search engine and browser you obviously need to be thinking out of the box.
So combine all of this together and I thought that sending a t-shirt to all the people who supported us along the journey made a lot of sense.
The only thing I did not count on is how difficult will be to pull this off as I did not want to settle with less than premium quality for these t-shirts. As a result they will be delayed (my best guess is July/August) and I apologize for that to our users. In hindsight, we probably should have opted out for something easier to pull off (someone mentioned a billboard on 101, that would certainly be much easier).
This did not jeopardize Kagi's finances in any way at any point, nor I would do anything like that ever (as I said I am all in and have everything to lose, so I run a fiscally responsible business). In fact, Kagi has turned profitable recently.
This has also not impacted our ability to hire (we went from 10 people twelve months ago to 25+ now) and it did not impact our ability to ship a great product (check Kagi and Orion changelogs). I would venture to say that most Kagi users agree that Kagi is getting better and better every week with great speed.
So would I do it again? Well let's wait and see what we have in store for hitting 50,000 members mark :)
[+] [-] claytongulick|1 year ago|reply
Things I love and can't live without:
- When I search for something, I don't have to deal with weeks of whatever I searched for coming up in ads on every web page I visit.
- I don't feel like "the man" is snooping on me in some sort of weird dark social credit score thing. (I literally got a call from Google once offering me a job based on what I'd been searching for. Flattering, but totally freaked me out)
- The quality is good for non-local things
- I'm the customer, not the product
- That makes things like blocking or enhancing sites possible
What I'd like to see improve:
- I don't want AI. I don't want summaries, I don't want hallucinations, I don't want assistants. I don't want it.
- Local results and map integration. When I click on a local result, actually having the map go to the result I clicked on. Currently this doesn't work well.
- Hours for local businesses.
I find myself still going to google for these things, and while it doesn't seem like a lot, aside from work stuff those kinds of searches are probably 80% of what I need. Where can we go for dinner tonight that's near by and still open? Who has all-you-can-eat deals near by? Where can I find some floating shelves to put in my office near by?
Those are all examples of things that Google does really well, and I don't have much luck with on Kagi.
I agree with the author that I'd rather see the quality there improve before AI features.
[+] [-] Zambyte|1 year ago|reply
What changes you have in mind to search functionality? I feel like the core search is rock solid as is, but they address search quality reports on their feedback forums all the time.
To me, the AI features (and specifically how they are only used when you opt in per query) are enhancing search, and the time they have been allocating to those features has continuously improved Kagis utility to me.
Note: I subscribe to Kagi Ultimate, so I use some AI features that are not available in the base plans.
[+] [-] Dayshine|1 year ago|reply
Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|1 year ago|reply
I'm a full Kagi shill. But I also want the stuff I like to remain stuff I like and reasonable criticism is the path there.
[+] [-] Raed667|1 year ago|reply
i’m glad they spent the time and effort on it.
[+] [-] keyle|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Sakos|1 year ago|reply
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 set money on fire.
[+] [-] neurostimulant|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] laborcontract|1 year ago|reply
If they fail with all of the free marketing they’ve been gifted by this community I can only shake my head.
[+] [-] sirdvd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] erickhill|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mr_machine|1 year ago|reply
Their other projects are not interesting or useful to me, but so far I can simply ignore them. Yes, on some level I wish they'd focus and quit wasting money and energy on things I don't care about, but that's really not my affair.
The one growing reservation I have is with regard to Vlad's/Kagi's actual, boots-on-the-ground approach to privacy. Kagi necessarily has the ability to know more about me than almost any other company. I want to see them demonstrate strong and unwavering commitment to respecting and protecting my privacy - through policy, technology, and careful and continuous vetting of partners. Expressed disinterest in collecting or capitalizing on my data is not enough, and seeing Vlad's communications in which he casually shrugs or responsibility-shifts to a third-party heightens my concern.
For now, I remain a customer - but a wary one. I've stopped actively recommending Kagi personally and professionally because as a privacy advocate, it increasingly feels irresponsible to do so.
[+] [-] sph|1 year ago|reply
I paid for a good search engine that respects my queries and does not try to outsmart me. The more Kagi focuses on AI, and making an """intelligent""" search engine, basically replicating Google's missteps, is the day I stop giving them money. I've already been noticing some of my keywords are being ignored or reinterpreted. Please stop that.
I don't care about email either. I am paying Fastmail for it, and I certainly know better than to attach my search history to my email account, especially when it's from an AI company. Is the goal here to copy Google?
To all startup owners: there is more to software quality and user experience than trying to fit the AI buzzword in anything you do. Stop following the hype and focus on building a damn good product.
[+] [-] mostlysimilar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lolinder|1 year ago|reply
My own experience has been that what I get month to month is worth what I pay. If the project is sustainable, then I'll get to enjoy it into the future. If not, I'll get to enjoy it while I can.
A search engine isn't like an email provider or even a web browser, there's basically no lock in that makes transitioning later difficult if something changes for the worse.
[+] [-] mfiro|1 year ago|reply
Sure, but what happens with your information after that is also very important. What's for me very concerning after reading the article is not a T-Shirt factory or burning budget, but the their attitude towards privacy.
[+] [-] barbazoo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] emushack|1 year ago|reply
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.
As a service, I like Kagi. Both in principle, and in practice. I find the "summarize this page" feature to be very useful. I also like the idea of paying for value, rather than being forced to feed the advertising beast. So I pay for value. If it stops being valuable, I will stop paying. I care about privacy, but I also realize that we live in a world where there are serious limits on the amount of privacy that can be expected. So I have to just do the best I can with what is available. Kagi is at least an improvement on the standard "eyeballs are the product" business model.
[+] [-] andrewmutz|1 year ago|reply
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 agreeing with him much more than the person he was talking to.
[+] [-] danpalmer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Teever|1 year ago|reply
t-shirts are something that people think they can understand, so they speak most at length about it compared to the other things Kagi is doing.
[+] [-] karaterobot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lijok|1 year ago|reply
You're paying, what, 10, 25 USD - are you getting a good service for it? If not, unsubscribe, if yes, what's the problem? Sounds like they're profitable now, so little risk of the service dissapearing.
Unnecessary drama by people who live for drama. My only advice for Vlad would be to not get caught up in it.
[+] [-] HWR_14|1 year ago|reply
People discuss Apple's commitment to privacy and if it is real or adequate.
[+] [-] ImPostingOnHN|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ibash|1 year ago|reply
American culture and customer support likes to blow smoke up your ass while saying no. Other cultures and Vlad don’t do that.
[+] [-] sleepybrett|1 year ago|reply
He reached out to her via email to set up a call. She demurred and asked him to stop contacting her, he persisted and wrote a petulant novella of an email. She asserted that he stop contacting her again. He seems to have finally taken the hint.
This is a guy who seems like he can't stand to be wrong about anything, not a business I would bet on with my wallet.
[+] [-] edude03|1 year ago|reply
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 (yet unproven) interests AND a leader who's maybe not so receptive to feedback.
For example I was part of the Orion beta and I left feedback in the discord that it took ~30 seconds on the then top of the line iPhone (13 Pro Max?) to load the interface which made it hard to use and I thought it was unreasonably slow and he said something like "that's not slow it's totally reasonable" and since then I decided it wasn't worth leaving any more feedback and have since left the community.
[+] [-] catapart|1 year ago|reply
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 job, because system fonts don't need to download or load into the browser. And since you can even specify the specific system font you want to use, you have a few options like serif or sans-serif.
All of that aside, if I applied a system font and your screen reader applies a different one, what was the point of the extra css? So that's my guess as to why people do this because, like you, I find it very hard to read.
If you're curious, though, Firefox has a built-in reader mode and I think Safari does, too. Last I checked, Chrome's was behind a flag. And then, of course, there are extensions (but extensions to read plain HTML docs seems exactly backwards, so...)
[+] [-] Tomte|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Bnichs|1 year ago|reply
That's said, I've been a customer for a while and the t-shirt debacle is one of the dumbest things I've seen a small company do. Even if you try and call it marketing cost (no name on the shirt makes that hard), there's no way it was the most efficient use of money for marketing.
And setting up infrastructure for it wreaks of "I'm bored with search let's do t-shirts." it completes goes against "do one thing really well" and just seems like a waste. If I were one of those investors and my money got spent on that I'd be really upset.
[+] [-] BadHumans|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] goldenpothos|1 year ago|reply
- Businesses that’ll eventually need to collect sales tax should add sales tax automation software to their stack from the beginning (even if they don’t expect to hit the threshold in a given jurisdiction anytime soon). Compliance can get really complicated really quickly -- and what founder wakes up and prefers doing taxes over actually building their product?
- Avalara is probably the most well-known one (Box uses them) but they have an implementation fee that we couldn’t stomach as a bootstrapped business https://www.avalara.com/us/en/index.html
- We ended up going with a fellow startup called Kintsugi because they had a free option that connects to Stripe and didn’t have an implementation fee. We probably won’t even hit any thresholds to need to file until 2025 (cross your fingers it’s earlier!!) but they said they’ll email us when we do, here’s their page https://trykintsugi.com/
- Anything related to compliance makes me anxious so this is great because I don’t even have to think about it until I actually need to, though hopefully not under the same circumstances as Kagi :)
[+] [-] keiferski|1 year ago|reply
I think this is only going to become more apparent once AI-generated content takes over the web.
[+] [-] abenga|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gandalfgreybeer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] internetter|1 year ago|reply
One thing I want to look into is ranking algorithms based on individual engagement. So, if you save lots of stories from a site, it ranks higher. If lots of people save stories from a site, it also ranks higher, ect
[+] [-] sph|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nojvek|1 year ago|reply
All information well organized without ads and junk. Like a super glorified Wikipedia with excellent search to dig exactly what you want.
[+] [-] iowahansen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ab_io|1 year ago|reply
I also think this product might be a bit too late. GPT4 has been out for over a year now, and it's changed how I look for answers. I tried FastGPT but like the author I found it lacking. As it stands, Perplexity feels more like the future of search than Kagi.
[+] [-] resfirestar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cube2222|1 year ago|reply
I don't care about Orion and Email, but what I'm getting right now in terms of search experience is definitely worth the cost.
[+] [-] drizze|1 year ago|reply
The thing that made me cancel my subscription was one specific interaction.
One day I was trying to buy tickets to a podcast tour, the sales for tickets was set to open at a specific time and I was searching for the purchase page at the moment of opening. I frantically searched "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets", the first search failed to bring relevant results. I tried "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets $YEAR", nothing.
I tried many searches for about a minute along these lines and thought maybe their site just wasn't public and I needed a specific link. Then I typed my original "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets" query into bing and got the exact correct webpage on the first try.
Bought the tickets I wanted and immediately cancelled my subscription to Kagi.
[+] [-] kodarna|1 year ago|reply
This article comes across so unhinged it almost works as an advertisement, except for the founder dismissing privacy issues...
I'm happy to hear Kagi are creating an e-mail service though, I've been looking to get away from Microsoft 365 since I'm not really using the meat of it. I hope they allow multiple aliases per users and perhaps add a masking service as well.
[+] [-] reducesuffering|1 year ago|reply
Kagi: "The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database. So, we basically ended up owning a merch production operation end-to-end, just so that we could ensure premium quality of these t-shirts!
Now, you may ask, why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts?
That's a classic stimulant-fueled side quest bender[+] [-] jchw|1 year ago|reply
Kagi Search is at the very least intriguing, though I honestly didn't find the results very impressive; they seemed alright, but nothing spectacular. The thing that is frustrating is, Google has a massive index, but searching it is an exercise in frustration because it feels like it is basically rewriting your query. Even using "" and + no longer seems to be good at ensuring certain things appear in the results, and so I sometimes try, in desperation, to simply repeat the term I want to emphasize multiple times in the query, which finally sometimes allows me to find things I already know exists. God forbid you wanted to find something you didn't know existed, because in that case, you might never realize Google is fucking up what you're looking for; it has the answer, but it's hidden in a sea of Google-funded blogspam. What a mess.
Will there ever again be a profitable search engine that works as well as Google used to? The answer might be no, and this bums me out.
> And he is very, very much the type that believes "not everything is political"
Well, at least we agree on one thing, I have always felt the "everything is political" angle was one of those semantic technicalities, kind of like saying "actually, the glass is always full, just sometimes it's full of air". The lack of a well-defined boundary between "political" issues and non-political issues should not be used as an excuse to drive politics and politically-charged discussion into otherwise rather mundane and apolitical things. I suppose it's not really that important, but this is one of those Internet-era brainrot issues I dislike most. Of course, maybe this is actually trying to make a more nuanced point, but it being phrased like this activated my "uhm, actually" response impulse.