Nah the Brave thing got spun up a bit. Kagi just wanted the extra search index data, which isn't even originally from Brave - they acquired it from Cliqz.
Brendan Eich also created JavaScript. So you're going to have to pretty much stop using the Internet entirely if you're going to act like his work has anything to do with his political opinions. Personally, I separate a person's work from their political opinions and I think you should too.
Not really. Life doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing dichotomy like this. It is a perfectly fine decision to boycott a product if it is viable to be boycotted, and keep using a product if it's not: using the web without JavaScript is almost impossible, so I'll use it; using the web without Brave is easy, so I won't use it.
This is not about separating a person's work from their political views, it's about not giving more power to people you don't want to have more power. If he is going to use money to campaign against LGBT people, then I'll do my best not to give him money, and I think you should too.
My browser of choice is Firefox, not Chrome. As I said, because Google does shady stuff too, I avoid giving them money when possible.
It's not that hard to prioritize companies that are aligned with your values. You don't need to start living in a cave or self-flagellate. Just look around to see if there is a suitable alternative.
I was talking about browsers, but I can see why the confusion happened, since Brave also has a search engine and this post is about a search engine.
Then yes, I use Google for my search engine. They do shady stuff, but they never campaigned against same-sex marriage, and none of the alternatives have given me good enough results and an acceptable political alignment for me to switch. Brave certainly doesn't seem much better, with unacceptable political stances and worse search results. DDG is getting there, but the search results are still not good enough to replace Google for me.
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?
The era of having startup founders both immediately accessible on social platforms (X/Twitter, Discord, etc.) and overly willing to share their opinions is a messy one.
It's hard enough in a small startup to prevent CEO "commentary-driven-development" , let alone have their random thoughts driving investment insight and user acquisition/attrition.
Even without seeing Vlads comments it was already disheartening to see them investing in AI features of questionable utility rather than focusing on the core search product. Trying to make a new search engine is already a difficult enough task without spreading themselves even thinner, and diluting the value of the subscription for those who just want search because they only offer unlimited searches in conjunction with unlimited access to the AI tools.
To me the Orion endeavor was much more concerning. I don't understand how you can sustain a company of a handful of people and work on search, ai, ai+search, orion and making tshirts.
The $10 unlimited tier gives you unlimited access to FastGPT and the summarizer. The 2.5x more expensive plan above that gives you more AI features, but it sounds like you're paying for early beta access, and they will filter down to the cheaper plan eventually.
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.
Vlad is not discussing, he is lecturing. The author of the blog post seems right. Vlad defends his position "lol email is not PII" repeatedly, despite being obviously and completely wrong. He has no understanding that it doesn't matter that a user could enter fake information.
His business collects email addresses, which is a process. Under GDPR, this process must be documented, users must be given their data on request (even if it just contains an email address, but usually it also contains the signup date for example as a proof for their data processing consent) and users must be informed about their rights to correct or delete such data.
He comes off totally as the "trust me bro" guy with zero respect for a different perspective and doesn't seem to be interested in changing his (objectively wrong) opinion. It is almost laughable, because "is email PII" has been discussed a million times since the introduction of the GDPR that you must've lived under a rock to dismiss it like Vlad did.
I re-read again. You are right, he says "personal emails are PII" in this email. In the original post however he dismisses the whole GDPR data request process as "we don't need this, because you can provide fake data".
Point is: if the business requests an email address, many people will provide their real email adress and your business needs to document this process under GDPR. I just checked. The signup form doesn't say "please give a FAKE email address", it just says "email address".
If a user provides a real email address, Kagi must respond to GDPR Art. 15 requests by providing...that same email adress. Might sound silly, but usually, there is other data associated with this. Usually, at least the timestamp of the signup. If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like user settings and so on.
Or, if the user signed up and later deleted the account, his email should explicitly NOT show up when asking for personal data.
See, it is about documenting the process, whether the outcome is "here is your email address you just asked for" or "we don't have any data on you". And Vlad says that this process is irrelevant for Kagi, while it is not.
>If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like user settings and so on.
I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've never received one that contained my user settings, so that seems pretty normal.
The whole PII convo seems incredibly asinine though, "PII" is not a thing in the GDPR. Personal data is[1], but that's not the same thing.
If Kagi keep a record of searches performed by a user, that's something that a SAR should be used for, but the whole convo just misses the mark entirely.
It's ultimately not up to Vlad. If the law declares email addresses are PII, they're PII.
If he's positioning his company to challenge that law when he runs afoul of it, that's a choice they can make but it's a business risk (and IANAL, but... Probably one they'll lose).
It does not matter in this context, because it is still incorrect.
> Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII.
Company has no means to identify what is the difference between personal or random email. Everything can be and must be treated equally from privacy perspective.
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.
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.
You can criticise something without obligating yourself to have a conversation with the subject. In fact, that is generally how most critical writing has worked, for centuries. If you're unhappy with the review of your restaurant in the paper, you _might_ be able to convince them to publish a short owner response, once, but they're certainly not going to engage in a dialogue about it.
> You can criticise something without obligating yourself to have a conversation with the subject.
That's the fundamental premise of telling people that they are sealioning.
Not everyone agrees with it (I suspect age plays more a role than anything else).
Your historical example doesn't really map very well to today, because control over the ability to put some text somewhere that others can read it is very, very different than it was historically.
None of this excuses the Kagi CEO's failure to back off when asked/told to. They should just have used their own blog or equivalent to respond.
Still, generalizing to a broad claim about raising an issue in public creating no future obligations seems somewhat wrong to me. You don't have to speak in public about anything at all. For me, your choice to do so creates some limited obligations towards future engagement (though I'm not sure quite where the limits lie).
>There was clear intention in engaging with this subject.
Yes, and then that engagement - which very much took place - did not give the author any confidence that FURTHER ENGAGEMENT (via email) would change the situation.
If I talk to you back and forth about an issue I have and feel like I'm talking to a brick wall, so I then write a critical review based on those issues, why should I be forced to not be a brick wall, in return? If Vlad wants someone to listen to him, he should probably take some time to engage with (not just 'listen to') what is being said on it's fundamental merits (not whatever surface level bit he wants to latch on to).
Recontextualizing an issue is not addressing it.
Explaining an issue is not addressing it.
Describing a paradigm that contextualizes an issue is not addressing it.
Vlad saw something critical of his hard work and wanted to put in the effort to clarify his stances and mend a relationship. I can absolutely understand that, your work is a reflection of yourself and nobody wants to be judged on misunderstanding. He might've even felt like he let someone who cared about Kagi down and wanted to make it right. Again, all understandable!
However, twice, the blog post author said they did not want to engage. At this point, regardless of how you feel about what was said, you should probably move on; they said their piece, you tried to engage, they rebuffed, oh well, do something else! To continue on is both incredibly annoying and a bit unhinged.
If Vlad absolutely felt like he needed to respond to this, he should've digested the main points of the original blogpost, reflected on them, and written his own blog post to a more general audience. Not necessarily in _response_ to the author, but understanding that more people probably feel this way as well and want to hear clear answers. Perfect examples of this would be an "Our stance on privacy" or "How we're ensuring Kagi's future," again factoring in the criticism from the author.
I write all of this as someone who pays for and likes Kagi. I think it's a good product, if a bit scattered at times. But the blog post does hit on some concerns that I have (privacy being the biggest) and seeing the follow up leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
There's probably some backstory between Vlad and Lori there.
But beyond that, there's some irony in that exchange. If Vlad had simply stopped engaging when Lori asked, it would indeed make Lori seem like more of an asshole for rejecting an appeal to have a simple conversation. But then Vlad transgressed that wish, making Lori's case about not wanting to engage.
Perhaps we live in different worlds, but there's a world of distanced between unhinged and roughly 3 emails to someone who wrote a peice targeted specifically at your business.
If anything the replies in that Mastadon thread make the author and others appear petty, combative and immature imo, and I do not say that as someone who agrees with all Vlad's perspectives.
Sure. But the first time they said "don't email me any more", it was actually more like "Don't email me any more... and another thing! X Y Z." playing an equally petty game of "who gets the last word".
After posting a blog entry specifically targeting and naming someone, their business, posting it on the internet and starting a Mastodon thread.
I'm all for generally leaving people alone, and being civil, but context please.
You don't get to open a salvo against someone, while pretending you're above interaction with them, then play the victim when they respond and universally and unilaterally dictate terms while always trying to get the last word in.
One thing I absolutely love about online discourse: shit all over someone, then block them. It is something that you don't see with in-person communications - because you really can't just "close off" the discussion to one way.
Anyway, I just think that people do things in online discussions that they wouldn't do to someone's face. And that tends to be a bad thing for reasonable discourse.
Another thing you don't quite seen in real life: strangers that record a serendipitous conversation, to later post it for the whole world to see, to point and laugh.
>Another thing you don't quite seen in real life: strangers that record a serendipitous conversation, to later post it for the whole world to see, to point and laugh.
In the thread linked above, I think his reasoning for posting the email is reasonable. I find this similar to what the Apollo dev did when discussing with Reddit people. If he didn't record the conversation or make it public, his words could have been twisted.
> One thing I absolutely love about online discourse: shit all over someone, then block them. It is something that you don't see with in-person communications
The author's response is perfectly calibrated to drive someone up the wall. Sling some mud and then hide behind "help, I'm being cornered."
Imagine doing this in the offline world. How well would this kind of behavior go over with people at the grocery store, do you think? Why is it acceptable online to behave like this?
As alternative perspective in terms of power dynamics: The Kagi CEO is a somewhat powerful figure as the CEO of a well-known tech company. The blog author is a random person from outside the tech startup culture.
The internet levels the playing field so the random person has the power to post criticism of the more powerful person and be heard. It doesn’t make sense to compare with the offline world because this wouldn’t be able to happen outside the internet.
In response the CEO is attempting to force them into a different context where he once again has power. The author recognizes this and therefore refuses.
But you’re not talking about Tim Cook, this is a guy running a company of ~10 people. Someone on the internet, with a following and an audience, has written an essay about how Vlad is a bad person, and now is implying the latter is abusive for trying to have a conversation.
This is psychotic behavior.
There’s a huge spectrum between NY Times writing a sourced article about a powerful business magnate and someone disparaging an SMB owner on their blog. If I took the posts and emails of someone I knew in my life and posted them online, I would probably get a call from the police.
This feels very similar to the trope on X, where someone makes an inflammatory or stupid comment, people angrily respond calling them stupid, and the original person then claims they're being harassed/were just joking, and ultimately neither side actually communicates. The people who like the original poster continue on believing that they were being harassed, and people who thought they were being stupid continue on believing they're being stupid.
I feel that Vlad is justified, even if I personally would've just considered it to be a lost cause and just kept receipts in case it became necessary to publicly respond, similar to how the Apollo dev released receipts when Reddit tried to make him out to be in the wrong.
Um, no. In general, if you tell someone to stop messaging you, they get to send one more message to react to that and tie up the conversation. "OK. You still haven't addressed points A, B, and C, so I still disagree. Let's wrap it up here then." That's perfectly reasonable and polite.
Vlad's message to "discuss" reads more like a sealion-ey 'let me explain to you why you are wrong, you just don't understand why you are wrong, I am very smart and not wrong' than an honest admission that Vlad was wrong and is interested in being humble and learning from someone else.
^ The parent link leads to an email chain between the CEO and the blogger in which the blogger says "go away I do not want to talk to you" several times and receives a chain of emails back. Text version:
Read them yourself, but to me they look like the emails of a persistent salesman. They were remarkable only in that they provide more excuses than concrete responses.
I find this quote funny and on some another level of disconnect about what they are competing with:
> Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free.
For a couple of my university years I had nothing but free Google t-shirts. They were throwing so much of this crap around that my closet was halfway to 20k. I only lamented they never gave away Google trousers or briefs.
They have a fair shot at competing with Google on quality of search and they should focus on that. If they think they can complete on AI, email or swag - good luck, and I hope you have a good money printer.
Honestly what he says makes sense in his "rebuttal", except for the part where he continues emailing after being told to stop.
I actually stumbled across the AI stuff being turned off by default yesterday when I got curious and was poking around the feature request forum. It was explicitly because a lot of people hate it for moral/ethical reasons. A lot of the comments in the replies are specifically about the AI stuff in spite of it being disabled by default.
Why even reply to an email when you intent to ignore it?
>Yes, hello so called prince of Nigeria. I have no interest in a discussion about the intricate court politics of Nigeria or its Byzantine inheritance rules. As you can see from my blog post it is entirely unlikely you would ever gain the throne even with my $2,000 wire transfer.
The only thing I take away from that is I'm very happy I don't know either of them and am never likely to.
While I do not agree on Vlads interpretation of PII and GDPR at all, that whole conversation was so incredibly mishandled by the author of this blog post.
I understand not wanting to engage in a conversation about a product you don't care about, but after collecting so much information and writing a lengthy blog post about it, that is a different story.
In my eyes, the author wrote a hit piece largely based on personal grudges, and then wanted to avoid any kind of responsibility.
And from my point of view, a lot of the financial stuff "makes sense". This is a small startup, probably with little business experience, and it shows. But why make it look like they are doing evil because of small, negligible mistakes?
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to
argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that.
And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but the author of this post sounds insufferable based on their email responses and fediverse thread. They post a public email on their public website (I assume for people to reach out to them) and then gets mad when someone does so?
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to
argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
If they don’t want to talk, just don’t respond.
The author also cross posted their blog to multiple social media platforms, which I assume means they wanted it to get attention. But then when the CEO does see it and offers some explanations they get mad that the CEO “vomited out” a reply that they didn’t want? I’m sorry, but the CEO of Kagi definitely sounds like the reasonable one here, thanks for linking this thread.
Jesus I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of terminally-online people that spend way too much time being angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry they are.
Like, these days you do not know when you email someone if they reply to you, or if they will post screenshots of your entire conversation to social media showing how utterly disgusted they are because you dared talk to them.
Have these people forgot about how strangers in real life behave and communicate?
At the risk of sounding grumpy, a big difference between the tech community today and in the Usenet days is that the Usenet crowd's interpersonal skills weren't two standard deviations to the left of the mean at your local Target.
Not a Usenet user, still an average idiot with an open inbox and a love for talking with random people. If you miss those days ping me via email, I’m always happy to meet new people.
> I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of terminally-online people that spend way too much time being angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry they are.
Yes, my impression as well. (I have never used Kagi but have considered trying it.)
Among the other things, the blog author approvingly put up a screenshot with someone insisting on seeing the entire world through their own political views and demanding others do so as well. ("Actually, the word 'politics' means 'everything', and also I'm right and everyone else is wrong.") As the meme goes, they need to touch grass.
Yikes. The lack of emotional and social maturity in the tech industry will never cease to impress me. Vlad is coming off as a big narcissist and the OP as disingenuous. If you don't want someone to email you, just block or ignore them and move on. Don't publish your private conversations for the terminally online peanut gallery.
Thanks for that. After reading both, I'm fine with Kagi and somewhat more annoyed by the author.
Perhaps Vlad is a little excessively enthusiastic and protective of his baby. But then you don't do something frankly crazy like start a new search engine from scratch in 2023 without being a little bit off. If we actually want a viable alternative to the advertising-funded search monopolies, we've got to be tolerant of some personality quirks.
And perhaps the T-shirt gambit is a poor use of limited resources. But have any of the startups that ended up making it big not make a few poor investments on the way up? I'll forgive it.
Meanwhile, Vlad's response does spell out several ways in which this lori exaggerated or misinterpreted things. Which of course are not acknowledged or responded to at all, despite lori's self-important tone. If you want to take your ball and go home because somebody doesn't take your concerns seriously, well you can, but don't expect me to follow you.
IMO, Vlad would have been better-off making his response his own blog post somewhere rather than an e-mail exchange. But eh, at least it's out there.
The author sounds unhinged. Also, their email address is kobld@proton.me, and Protonmail easily lets you block email addresses or entire domains. The author comes off as an attention-seeking baby.
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.
On the other hand, I see it as evidence that adtech is not in control of the company. Public companies or companies beholden to ad money would never be able to get away with a stunt like that. Can you imagine Meta sending each of their users a T-shirt? At > $40 RPU they could afford it.
The (publicly listed) bank I'm a customer of sent me a pair of oven mitts during the 2008 financial crisis, with an accompanying note that I'd paraphrase as "there have been rumors about our financial stability, and to show how untrue they are we're sending a gift to our customers".
It remains the worst customer retention pitch I've ever seen.
Vlad's interpretation of GDPR is both horribly wrong and very concerning.
Personally Identifiable Information includes anything that can be used to uncover a person's identity. An email address is PII, as it can be used to identify which person their data relates to - and they do have data, at the very least a user account and settings but likely also logs.
Full names, phone numbers or IP addresses are also PII - if you have a server log with source addresses, that's PII under both GDPR and CCPA. Why you have it, and whether I can take steps to hide my identity is no excuse - you need to follow the legal process for PII under GDPR and CCPA, need have data controllers in place and ways for any individual (registered or not!) to make the appropriate data requests and removal requests as applicable.
To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly.
An e-mail by itself is not PII, it has to be connected to other personal data. When companies use Stripe for payments, those other personal data are cared for by Stripe.
There are people who argue that just the name of a person is PII and they are wrong.
There is no test under GDPR for personal data that can identify an individual to have to identify a single unique individual to be in scope of the legislation, just that the personal data can be used to identify _an_ individual. Two people living at the same address with the same name sharing the same telephone doesn't suddenly make all that personal data fall out of scope.
Whilst the response from OP is so obviously wrong and confusing that it's likely to be a troll and not worth engaging with, it's worth clarifying to anyone reading this thread that email addresses most certainly do qualify as personal data under GDPR. GDPR very clearly states what personal data is (see https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/ and https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/personal-data/) and that storing or processing of this data necessitates the need to comply with the requirements of the GDPR (particularly the rights detailed under https://gdpr-info.eu/chapter-3/).
For the purposes of this conversation, an email address is personal data, operating in the EU (and additionally, by way of carried-over legislation, the UK) means complying with the GDPR, and therefore Kagi need to provide mechanisms by which people covered by the legislation can enforce the rights afforded them within it.
(GDPR also doesn't use the term "PII", merely just "personal data" and goes on to detail what this means in terms of identification, which might add to the confusion in OPs original message).
> There are people who argue that just the name of a person is PII and they are wrong.
> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, [...]
If I write a name on a piece of paper here on my desk, I have not violated GDPR. If the radio commentator speaks the name of the soccer player who made a pass, he has not violated GDPR. But there are people who argue that names by themselves (without reference to anything else) are protected personal identification data. Which they clearly are not.
"This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data wholly or partly by automated means and to the processing other than by automated means of personal data which form part of a filing system or are intended to form part of a filing system."
A name or email in Kagi's database is very clearly subject to GDPR. A note on your desk may not be; not because the name isn't PII, but because not all PII is in a protected context.
You're incorrectly mixing up "it's not PII" with "it's not subject to GDPR". It's still PII even if you're not legally required to protect it in a specific scenario; I can, for example, tell random people about my wife's very unique medical conditions, but her hospital cannot.
> ‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.
> Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them.
> Personal data may, for example, include information on name, address, e-mail address, personal identification number, registration number, photo, fingerprints, diagnostics, biological material, when it is possible to identify a person from the data or in combination with other data. It is said that the information is “personally identifiable”.
---
An email address is obvious PII because it is a globally unique identifier representing a way of contacting a specific person. You can find the name of the owner separately and correlate it with your stored data, thus identifying the person.
Even if you store nothing else, the email reveals that you have an association with the user, but you most likely also have data that ties activity to the email such as the user logging in and using your service in any way or form.
> There are people who argue that just the name of a person is PII and they are wrong.
A person's name is the most obvious case of personally identifiable information.
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.
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 considered investing a small amount in them when they were raising a round from customers since I loved the search product so much. I too can't imagine going back to anything else, especially now that I have prioritized and blocked domains set up perfectly and added lenses, and this stuff works across desktop and mobile!
I've been mildly regretting not investing up until 5 minute ago when I read about spending 1/3 of that on the t-shirt factory.
The claim that's made in this blog - that Kagi 'owns a t-shirt factory' seems disingenuous, or lazy at best. Kagi's own blog says that instead of going with a major branded merch manufacturer/distributor, they chose to work with a small print shop instead. Nothing about blowing funds on an actual factory/print shop. "Owning a merch operation end to end" just means they're not paying some manufacturer to do production, warehousing, order fulfillment/drop shipping, etc.
Totally agree on all points. I don't believe I have the technical capability for it but both the fear of losing great search and the lack of direction has made me think about what it would take to replicate the search experience.
Investing in better search is absolutely vital, and AI may be the right tool there, but I don't care about the AI. I pay Kagi to be a better search and informational retrieval tool, not to do AI.
It's not like they've gone all-in on AI though. Going through their changelog https://kagi.com/changelog it looks like they regularly make improvements to their core product and there've been a lot of significant QoL improvements in recent months. Just the Wolfram change alone has cut my need for Google significantly.
The one thing I really hope they put more work into is searching for local news. That's one of the areas where I still have to turn to Google.
They should've spent it on a marketing agency, because I don't know how a shirt which doesn't even have the name Kagi on it is supposed to give them brand exposure.
I can't speak to the t-shirts. I was on duckduckgo before Kagi and also can't imagine returning there. I don't know what they're doing there but it's not improving. And yeah I am so with you on 2).
It seems like (again, t-shirts aside) Kagi is throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I hope they're having fun because I sure am.
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.
I agree pretty much verbatim. I don't see how anyone could criticize them for getting into the AI game as well or at least using a 3rd party AI software for some results. That would just be silly these days. I like Orion browser but to be honest firefox does what I need.
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 real duty to outsiders throwing away money.
I don’t see any claims that they are unethical. “Losing faith” seems to be being used more like losing hope or something. People are worried that they are doing things that seem a bit wasteful because they don’t want them to fail.
> 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.
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.
Depends on if those higher salaries actually motivated higher productivity, commensurate with the increase.
Or, at the bottom end, if their previous salaries were barely ramen-style living wages, I would be glad that they have become able to pay themselves enough to be comfortable.
False dichotomy. They should be plowing that money into more R&D, or, absent the current ability to do that, saving it for a rainy day.
As a paying customer, I want Kagi to succeed. I want Kagi's search offering to keep improving. Spending a couple hundred thousand of the company's money on t-shirts (one that I would receive, as I was a fairly early customer) sounds foolish to me, regardless of how much the founder is personally invested in the company, and regardless of whether or not he'll invest more of his own money to keep the company growing in the future, if needed.
I'm still bullish on Kagi's future, but things like this (and things mentioned in the linked article as a whole) make me a little worried.
> Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
Probably! When I was at Twilio, we participated in GitHub's charity dodgeball tournament a few times (early last decade, I think). The cost of admission was $3000 per team, and would go to charity. After a couple years doing it, finance started getting uncomfortable with it. We were a private, unprofitable company (now Twilio is, of course, a public, unprofitable company), giving away money that our VCs had invested in us.
Initially I rolled my eyes, "just the bean-counters doing what they do best: whining about every bit of spend". But later, looking back, I realized they had a point. While $3000 wasn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of the company, what benefit was spending it actually providing the company? Ok, so 12 or so employees got to go and have a fun day at a rec center, boosting morale for them. We got our logo on the website for the tournament, which was maybe a little visibility/marketing. But was that really worth $3000 of our VC money? Maybe it was, but I don't think it's an obvious "yes".
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.
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.
I hope not to sound like I'm blaming you, but do you actually use the features that are unique to Kagi? Over time my manually configured block/lower/raise/pin list has continuously grown, quickly leading to higher and higher quality search results. I also have integrated custom lenses and bangs into my workflow more and more over time. I often end up searching seemingly very generic things and getting exactly what I'm looking for in the first or second result. Maybe my results after the first couple are weird too, but it doesn't really matter to me because I don't actually get very deep into results most of the time.
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.
Ok, maybe it’s not that the quality of Kagi results is so high, it’s more that the quality of Google results is so poor. Just not having to deal with all the spam is a winner to me.
Google results were rather like this in the golden age of Google searches. But the bad results can give you an idea of how to tweak your search to get what you're actually looking for.
The modern, more polished Google search can make it literally impossible to find things that exist, because Google tries too hard to provide what it thinks you're looking for.
- Business listing search via maps is not a great experience. Maps and searching on maps are a more important endeavor than browser and email when thinking about the ecosystem.
- AI is definitely important but so far none of those features (afaik) have trickled down to non-ultimate users. From what I have seen, features have been removed from the regular plans.
Certainly not. I still get a decent amount of AI-generated blogspam in my results. Yes, it's great that Kagi offers me the option to manually block sites I don't want in results, but that's a workaround, not a solution, to the AI-generated spam problem.
I don't know if it's possible to detect this sort of crap automatically, but IMO this is the biggest threat to web search today.
> What changes you have in mind to search functionality?
Reverting the changes from around December that made it next to impossible to search for language-agnostic or English terms in another language.
Also reverting the changes over time that brought them closer to google or DDG and ignoring search terms unless you use verbatim or quote everything.
Kagi used to be about being explicit, but it’s slowly turning into the same "we know what you want to search for, so STFU" that all the other search engines are.
I paid for the 1 year plan, because I was excited about a company that was only for search, and provided good search by nature of people paying for it (so no ads and fair ranking)
I have noticed the search has gotten worse in the ~7 months I've been using it, I started using Google more and more, and I was not planning to renew. I still use it, but after reading this article I'm definitely not going to use it again after my 1 year ends.
They aren't prioritizing the only feature I care about.
> 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 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. Embrace change, be agile, and most importantly listen to your feedback.
Wish Kagi nothing but success, I would very much like a disruptor in this space. Best of luck to you and your team.
Maybe customers were wary of having 1 ton of steel barreling down the street. And there's no ergonomics in phones. Their prime quality is portability. Ergonomics has been sacrificed to convenience.
This is a forum where people respond well to practical explanations from thoughtful founders.
I don't know if the OP got what they needed from this reply, but I assume I'm not alone in being impressed by the humility and candor of the response and developed much greater affinity for Kagi from some of the specifics of what were said.
I want more companies to have communicative, principled management that invites a sustainable base of like-minded customers/partners and fewer companies that pretend they can please 7B people by radically changing their product every 3 months.
Interesting take. It is valid and don't take my alternative interpretation as suggesting otherwise.
I owned a business for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was my primary source of income. I valued feedback, tried my hardest to solicit as much of it as possible, and always took it to heart (though I had to always try and glean statistics from the sum of all feedback so that I was never spending resources on minority opinions).
What I read from the user was that the company created an optics problem. It wasn't whether the company was losing money or not, it was just that the user is choosing to support that company because they want a really good search engine, and the optics of divesting the company's resources into multiple projects makes it appear as if it could be the case that not enough focus is being spent on what really matters to that user.
What I read from the founder was that the optics issue went completely over his head and a complete dismissal of the user's concerns and feedback, along with a doubling down of the decisions made.
It's not a good look in my opinion. Even though the founder was polite and didn't say anything inappropriate, I would NEVER have responded to a customer of mine like that.
You sound like a very good businessman, and a reasonably astute interrogator of user feedback. I wish there were more businesses with people having those traits at the helm!
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 to ever take on Google and Chrome, they need their own champion.
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 don't have fryers yet when I thought that me eating here was supporting them coming, not something else.
You are both right. Freediver laid out the vision, and some users are saying the vision isn't what the paying users are paying for. As someone who ran a business like this, GS is telling Freediver this should probably be something to give extra attention to and consciously decide is it the company the vision or the search product people are paying for?
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.
> It's a stretch to justify paying for search, but I do it.
I think therein lies the problem for many people. If you're already at a stretch to justify paying for search, any deviation from your assumption of the correct decisions from the company will be magnified.
I think the most positive aspect of freediver's response is the implied dismissal of the above. - that their stubborness is genuine, not a more robotic, seemingly hollow, response of concern. As a marketing approach, I'm wondering if maybe that would give you less reach and more impact in general.
Yeah.. I can understand where the author's coming from not wanting to be on a call or get emailed by the founder, but this is such an immediate assumption of bad "fatih" on their part, and a tactless way of communicating that, that I don't consider it a great look for the author.
I'm not even arguing people should assume good faith until proven otherwise (I don't think we should, generally). Just that being so steadfast in one's assumption of bad faith is unwarranted.
Surely, many of us maintain a blog where we publish personal reflections, often discussing new technologies we test or try to use. It would truly be a nightmare to personally engage with every business owner, developer, or investor.
If this were an occasional occurrence, I would agree with you, but it seems to happen systematically. Perhaps it's an exaggerated and counterproductive way of reacting.
People have the right to hold different opinions without feeling compelled to try to convince others of their own views or to be persuaded by others' opinions.
Accepting that people can have differing viewpoints demonstrates respect for diversity of opinion and individual freedom of thought.
The concept of accepting different opinions without trying to convince each other implies respect for intellectual autonomy and freedom of thought for each individual, while still encouraging open dialogue and constructive engagement __when appropriate__.
It really does call into question everything in the origt blog post. The emails from the CEO are such a breath of fresh air. Even the typos are endearing. It reads like an immediate, frank, unfiltered reaction, giving an honest expression of his values. and he didn't lose his cool while being repeatedly taunted by the blog author who only wanted a one-way attack amd the last word without listening to a rebuttal.
I think you can read that thread in multiple ways depending on your previous experience.
As a woman who’s had bad experiences with men before, this kind of “no you owe me your time” behaviour usually triggers a “get away from this guy; fast” kind of response.
This doesn’t mean Kagi is necessarily bad or that this was what Vlad intended, but it does for sure reduce my faith in the project. Not enough to stop paying for Kagi, but I’ve definitely gone to the “raise shields, power phasers” stage.
That's fair I guess. That's not meant flippantly, but I don't have that experience so I can only guess. However isn't it best to assume good faith in a non threatening situation?
If this is a regular "trigger point" in real life, I can understand that as a knee jerk, but there's no danger or need for immediate reaction via email, so why judge through that lens once you've identified you're doing so?
Perhaps I should have said "target customers" where I said "customers", I don't know. But it should not be surprising that "being an HN user" correlates strongly with "finds out about things on HN".
I think that statement is generally true for any random company, but I think for a company like Kagi, HN users are actually a lot more representative of their user base.
>I work in CX, you should listen to your customers.
The only way a customer speaks is with money. If people like what you sell, you'll have more customers speaking with their wallet. If they don't then they tell you so by not purchasing what you sell. Internet commenters (such as myself) do not represent all customers or even a majority. People who are happy with a product usually see no reason to give feedback – especially when it's a small purchase. Likewise, people who hate your product wouldn't purchase it in the first place.
This sounds like a great argument for not listening to anyone, or improving your product or messaging at all. Make the obvious observation that the complainers are a minority (ignoring that vocal non-complainers are also a minority), that their public complaints don't represent the opinions of one or two orders of magnitude of people who won't ever complain (just silently drop), are not ever influential, and that the silent majority support every decision you've made.
The cool part is that as people start leaving your product, complainers will become an even smaller minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself. Maybe blame it on bullying?
What people say they want is usually something completely different to their purchasing behaviour, and as a business you should listen little to what people say they want and listen much to how they spend their money.
For just about any business, if they were to ask their customers or the public at large what they want, the answer is usually "We want free stuff!". Cool to do if you're a politician, but bad business practice.
There's an old expression saying "the customer is always right", meaning that you can never blame the customers for how they spend or don't spend their money. If paying customers show a certain preference you better give it to them.
People who don't complain but silently drop are speaking with their wallets and that has to be listened to, as I said in my previous post. A business has to listen to customer spending behaviour and not listen too much to complainers. Normal people will give hotels awful reviews if it was raining on their vacation and great reviews if the weather was good and they had fun with their friends. Complaining is a past time to release some stress for many, and a pathological problem for a few. But when it comes to actually spending money is where the truth comes out.
Most people will not like your product and not buy your product, that's the large majority. That's why most normal businesses do not have the same reach as for example Apple or Toyota.
> The cool part is that as people start leaving your product, complainers will become an even smaller minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself.
You can be sure that nobody second guesses themselves more than business leaders – especially if sales drop or stagnate. That doesn't mean that every complainer is right in their complaints.
As for Kagi there seems to be very many commenters online and in their feedback forums who believe that the main selling point of the service is privacy or extensive customisation. But I believe that the main selling point is search results quality and that everything else comes second. At least if they want to widen their customer base beyond computer hackers.
If you take a look at the Kagi feedback forums, there's almost every week somebody starting a thread where they demand that Kagi implements a very niche feature and then threatens to unsubscribe if they don't do it. Or demands a niche feature or they won't sign up. You can't listen too much to these people, you have to follow your own vision and if people agree with your decisions you'll see it in sales. If not, then you were wrong in your vision.
>and as a business you should listen little to what people say they want and listen much to how they spend their money.
yeah well if I never pay money for kagi and never speak about anything how the hell is kagi supposed to know what they could do to get me to pay for them?
Casting a wide net and see what they catch, like most businesses who are not making bespoke solutions for their clients. Probably there is nothing they could do that would make you specifically pay for them.
Sure. A complaint of “why did you give us t-shirts?” isn’t very actionable aside from perhaps being more verbose as to why. But something like “Why are you guys starting an e-mail service? Most of us just want a good search engine with perhaps a simple LLM attached to it for base things like summarization” is definitely actionable.
I would like a Gmail competitor with solid email search, so that wouldn't be a strange side show for me, if anything they'd be copying Google's evolution in possibly a pro-user way that might be game changing in similar ways Gmail was game changing when it came out.
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.
I remember Daniel King's PowerPlayChess channel recently started promoting Kagi, doesn't this count as paid advertising or is this deal something else?
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.
Google search has been bad for a long time. It's clear they serve their customers (advertisers) quite well, but as a user of their search, they're not particularly impressive.
The biggest problem is a problem of scale: being the biggest search provider means Google are targeted by SEO, so it's harder for Google to sift out the AI-generated garbage--Kagi just isn't involved in the arms race that Google is. But as a user that's not my problem; I'm not going to tolerate bad search results out of some sense of "fairness" to a corporation. And Kagi is delivering real user-centered features which are, frankly, obvious, i.e. Google should be embarrassed that they don't let you filter/prioritize domains or search within lenses like Kagi does.
I could see Kagi being able to sidestep maybe 95% of the 'arms race'.
But even the remainder will trip them up every now and then.
If these periods last only a few minutes it probably won't matter but if it lasts a few days or more then it's very likely to impact customer retention.
Serving optimally performing ads to billions of global users is a radically different problem than serving optimal search results and accessory features to a self-selected 50,000 or 500,000 customers.
Hence why I specifically said search quality without mentioning a large userbase...
Did you not see the last part on your end?
Plus, if anything a small userbase makes it more difficult for quality search because the long tail is still effectively infinitely large, relative to the competencies of a single decision maker, but now there is only have one user searching for any random super niche topic maybe once a month, in total.
So they can't even a/b test or rely on customers reporting in on the real situation because it is too sparse.
The point is that search quality is subjective, not objective, and the two companies are each structured to approach it very differently.
In pursuing billions of global users across all demographics and trying to maximally monetize them through ads, Google is pursuing an entirely different measure of "search quality" than Kagi.
Google delivers their version of search quality when a rice farmer in Thailand and financier in the Bay Area both reach for Google when they want to find something online and then get distracted by an ad.
Meanwhile, Kagi gets their version right when they have a profitable base of happy customers. They can make different and more aggressive assumptions about the needs of their users, solicit and digest direct feedback about those assumptions, and optimize a product that delivers superb search quality for their niche.
They're completely different technical problems that only occasionally intersect. Their engineering teams aren't competing with each other.
Even if the entire customer base was limited to only HN users with karma exceeding X amount there will still be thousands of searches per day in obscure niches, just each one in a different niche.
So I don't see how Kagi can avoid having to deliver quality search results in millions of niches. Just at a very low frequency compared to Google.
Or are you suggesting to not bother with search quality past a certain lower threshold?
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.
It is trying at all cost to make drivers lose focus of the road to see your advert, putting themselves and the people around them at risk of a road crash.
Somewhere between 20,000 (number of t-shirts sent out) and 50,000 (their stated next target). Not too bad for a startup but a drop in the proverbial ocean of search.
The percentage of HN users in their customer base is very probably far higher than the percentage of HN users in the general population. Many orders of magnitude ;)
I prefer billboards, but I think that’s probably because they are exotic for me. We don’t really have them in Germany (or at least where I am), so when I see them in South Africa, they are always this cool and interesting thing.
Please please please take Hacker News' opinions with a very large grain of salt. Many of Hacker News' users work at garbage AdTech companies and there are often people posting here who say things like "I for one enjoy targeted ads" (that's an actual quote). This place is not representative of your customer base.
I love what you're doing and will continue to support you at your Professional tier as long as you continue doing what you're doing.
That's a difficult question, but I think we can pretty clearly say that a user base with a high concentration of AdTech workers is probably a bit biased against a company that is pretty clearly anti-AdTech.
The number of times I've heard people extol the virtues of targeted ads on this site is absurd. I've even heard folks here say that Google ads are more helpful than the search results as if that's a good thing. And these are far more common comments here than comments in favor of actually returning good search results or aligning your income with user interests.
I would think people in AdTech would be first in line to pay for a search engine that avoids AdTech. They understand how the sausage is made. They want the rest of us to use the AdTech products but they themselves are going to avoid them where possible.
How often do you think the CEO pf Delta Airlines flies in first class versus on a private jet? My guess is only often enough to gin up a little PR.
Sure, but that doesn't translate into people telling the truth online.
And to be clear, I'm not even talking about being intentionally dishonest. AdTech workers likely believe the pro-ad propaganda they spout because they have to in order to live with themselves.
For my own business (epaper calendars), HN has been a great source of feedback from potential customers. People here are both direct and kind with their feedback.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that HN is a very specific niche of the Internet. But for a slightly nerdy, not mass-market, product like mine (or Kagi) this niche is a great place to grow.
You just have to be mindful to see the feedback through the lens of the fact that you're talking to a niche audience and keep an eye on what a broader market might be looking for if that's where you're planning to go
I agree. My look about HN for privacy-focused topics changed after YouTube's blocker war. I realized there are many privacy-truder-tech workers here, and their comments were largely structured smartly to lighten how awful those "tech industries" are.
HN is probably more representative of the customer base than your preconceived notions and hostility. I imagine a large base of the current 20+k users are via HN.
> there are often people posting here who say things like "I for one enjoy targeted ads"
You can find some people on HN who will say anything. That's the nature of a large distributed community.
But I also think the fact that there are people who would say that is a good thing. I despise ads, ad-tracking/privacy invasion, etc with a passion. I won't use anything that has ads. I won't even install most apps, even paid/premium, if they collect personal information. So you know my biases.
Their argument is a whole lot more nuanced (and better) than you are presenting it. The main point is that they find (or consider) ads to be useful for helping people find new products they might be interested in. And that does quite obviously happen sometimes (how often is very much up for debate though(. For them, the privacy tradeoff is worth it. I would guess that a portion of people who agree with that would fall into the "what do I have to hide if I'm not doing anythign wrong" camp. I think they're nuts, but it is an interesting viewpoint to consider that is a lot more nuanced and contextual then just "I enjoy targeted ads."
Honestly I get the T-shirt part this way. You got to Doo crazy stuff as a start-up.
I also get that you try ai stuff. As long as you keep up de search.
However what scares me is the apparent lack of knowledge about privacy, gdpr and what is PII in a product that, to me, is all about privacy.
Have one person in the company be an expert in privacy and GDPR etc and use their insights, since it is critical for your right of existence.
I got the same impression - the lack of understanding of the basics of GDPR makes them look as amateurs, not professionals trying to raise the bar for privacy. I was considering using Kagi, but this is a massive turn off.
They'll likely discover that GDPR is not that optional as soon as a customer (or a competitor with a grudge!) reports them to their relevant national privacy/personal data protection authority, after which they'll get to have a very uncomfortable conversation where they will not be able to use those arguments
This should matter if Kagi ever intends to do business in the EU.
I suppose a serious breach of regulations, and if Kagi decided to ignore fines, apart from a bad reputation, could ultimately lead to things like judicial decisions of blocking access to the website or blocking payments for EU customers.
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.
Quick (but difficult) question: do you foresee there arising a reasonably reliable way to filter out the coming wave of ai spam? I’m told that half of Twitter is bots talking to each other at this point, and I’m sure this is coming to other media as well. Eg, massive, massive waves of content marketing, sock puppets, etc.
Is there reason to be optimistic that you or other actors will be able to sift through it?
Yes, significant part of our effort is to build technology that detects LLM spam. We have a working model that detects LLM generated text with 90% accuracy currently. The plan is to integrate in search results and make available as an API.
And just out of interest: what is the rate for false positives? An accuracy of 90% sounds very decent, as long as it doesn’t also filter out 10% of legitimate content.
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.
Yesterday I realized I had 75 tabs open on my mobile web browser and decided to do some trimming. Anything I was confident would come up again and didn’t need to be held onto got closed, including a tab for Kagi. And now I find Kagi has come up again, and I really liked reading this message so now I’m opening the tab again and almost certainly subscribing
This is a very weird answer. People who are paying for your service want you to succeed, they want an alternative to Google search. Many of them (like the article above) explicitly say they don't want a t-shirt, they just want a better search product from you.
After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, money and energy you spent on those t-shirts. Your customers are complaining because they want you to succeed. If they didn't care about you, they'd just cancel the subscription and move on. And your response to it is "nah, what we did was right" and not "yeah, maybe we shouldn't have spent all that resources on a stupid t-shirt that nobody wanted"?
I just don't get it. And what are you gonna do when you hit 50K members? Are you planning to send an entire wardrobe (from undies to a suit) to all your 50K customers (assuming IF you ever hit that many customers)?
I don't think it's that weird at all. Nor did they say the "customer" needs to think outside the box (what a great misrepresentation). They were just explaining their thinking process.
I never said they said the customer needs to think outside the box. They claimed that they had to think outside the box (as if no company had sent promotional t-shirts before and as if promotional t-shirts is some kind of groundbreaking idea). I did not misrepresent anything
The Founder of the company decided to pour in his own money worth of millions ( assuming that is true ) into the company. He bootstrapped it.
They were on track to becoming profitable. And now, as the replies shows they are now profitable.
He decided to spend some money to buy everyone a t-shirt as a gift.
And all I see is not thank you but anger and frustrations. Pointing to waste of time as if the product is going downhill or not iterating fast enough. But in fact according to changelog they are doing pretty well.
Spending my own money to say thank you in my own way and all I got was, all these negativity.
Kagi is playing against the likes of Google and Microsoft, who have infinite resources. Search is not a fight one can win casually. Every dollar, minute that is wasted on dumb stuff like t-shirts is an opportunity wasted on improving their core product.
Read the article, the author clearly lays out how Kagi is scattering their attention, money and energy on things that do not matter one bit.
He decided to spend some money to buy everyone a t-shirt as a gift.
A gift that nobody asked for, a gift that has zero impact, a gift that took their attention, time and money away from their core product.
Let me repeat - people are complaining because they care, because they want Kagi to succeed. Google search has gotten so bad that people are desperate for an alternative. Instead of taking it as "people are mean to us", perhaps Kagi should take it as "let us listen to our customers, they really do want us to succeed". If you see it from the perspective of a Kagi fan/customer, your opinion might change
cause for their guys, search results and things related to search experience is basically everything, some stupid gift like a t-shirts just let people support them think they spend money at somewhere they just dont give a damn, despite kagi is get better now, but this behavior just bother us computer hacker :)
I'm not a user, but you must have found a great market because your users are anxious about the company failing. The fact that they spinned the fact that you were able to create a company and a whole t -shirt operation on a marketing budget as a bad thing is telling. You're doing great. The t-shirt op is a great investment an will return a great value.
Hi, Vlad. We've met before, I'm the person whose 70-year-old mother is using Kagi. I also have actively been trying to move people to Kagi for some time - even paying for their accounts. The biggest block I face is not brand recognition. It's a lack of An Android app.
To move my mother to Kagi, I had to install Brave Browser on her android cell phone, make it the default browser on Android, change Brave's default search engine and create a desktop shortcut to it.
Android is ubiquitous in Brazil. I won't be able to move much people to Kagi with a process this involved.
Happy to chat further about this topic if you wish, privately or publicly.
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 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.
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.
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.
(1) I helped somebody start a hobby shop years ago, he was having trouble getting the bank loans to start it and I asked him if he’d consider raising equity, the next day he asked if I was serious, I told him I would put something in if he found some other investors and that was what happened.
He was successful about building a community around the store but not successful at the paperwork so it turned out we had not paid the sales tax for a few years which led the state to put up signs in front of the store, thankfully he was able to scrape up the money. Boy it was a near death experience.
(2) If you are working on search in 2024 and you are serious you’re going to be using A.I.
> (2) If you are working on search in 2024 and you are serious you’re going to be using A.I.
Pretty sure Marginalia doesn't use AI and to the best of my knowledge Viktor hasn't written about plans to do so. But maybe he's not serious because it sure seems like he's having fun!
(1) Marginalia can get away with it because it is searching a smaller collection over which it is easier to manage spam. On the other hand, Matt Cutts became a hero at Google not because he built models for filtering unwanted content but because he figured out how to motivate people to make the labels to train that sort of model.
(2) One of the most depressing experiences of my life was reading through the first ten years or so of TREC conferences looking for something useful to improve the search engines I was building. Eventually I found a volume that revealed the handful of useful results that they got in the first ten years (here https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262220736/trec/)
Advances in search quality are rare and come along about once a decade; BM25 was such an advance, on paper. Even though BM25 is in Elasticsearch and a lot of other products very few people are taking advantage of it because they don't want to do the parametric tuning it requires to get superior results.
is a similar once-in-decade advance that actually works out of the box with relatively little tuning. It doesn't address all the issues of search and should be integrated with more traditional search, but if you are building a search engine in 2024 you can expect to wait another 10 years for another advance like that.
(3) Marginalia particularly interests me because it is a small collection and the problems of search over a small collection are very different from those over a large collection. Gerald Salton started IR research with a deck of punch cards and he thought 80 documents was a lot and with 80 documents you are going to be very concerned about missing relevant documents because you didn't pick the right word. If you have 80,000,000,000 documents you have a very different problem. My take is SBERT and related techniques are particularly effective against small collection problems.
I wonder if the t-shirts were basically a way to siphon some investor money directly into their own pockets. Or if someone just thought they can do it cheaper and then ran into sunk cost fallacy.
I mean, Occam's razor says they were just naive and didn't realise what a huge pain doing stuff like that is. There's a reason that pretty much everyone uses a third party for this.
Yes, of course they created a consumer product that outperforms the main product of the third largest company in the world just as a measure to cheat investors out of a couple of hundred thousand. That's why I won't buy Apple products either, because I'm sure all these iPhones and Macbooks are just a tricky plan to build up investor confidence so that they can cheat them out of money in the future.
Useless snark aside, if the Kagi team wanted more "money directly into their own pockets" they could just raise their salaries. If their product is comparable to Google their salaries could be as well.
> Useless snark aside, if the Kagi team wanted more "money directly into their own pockets" they could just raise their salaries. If their product is comparable to Google their salaries could be as well.
And they'd get the money for those massive salaries from what magic money tree? They're at best barely profitable, revenue is probably around $2m, and they only raised $670k in funding. This isn't a particularly money making enterprise.
What I'm saying is that they could take all the investor money as salaries for themselves if they wanted, and easily motivate it by comparing to industry compensation for similar work. They don't need to invent any Yugoslavian scheme to put "money directly into their own pockets."
I 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.
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.
Me too and I also happily support Orion and using the RC as a default browser.
Kagi is for a subset of the internet and specifically for the part that has content. The good parts of cyberspace if you like. OP seems to be looking for something bigger like someone they can trust to replace Google and save the internet as well. For that search I say good luck sailor
(see, that is the good thing in Kagi too - you can downvote ;)
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 live lives that aren't tethered to a search engine in a meaningful way. Google "wins" their traffic because they don't care, and every bit of friction in-between them and their content is extra work. Kagi's payment-upfront mentality is unrealistic for everyone except the most well-paid Bay Area engineers.
That's not to say I don't understand the "avoid ads at all costs" concept. I do oppose to using anti-advertising sentiments as a populist rallying cry so people will line up at your Search SaaS kiosk and pay you whatever you ask for. At this point you really might as well just invest in your own Searx instance, it's plenty cheaper. And you can't even "dropbox comment" me since there have been third-parties providing search for free since before HN was a website.
> 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.
> 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.
It is a business, what did you think? That's why they charge money for their service. Like millions of other businesses, they will never get any significant part of the world's population as users. Why is that a problem to you?
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
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.
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 they are criminals, in which case we don't care they don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
For me, and probably a lot of other people who moved from other search engines, long-term viability of Kagi is important - heck, that's the reason I've decided it's worth paying some money for search.
Given that, I'd expect them to be very frugal with their spendings. Burning money on T-shirts, on another Browser, AI "improvements", Kagi Email (wtf? first time I've heard of it) show that they have incredibly startupy mindset, and will end up like every other company that takes VC money - bloated, money focused and deaf to their community.
Every entrepreneur obsesses about some competitor or some business model.
You can see various baubles glint in Vlad's eye.
If you are a collection of 10x devs, you can afford to make multiple bets and test for traction. You can sample the Brave waters, or try to head off Proton claiming ownership of privacy first, or get in front of perplexity and phind. Arguably, only products you've shipped can tell you the truth about product market fit.
Which is to say, I don't think these "let 1000 flowers bloom" experiments are a bad thing... so long as the core product has no appearance of inattention and never goes backwards in usability or quality while "net promotion" is still part of the growth plan.
> 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.
Because "going down" doesn't necessarily mean _shutting_ down-- it could be a sale as well. Considering the stated attitude towards privacy, that should worry you if privacy is your concern.
One of the main selling points of Kagi is privacy. It's featured on the main landing page, they have a page dedicated to it, and it's mentioned in pretty much every sales pitch they will make. Kagi's audience is also comprised of people who have that value as paying for a search engine means divesting from adtech surveillance.
So, it does not matter that "all search engines are problematic in terms of privacy"-- this one is marketed to not be. That's why people have concerns about how serious they're taking that committment and why people would hold them to a higher standard. It's also why a sale to a company which does not respect privacy is potentially a major issue, especially if current customer data isn't being handled in the manner they had expected.
Sure, I get that. I'm one of the more privacy-sensitive people you're likely to meet.
The complaint is about the marketing for sure. But that's not so different from the other "privacy-oriented" engines I'm aware of.
I'm not saying Kagi is (or is not, I don't know) being a good actor here. I'm just saying that if you want to use a search engine at all, you're effectively having to choose the lesser of evils.
Kagi may not be a saint, but since there aren't better options, I'm willing to settle with a search engine that actually gives me useful search results and isn't totally egregious on privacy issues.
Every tech company I've ever seen has had free t-shirts to give out at some point. While I don't think it was a smart use of limited funds, it's certainly not a major pivot to physical products like Evernote.
> unless they are criminals, in which case we don't care they don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
Christians can be labeled criminals in China. Young women try to get a 1st trimester abortion in Texas.
What the hell is he talking about? Anyone with even a basic understanding of human liberty and dignity knows anonymity and free speech are bedrocks. Especially disturbing coming from someone trying to run a search engine which can collect very detailed and targeted information from users via their search history!
I have been a proponent of kagi from near inception, and have interacted with Vlad by email as well as Discord, including getting change/feature made. The core search product was (for the longest time*) a breath of fresh air, as were these interactions**.
That "criminals" comment flipped my advocacy off like a light switch, for all the reasons described here in this thread. Perhaps it will get walked back.
* Lately, the results seem more Bing-like, and I've even had to !g things for the first time in a year to find a non-spam result. The core product has to be 10x for people to advocate and people to switch, not just more of the same or slightly better.
** Although, I couldn't convince him to make a team plan that would effectively let me pay full price (pro or ultimate) per employee for everyone registering from a domain. I cannot fathom why he wouldn't let a company pay him for double or triple digit employees, it's free money. Plus, those employees that use it for free at the office, will get frustrated at home, and buy the family option and tell their friends... Refusing to let me cover my employee base is a weird flex for someone still counting subscribers trying to get to 25,000.
Those who have "nothing to hide" still close their curtains at night and shut the door to the bathroom when on the toilet.
Granting and fiercely protecting privacy is a simple matter of respect for your fellow human beings. Doing so also has the side effect of slowing descents into various forms of totalitarianism.
Kagi is aiming for more privacy, I.e. a search engine and browser that doesn't track your habits or sell them to data brokers to identify you. Kagi does that very well.
Eh, a founder that effectively says 'we don't care if we give away the identity of our users if they are criminals' is not totally in line with my definition of an organization focused on privacy.
At least not a definition of privacy I really care about.
Anonymity should be the default. I don't have any right to come peeking into your windows, or to tap your phone, even if there's a market for whatever I discover. The same should be true for online activity.
And his comment about needing privacy? Name one person that needs privacy while taking a shit. Just because your desire for privacy doesn't rise to the level of need, that doesn't make it any less valid.
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.
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 online).
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 salty, were to report this to a privacy watchdog, there's a high likelihood it could result in a penalty. It might be beneficial to revisit GDPR guidelines to ensure compliance and avoid such risks.
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.
GDPR is not just for business that "sells data". Like the above said, you would need a GDPR expert consultant to go through your whole process. It will also correlate to your country's law, not something "you can do what you think it's true".
You can check Mullvad's privacy policy to see how they are handling GDPR. It's not written in "corporate words" and is very clear to me. For example, they don't even need email address to sign up but once payment comes to the table, GDPR comes - depending on which method of payment, regardless of how you insist on "no data collect": https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy
The correct thing to do is transparenting that process with your legal/GDPR person.
I really don't want to use a VPN and a fake e-mail address with Kagi to get the kind of anonymity that DDG at least claims to offer.
[It would also be selling point to offer at least GDPR levels of privacy to everyone -- embrace it and do it right for the EU and don't fuck over people in the rest of the world just because you aren't required to do it here]
Yikes. I'm happy to stay away from Kagi, now. I find that platform strategy and that founder's attitude to be hideous, so I appreciate you bringing that to light.
I personally haven’t lost faith, because search is still the best out there. I’m really happy with it, no complaints and I’m not planning on cancelling.
Speaking about their whole business, I think three things left me a negative impression:
- the tshirts were really unnecessary. I didn’t understand that. I am not sure the world needed more trash being produced and for sure it was not a good use of their money.
- I think AI as a tool has a place in their offering (Quick Answer, Summarizer). I don’t think the Assistant stuff makes sense for a search engine.
- the apparent lack of care for privacy that appears in the quotes in the blog posts are not good and I hope Vlad changes his mind and addresses that properly. Everyone needs privacy. Moreover, GDPR is no joke and it should be followed properly.
Maybe they needed a German company to receive money from the BND for their user data without the US knowing :-D
But in all seriousness, I’ve been a subscriber ever since they started and I’m an ultimate subscriber still, and I’d be sad if they went bankrupt due to mismanagement of the funds.
I stopped reading once I realized it was just a rant about their business. Why would I care? Their search is better, it's worth what I pay, if it stops being worth the money I'll stop paying. I could care less how their business is run. If I was investing I might look closer, until then, the maximum I have at risk is the $100 or so it costs a year, which I'm comfortable with. Did I miss something more damning later in the article?
I completely agree. I use products because they're useful, not because I'm invested (financially or emotionally) in the business creating said product.
> I had Claude3 read it for claims about quality, security, privacy. It found none.
You might want to consider actually reading things for yourself, rather than assuming the magic robots are telling the truth (the magic robot did not tell you the truth, here).
I had ChatGPT read your comment and asked it "Is this a useful methodology of evaluating articles?"
It cautioned me that "it's important to recognize the limitations of such tools" and said:
> Tools like Claude3 may struggle with understanding the context of certain claims or the overall tone and intent of the article. They might flag statements that are not actually problematic or miss important context that affects the interpretation of claims.
This is disheartening to hear... Especially wrt. AI I was hoping for them to use it to classify the web and not aiming for yet another GPT frontend. Or in general developing tools that are a match for the state of the information space that exists today.
And whatever the heck is going on with all the other stuff. There's no way one should stretch oneself this thin.
Kagi founder here. I am probably 'guilty' of reading and responding to every comment on discord, our feedback forum and I still respond to support tickets.
This does invite trouble but interacting with users of the product I am building is also the only way I know how to do it and is keeping me sane. Not to mention it helps build a great product, as users probably 'built' half of it with feedback.
I never thought that talking too much with the customers can be bad but it also may be true that full openness approach becomes a burden at some point and that it would be healthier to separate from it a bit.
I think it's a matter of scale. The principles and instincts that guide us in small-group conversations don't always translate well in large groups -- especially in conversations with an imbalance of emotional investment in the conversation. As the founder, you have a lot more riding on every exchange than any user does (even ardent, investing users). And as your user base grows, both the number of those interactions and their visibility and potential impact on your company is growing. So they're increasing in both number and stakes.
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.
Idk about "bad faith argument," because even if Kagi doesn't technically own the thing, they literally said "we basically ended up owning a merch production operation end-to-end."
I know I'm being pedantic but there is a difference between a factory and a fulfillment service. When I read "they own a T-shirt factory" I interpret it as a place where T-shirts are made which is a much bigger cost than renting a warehouse for fulfillment.
owning a merch production operation end-to-end is not owning a fulfillment service. it says production operation end to end. read that again. do you know what "production" means?
But they don't own a production operation end to end. They partnered with a print shop, imported the shirts from Serbia, rented space in a warehouse, built a backend service to track it all.
But your AI is... wrong. The article contains clear criticisms of search quality and privacy concerns around a CEO who says things like "people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably elss than a 100 in the entire world."
You asked your AI if there was "any discussion of privacy", and it said no. That's clearly incorrect, and you've now changed the goalpost massively to disagreement personally with that discussion.
Here, I asked Claude about it, since you like that approach.
> A CEO of a search engine states "people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than a 100 in the entire world". Is this concerning from a privacy perspective?
> Yes, this statement by the CEO of a search engine company is quite concerning from a privacy perspective for several reasons:
> 1. Underestimating the need for anonymity: The claim that only a few people in the world "really need anonymity" is a gross underestimation. There are many legitimate reasons why individuals may need anonymity, such as whistleblowers, journalists, activists, victims of abuse, members of persecuted groups, and even ordinary citizens who value their privacy.
> 2. Privacy as a fundamental human right: Privacy is widely recognized as a fundamental human right. By dismissing the need for anonymity, the CEO is essentially disregarding the right to privacy for a large segment of the population.
> 3. Potential conflict of interest: As the CEO of a search engine company, which collects and monetizes user data, there is a potential conflict of interest. Downplaying the importance of anonymity and privacy could be seen as a way to justify the company's data collection practices.
> 4. Centralization of power: The statement reflects a concerning centralization of power, where a single entity (the search engine company) gets to decide who "really needs anonymity" and who doesn't. This goes against the principles of a free and open internet.
> 5. Chilling effect: Such statements from a prominent tech leader could have a chilling effect on individuals who seek anonymity for legitimate reasons, as it may discourage them from exercising their right to privacy.
> Overall, this statement by the CEO reflects a concerning lack of understanding or appreciation for the importance of privacy and anonymity in a free and democratic society. It underscores the need for strong privacy protections, decentralized systems, and a broader recognition of the fundamental right to privacy for all individuals, regardless of their specific circumstances.
As a follow-up...
> How do you feel about the claim "I might like anonymity but it is absolutely a 'want', not 'need'."
> I would disagree with the blanket claim that anonymity is absolutely a "want" and not a "need" for everyone. While that may be true for some people, there are many legitimate scenarios where anonymity can be a crucial need, not just a want...
> blah blah blah
> While anonymity may just be a casual preference for some, denying that it can be a critical need for others is concerning. It dismisses the reality that millions face real threats to their safety, freedom or even lives which anonymity helps protect against. Reducing it to just a "want" is dismissive of these legitimate needs.
I see our main disagreement being rooted in your use of the phrase "for everyone". It disregards the fact "rare" means exactly, 'some people'.
I do not read the attitude at Kagi to be downplaying the importance of privacy. To me it seems like a mature realization of the limits of online life. Anonymity is very expensive. Try to buy something online if you doubt it.
I disagree with your interpretation of Vlad's position but, I'm cool with your seeing it differently. I suggest you stick with Google and their much better () attitude toward privacy.
ps, I 100% could prompt Claude to rebut every sentence in your post. I do like that approach when it is productive. Except that I decided to talk back to all of you, Claude saved me the time it would take to interpret the original rant. I consider saving time to be a good use. Of course, you probably had fun playing with my text and Claude, so good for you.
I read a lot more than three paragraphs before I delegated reading the rest. For most of the article, his complaints were distinctly not relevant to my interests.
I wasn't necessarily saying that you had only read that much, rather that it's a common issue here on HN, and that Claude3 appears to have done the same thing. Stepping back a bit, it's concerning to me that Claude isn't able to read a document with multiple different themes and then represent the fact there were multiple themes, instead taking the first and "assuming" that's what the whole document is about.
I thought this article was actually quite varied – there are issues about personal interactions and communication style, AI hype, marketing and business blunders, tax issues, privacy issues, politics. Some of those matter more to me than others, but I'd imagine most Kagi users would care about at least one of them, given the product is pitched at users who care about some of these.
Oh, ffs, is this going to be the new thing, now? People pretending to read articles by feeding them to an AI and believing whatever old nonsense it spits out? I do think the "humanity is doomed" angle with AIs is overplayed, but okay, yeah, if people are going to do that, maybe humanity _is_ doomed.
If you read the article, you will discover that your magic robot is mistaken.
I pretty much hate you all now for making me read the goddam thing entirely. It's stupid and boring and Claude3 is right. The guy does not point to any holes in security or privacy. He doesn't like the guy's attitude but, there's no "he's collecting your search in privacy mode" claim.
His only criticism of the search results is to say he doesn't think it's better than anyone else.
And yes, it's going to be a thing now. We have cool tools that help us get stuff done quicker. In this case, I read part of the article, then skimmed it before asking Claude3 to read it carefully. Then, because you people are full of fantasy, I read it personally carefully and confirm that my magic robot is exactly right. That encourages me to do it more.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadI also refuse to use anything from Brave for this reason.
This is not about separating a person's work from their political views, it's about not giving more power to people you don't want to have more power. If he is going to use money to campaign against LGBT people, then I'll do my best not to give him money, and I think you should too.
It's not that hard to prioritize companies that are aligned with your values. You don't need to start living in a cave or self-flagellate. Just look around to see if there is a suitable alternative.
Then yes, I use Google for my search engine. They do shady stuff, but they never campaigned against same-sex marriage, and none of the alternatives have given me good enough results and an acceptable political alignment for me to switch. Brave certainly doesn't seem much better, with unacceptable political stances and worse search results. DDG is getting there, but the search results are still not good enough to replace Google for me.
It's hard enough in a small startup to prevent CEO "commentary-driven-development" , let alone have their random thoughts driving investment insight and user acquisition/attrition.
It’s good interacting with the real people that make software.
IMO, The fact that it’s so detached from the customer is part of why MBAs fit in to leadership so nicely.
None of the customers see it coming, because they don’t interact with employees.
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.
His business collects email addresses, which is a process. Under GDPR, this process must be documented, users must be given their data on request (even if it just contains an email address, but usually it also contains the signup date for example as a proof for their data processing consent) and users must be informed about their rights to correct or delete such data.
He comes off totally as the "trust me bro" guy with zero respect for a different perspective and doesn't seem to be interested in changing his (objectively wrong) opinion. It is almost laughable, because "is email PII" has been discussed a million times since the introduction of the GDPR that you must've lived under a rock to dismiss it like Vlad did.
Point is: if the business requests an email address, many people will provide their real email adress and your business needs to document this process under GDPR. I just checked. The signup form doesn't say "please give a FAKE email address", it just says "email address".
If a user provides a real email address, Kagi must respond to GDPR Art. 15 requests by providing...that same email adress. Might sound silly, but usually, there is other data associated with this. Usually, at least the timestamp of the signup. If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like user settings and so on.
Or, if the user signed up and later deleted the account, his email should explicitly NOT show up when asking for personal data.
See, it is about documenting the process, whether the outcome is "here is your email address you just asked for" or "we don't have any data on you". And Vlad says that this process is irrelevant for Kagi, while it is not.
I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've never received one that contained my user settings, so that seems pretty normal.
The whole PII convo seems incredibly asinine though, "PII" is not a thing in the GDPR. Personal data is[1], but that's not the same thing.
If Kagi keep a record of searches performed by a user, that's something that a SAR should be used for, but the whole convo just misses the mark entirely.
[^1]: See article 4.1 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
That is odd because the user has right to get ALL the data they want that is stored about them in the service.
If he's positioning his company to challenge that law when he runs afoul of it, that's a choice they can make but it's a business risk (and IANAL, but... Probably one they'll lose).
> Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII.
Company has no means to identify what is the difference between personal or random email. Everything can be and must be treated equally from privacy perspective.
Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.
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.
That's the fundamental premise of telling people that they are sealioning.
Not everyone agrees with it (I suspect age plays more a role than anything else).
Your historical example doesn't really map very well to today, because control over the ability to put some text somewhere that others can read it is very, very different than it was historically.
None of this excuses the Kagi CEO's failure to back off when asked/told to. They should just have used their own blog or equivalent to respond.
Still, generalizing to a broad claim about raising an issue in public creating no future obligations seems somewhat wrong to me. You don't have to speak in public about anything at all. For me, your choice to do so creates some limited obligations towards future engagement (though I'm not sure quite where the limits lie).
Yes, and then that engagement - which very much took place - did not give the author any confidence that FURTHER ENGAGEMENT (via email) would change the situation.
If I talk to you back and forth about an issue I have and feel like I'm talking to a brick wall, so I then write a critical review based on those issues, why should I be forced to not be a brick wall, in return? If Vlad wants someone to listen to him, he should probably take some time to engage with (not just 'listen to') what is being said on it's fundamental merits (not whatever surface level bit he wants to latch on to).
Recontextualizing an issue is not addressing it. Explaining an issue is not addressing it. Describing a paradigm that contextualizes an issue is not addressing it.
Vlad saw something critical of his hard work and wanted to put in the effort to clarify his stances and mend a relationship. I can absolutely understand that, your work is a reflection of yourself and nobody wants to be judged on misunderstanding. He might've even felt like he let someone who cared about Kagi down and wanted to make it right. Again, all understandable!
However, twice, the blog post author said they did not want to engage. At this point, regardless of how you feel about what was said, you should probably move on; they said their piece, you tried to engage, they rebuffed, oh well, do something else! To continue on is both incredibly annoying and a bit unhinged.
If Vlad absolutely felt like he needed to respond to this, he should've digested the main points of the original blogpost, reflected on them, and written his own blog post to a more general audience. Not necessarily in _response_ to the author, but understanding that more people probably feel this way as well and want to hear clear answers. Perfect examples of this would be an "Our stance on privacy" or "How we're ensuring Kagi's future," again factoring in the criticism from the author.
I write all of this as someone who pays for and likes Kagi. I think it's a good product, if a bit scattered at times. But the blog post does hit on some concerns that I have (privacy being the biggest) and seeing the follow up leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But beyond that, there's some irony in that exchange. If Vlad had simply stopped engaging when Lori asked, it would indeed make Lori seem like more of an asshole for rejecting an appeal to have a simple conversation. But then Vlad transgressed that wish, making Lori's case about not wanting to engage.
If anything the replies in that Mastadon thread make the author and others appear petty, combative and immature imo, and I do not say that as someone who agrees with all Vlad's perspectives.
I'm all for generally leaving people alone, and being civil, but context please.
You don't get to open a salvo against someone, while pretending you're above interaction with them, then play the victim when they respond and universally and unilaterally dictate terms while always trying to get the last word in.
Anyway, I just think that people do things in online discussions that they wouldn't do to someone's face. And that tends to be a bad thing for reasonable discourse.
The Internet has turned us into sociopaths.
In the thread linked above, I think his reasoning for posting the email is reasonable. I find this similar to what the Apollo dev did when discussing with Reddit people. If he didn't record the conversation or make it public, his words could have been twisted.
Ummm dating and breakups?
Imagine doing this in the offline world. How well would this kind of behavior go over with people at the grocery store, do you think? Why is it acceptable online to behave like this?
The internet levels the playing field so the random person has the power to post criticism of the more powerful person and be heard. It doesn’t make sense to compare with the offline world because this wouldn’t be able to happen outside the internet.
In response the CEO is attempting to force them into a different context where he once again has power. The author recognizes this and therefore refuses.
This is psychotic behavior.
There’s a huge spectrum between NY Times writing a sourced article about a powerful business magnate and someone disparaging an SMB owner on their blog. If I took the posts and emails of someone I knew in my life and posted them online, I would probably get a call from the police.
I feel that Vlad is justified, even if I personally would've just considered it to be a lost cause and just kept receipts in case it became necessary to publicly respond, similar to how the Apollo dev released receipts when Reddit tried to make him out to be in the wrong.
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.
https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
Read them yourself, but to me they look like the emails of a persistent salesman. They were remarkable only in that they provide more excuses than concrete responses.
> Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free.
For a couple of my university years I had nothing but free Google t-shirts. They were throwing so much of this crap around that my closet was halfway to 20k. I only lamented they never gave away Google trousers or briefs.
They have a fair shot at competing with Google on quality of search and they should focus on that. If they think they can complete on AI, email or swag - good luck, and I hope you have a good money printer.
I actually stumbled across the AI stuff being turned off by default yesterday when I got curious and was poking around the feature request forum. It was explicitly because a lot of people hate it for moral/ethical reasons. A lot of the comments in the replies are specifically about the AI stuff in spite of it being disabled by default.
Most of this seems fine for a startup?
>Yes, hello so called prince of Nigeria. I have no interest in a discussion about the intricate court politics of Nigeria or its Byzantine inheritance rules. As you can see from my blog post it is entirely unlikely you would ever gain the throne even with my $2,000 wire transfer.
The only thing I take away from that is I'm very happy I don't know either of them and am never likely to.
I understand not wanting to engage in a conversation about a product you don't care about, but after collecting so much information and writing a lengthy blog post about it, that is a different story. In my eyes, the author wrote a hit piece largely based on personal grudges, and then wanted to avoid any kind of responsibility.
And from my point of view, a lot of the financial stuff "makes sense". This is a small startup, probably with little business experience, and it shows. But why make it look like they are doing evil because of small, negligible mistakes?
Narcissism.
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
replying with a 1100 word long email is a mood.
What mood?
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
If they don’t want to talk, just don’t respond.
The author also cross posted their blog to multiple social media platforms, which I assume means they wanted it to get attention. But then when the CEO does see it and offers some explanations they get mad that the CEO “vomited out” a reply that they didn’t want? I’m sorry, but the CEO of Kagi definitely sounds like the reasonable one here, thanks for linking this thread.
Like, these days you do not know when you email someone if they reply to you, or if they will post screenshots of your entire conversation to social media showing how utterly disgusted they are because you dared talk to them.
Have these people forgot about how strangers in real life behave and communicate?
I miss talking with the average idiot from the 2000s internet.
Yes, my impression as well. (I have never used Kagi but have considered trying it.)
Among the other things, the blog author approvingly put up a screenshot with someone insisting on seeing the entire world through their own political views and demanding others do so as well. ("Actually, the word 'politics' means 'everything', and also I'm right and everyone else is wrong.") As the meme goes, they need to touch grass.
Perhaps Vlad is a little excessively enthusiastic and protective of his baby. But then you don't do something frankly crazy like start a new search engine from scratch in 2023 without being a little bit off. If we actually want a viable alternative to the advertising-funded search monopolies, we've got to be tolerant of some personality quirks.
And perhaps the T-shirt gambit is a poor use of limited resources. But have any of the startups that ended up making it big not make a few poor investments on the way up? I'll forgive it.
Meanwhile, Vlad's response does spell out several ways in which this lori exaggerated or misinterpreted things. Which of course are not acknowledged or responded to at all, despite lori's self-important tone. If you want to take your ball and go home because somebody doesn't take your concerns seriously, well you can, but don't expect me to follow you.
IMO, Vlad would have been better-off making his response his own blog post somewhere rather than an e-mail exchange. But eh, at least it's out there.
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.
If they thought it'd help, absolutely. Facebook has a long history of doling out swag; I've got a free Oculus sitting downstairs.
It remains the worst customer retention pitch I've ever seen.
Personally Identifiable Information includes anything that can be used to uncover a person's identity. An email address is PII, as it can be used to identify which person their data relates to - and they do have data, at the very least a user account and settings but likely also logs.
Full names, phone numbers or IP addresses are also PII - if you have a server log with source addresses, that's PII under both GDPR and CCPA. Why you have it, and whether I can take steps to hide my identity is no excuse - you need to follow the legal process for PII under GDPR and CCPA, need have data controllers in place and ways for any individual (registered or not!) to make the appropriate data requests and removal requests as applicable.
To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly.
https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-26/
There are people who argue that just the name of a person is PII and they are wrong.
It's very easy for a name to be PII. I'm quite certain mine is unique, due to hyphenating when I got married.
Whilst the response from OP is so obviously wrong and confusing that it's likely to be a troll and not worth engaging with, it's worth clarifying to anyone reading this thread that email addresses most certainly do qualify as personal data under GDPR. GDPR very clearly states what personal data is (see https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/ and https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/personal-data/) and that storing or processing of this data necessitates the need to comply with the requirements of the GDPR (particularly the rights detailed under https://gdpr-info.eu/chapter-3/).
For the purposes of this conversation, an email address is personal data, operating in the EU (and additionally, by way of carried-over legislation, the UK) means complying with the GDPR, and therefore Kagi need to provide mechanisms by which people covered by the legislation can enforce the rights afforded them within it.
(GDPR also doesn't use the term "PII", merely just "personal data" and goes on to detail what this means in terms of identification, which might add to the confusion in OPs original message).
It's in your database. That's inherently a connection to something else.
> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, [...]
https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/
A name is PII, as stated by the definitions in the GDPR.
What is there to misunderstand?
"This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data wholly or partly by automated means and to the processing other than by automated means of personal data which form part of a filing system or are intended to form part of a filing system."
A name or email in Kagi's database is very clearly subject to GDPR. A note on your desk may not be; not because the name isn't PII, but because not all PII is in a protected context.
You're incorrectly mixing up "it's not PII" with "it's not subject to GDPR". It's still PII even if you're not legally required to protect it in a specific scenario; I can, for example, tell random people about my wife's very unique medical conditions, but her hospital cannot.
Quoting GDPR Article 4, point 1 (https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/):
> ‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.
And Recital 30 (https://gdpr.eu/recital-30-online-identifiers-for-profiling-...), which gives some more examples of identifiable information such as IP addresses:
> Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them.
There is also the quote from the Danish Datatilsyn (https://www.datatilsynet.dk/english/fundamental-concepts-/wh...) also makes some more examples and explicitly highlight that is is PII even when it must first be combined with other data:
> Personal data may, for example, include information on name, address, e-mail address, personal identification number, registration number, photo, fingerprints, diagnostics, biological material, when it is possible to identify a person from the data or in combination with other data. It is said that the information is “personally identifiable”.
---
An email address is obvious PII because it is a globally unique identifier representing a way of contacting a specific person. You can find the name of the owner separately and correlate it with your stored data, thus identifying the person.
Even if you store nothing else, the email reveals that you have an association with the user, but you most likely also have data that ties activity to the email such as the user logging in and using your service in any way or form.
> There are people who argue that just the name of a person is PII and they are wrong.
A person's name is the most obvious case of personally identifiable information.
- 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.
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 mildly regretting not investing up until 5 minute ago when I read about spending 1/3 of that on the t-shirt factory.
> allocate[d] nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts
Though it sounds like they don't actually own "a t-shirt factory", but rather a t-shirt distributor.
The one thing I really hope they put more work into is searching for local news. That's one of the areas where I still have to turn to Google.
Presumably the tshirts are a marketing cost that they hope will lead to greater brand exposure and more subscribers.
What an own goal. I’m sure it made sense to them but I’m worried they don’t truly understand their customer base.
It seems like (again, t-shirts aside) Kagi is throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I hope they're having fun because I sure am.
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.
i’m glad they spent the time and effort on it.
Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
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.
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 real duty to outsiders throwing away money.
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.
But we are still allowed to criticize moves that we think are counter-productive or a waste.
Yes.
Do you think they charge too much?
Do they charge more than you think it's worth?
Or, at the bottom end, if their previous salaries were barely ramen-style living wages, I would be glad that they have become able to pay themselves enough to be comfortable.
As a paying customer, I want Kagi to succeed. I want Kagi's search offering to keep improving. Spending a couple hundred thousand of the company's money on t-shirts (one that I would receive, as I was a fairly early customer) sounds foolish to me, regardless of how much the founder is personally invested in the company, and regardless of whether or not he'll invest more of his own money to keep the company growing in the future, if needed.
I'm still bullish on Kagi's future, but things like this (and things mentioned in the linked article as a whole) make me a little worried.
> Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
Probably! When I was at Twilio, we participated in GitHub's charity dodgeball tournament a few times (early last decade, I think). The cost of admission was $3000 per team, and would go to charity. After a couple years doing it, finance started getting uncomfortable with it. We were a private, unprofitable company (now Twilio is, of course, a public, unprofitable company), giving away money that our VCs had invested in us.
Initially I rolled my eyes, "just the bean-counters doing what they do best: whining about every bit of spend". But later, looking back, I realized they had a point. While $3000 wasn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of the company, what benefit was spending it actually providing the company? Ok, so 12 or so employees got to go and have a fun day at a rec center, boosting morale for them. We got our logo on the website for the tournament, which was maybe a little visibility/marketing. But was that really worth $3000 of our VC money? Maybe it was, but I don't think it's an obvious "yes".
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.
It's just a matter of focus with a team of that size.
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.
DDG and Kagi both use Bing data. That could be the reason
The modern, more polished Google search can make it literally impossible to find things that exist, because Google tries too hard to provide what it thinks you're looking for.
- Business listing search via maps is not a great experience. Maps and searching on maps are a more important endeavor than browser and email when thinking about the ecosystem.
- AI is definitely important but so far none of those features (afaik) have trickled down to non-ultimate users. From what I have seen, features have been removed from the regular plans.
- Remove reliance on using bing/google searches.
- Search is not a one and done operation.
Certainly not. I still get a decent amount of AI-generated blogspam in my results. Yes, it's great that Kagi offers me the option to manually block sites I don't want in results, but that's a workaround, not a solution, to the AI-generated spam problem.
I don't know if it's possible to detect this sort of crap automatically, but IMO this is the biggest threat to web search today.
Reverting the changes from around December that made it next to impossible to search for language-agnostic or English terms in another language.
Also reverting the changes over time that brought them closer to google or DDG and ignoring search terms unless you use verbatim or quote everything.
Kagi used to be about being explicit, but it’s slowly turning into the same "we know what you want to search for, so STFU" that all the other search engines are.
User since December 2021.
I have noticed the search has gotten worse in the ~7 months I've been using it, I started using Google more and more, and I was not planning to renew. I still use it, but after reading this article I'm definitely not going to use it again after my 1 year ends.
They aren't prioritizing the only feature I care about.
If they fail with all of the free marketing they’ve been gifted by this community I can only shake my head.
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.
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 :)
If the venture fails, you will ask yourself if you listened enough. Be proactive, address concerns, do not put yourself in a defensive position. Embrace change, be agile, and most importantly listen to your feedback.
Wish Kagi nothing but success, I would very much like a disruptor in this space. Best of luck to you and your team.
Or you know, that all cell phones had to have a physical keyboard. Until they suddenly didn't.
[Never tried Kagi, but let the man do his thing.]
I don't know if the OP got what they needed from this reply, but I assume I'm not alone in being impressed by the humility and candor of the response and developed much greater affinity for Kagi from some of the specifics of what were said.
I want more companies to have communicative, principled management that invites a sustainable base of like-minded customers/partners and fewer companies that pretend they can please 7B people by radically changing their product every 3 months.
I owned a business for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was my primary source of income. I valued feedback, tried my hardest to solicit as much of it as possible, and always took it to heart (though I had to always try and glean statistics from the sum of all feedback so that I was never spending resources on minority opinions).
What I read from the user was that the company created an optics problem. It wasn't whether the company was losing money or not, it was just that the user is choosing to support that company because they want a really good search engine, and the optics of divesting the company's resources into multiple projects makes it appear as if it could be the case that not enough focus is being spent on what really matters to that user.
What I read from the founder was that the optics issue went completely over his head and a complete dismissal of the user's concerns and feedback, along with a doubling down of the decisions made.
It's not a good look in my opinion. Even though the founder was polite and didn't say anything inappropriate, I would NEVER have responded to a customer of mine like that.
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 to ever take on Google and Chrome, they need their own champion.
You are both right. Freediver laid out the vision, and some users are saying the vision isn't what the paying users are paying for. As someone who ran a business like this, GS is telling Freediver this should probably be something to give extra attention to and consciously decide is it the company the vision or the search product people are paying for?
The vision of a company shouldn't be much of a concern to paying customers of an existing product.
I think therein lies the problem for many people. If you're already at a stretch to justify paying for search, any deviation from your assumption of the correct decisions from the company will be magnified.
I think the most positive aspect of freediver's response is the implied dismissal of the above. - that their stubborness is genuine, not a more robotic, seemingly hollow, response of concern. As a marketing approach, I'm wondering if maybe that would give you less reach and more impact in general.
https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
I'm not even arguing people should assume good faith until proven otherwise (I don't think we should, generally). Just that being so steadfast in one's assumption of bad faith is unwarranted.
If this were an occasional occurrence, I would agree with you, but it seems to happen systematically. Perhaps it's an exaggerated and counterproductive way of reacting.
People have the right to hold different opinions without feeling compelled to try to convince others of their own views or to be persuaded by others' opinions. Accepting that people can have differing viewpoints demonstrates respect for diversity of opinion and individual freedom of thought.
The concept of accepting different opinions without trying to convince each other implies respect for intellectual autonomy and freedom of thought for each individual, while still encouraging open dialogue and constructive engagement __when appropriate__.
As a woman who’s had bad experiences with men before, this kind of “no you owe me your time” behaviour usually triggers a “get away from this guy; fast” kind of response.
This doesn’t mean Kagi is necessarily bad or that this was what Vlad intended, but it does for sure reduce my faith in the project. Not enough to stop paying for Kagi, but I’ve definitely gone to the “raise shields, power phasers” stage.
If this is a regular "trigger point" in real life, I can understand that as a knee jerk, but there's no danger or need for immediate reaction via email, so why judge through that lens once you've identified you're doing so?
...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.
I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here. I assume many people are on the same boat, so I wouldn't be so sure about that.
Perhaps I should have said "target customers" where I said "customers", I don't know. But it should not be surprising that "being an HN user" correlates strongly with "finds out about things on HN".
I would strongly bet their primary source of customers came via a HN referral.
We are literally their Target Customers.
If anything, I’m interested in what the evolution will look like as their customer base expands beyond HN types…
The only way a customer speaks is with money. If people like what you sell, you'll have more customers speaking with their wallet. If they don't then they tell you so by not purchasing what you sell. Internet commenters (such as myself) do not represent all customers or even a majority. People who are happy with a product usually see no reason to give feedback – especially when it's a small purchase. Likewise, people who hate your product wouldn't purchase it in the first place.
The cool part is that as people start leaving your product, complainers will become an even smaller minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself. Maybe blame it on bullying?
For just about any business, if they were to ask their customers or the public at large what they want, the answer is usually "We want free stuff!". Cool to do if you're a politician, but bad business practice.
There's an old expression saying "the customer is always right", meaning that you can never blame the customers for how they spend or don't spend their money. If paying customers show a certain preference you better give it to them.
People who don't complain but silently drop are speaking with their wallets and that has to be listened to, as I said in my previous post. A business has to listen to customer spending behaviour and not listen too much to complainers. Normal people will give hotels awful reviews if it was raining on their vacation and great reviews if the weather was good and they had fun with their friends. Complaining is a past time to release some stress for many, and a pathological problem for a few. But when it comes to actually spending money is where the truth comes out.
Most people will not like your product and not buy your product, that's the large majority. That's why most normal businesses do not have the same reach as for example Apple or Toyota.
> The cool part is that as people start leaving your product, complainers will become an even smaller minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself.
You can be sure that nobody second guesses themselves more than business leaders – especially if sales drop or stagnate. That doesn't mean that every complainer is right in their complaints.
As for Kagi there seems to be very many commenters online and in their feedback forums who believe that the main selling point of the service is privacy or extensive customisation. But I believe that the main selling point is search results quality and that everything else comes second. At least if they want to widen their customer base beyond computer hackers.
If you take a look at the Kagi feedback forums, there's almost every week somebody starting a thread where they demand that Kagi implements a very niche feature and then threatens to unsubscribe if they don't do it. Or demands a niche feature or they won't sign up. You can't listen too much to these people, you have to follow your own vision and if people agree with your decisions you'll see it in sales. If not, then you were wrong in your vision.
yeah well if I never pay money for kagi and never speak about anything how the hell is kagi supposed to know what they could do to get me to pay for them?
That doesn’t mean a business needs to acquiesce to every little demand. But “just listen to the money” is a horrible path for product improvement.
plenty of actionable complaints are just wild goose chases to nowhere.
I remember Daniel King's PowerPlayChess channel recently started promoting Kagi, doesn't this count as paid advertising or is this deal something else?
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.
Google search has been bad for a long time. It's clear they serve their customers (advertisers) quite well, but as a user of their search, they're not particularly impressive.
The biggest problem is a problem of scale: being the biggest search provider means Google are targeted by SEO, so it's harder for Google to sift out the AI-generated garbage--Kagi just isn't involved in the arms race that Google is. But as a user that's not my problem; I'm not going to tolerate bad search results out of some sense of "fairness" to a corporation. And Kagi is delivering real user-centered features which are, frankly, obvious, i.e. Google should be embarrassed that they don't let you filter/prioritize domains or search within lenses like Kagi does.
But even the remainder will trip them up every now and then.
If these periods last only a few minutes it probably won't matter but if it lasts a few days or more then it's very likely to impact customer retention.
Did you not see the last part on your end?
Plus, if anything a small userbase makes it more difficult for quality search because the long tail is still effectively infinitely large, relative to the competencies of a single decision maker, but now there is only have one user searching for any random super niche topic maybe once a month, in total.
So they can't even a/b test or rely on customers reporting in on the real situation because it is too sparse.
In pursuing billions of global users across all demographics and trying to maximally monetize them through ads, Google is pursuing an entirely different measure of "search quality" than Kagi.
Google delivers their version of search quality when a rice farmer in Thailand and financier in the Bay Area both reach for Google when they want to find something online and then get distracted by an ad.
Meanwhile, Kagi gets their version right when they have a profitable base of happy customers. They can make different and more aggressive assumptions about the needs of their users, solicit and digest direct feedback about those assumptions, and optimize a product that delivers superb search quality for their niche.
They're completely different technical problems that only occasionally intersect. Their engineering teams aren't competing with each other.
So I don't see how Kagi can avoid having to deliver quality search results in millions of niches. Just at a very low frequency compared to Google.
Or are you suggesting to not bother with search quality past a certain lower threshold?
I don’t know about you, but the reason I’m paying for Kagi is because their search results are reliably better than Google.
That may be because all the spam optimizes for Google, but noneless they’ve already done the thing you say they should focus on.
As long as the search quality isn’t compromised it doesn’t matter to me what they do with my money.
Because of adverse selection?
Users that are users because of marketing are somehow different?
As does some sponsorship a la the VPN ads my kids see constantly in content heavy educational videos.
It is trying at all cost to make drivers lose focus of the road to see your advert, putting themselves and the people around them at risk of a road crash.
https://kagi.com/stats
I love what you're doing and will continue to support you at your Professional tier as long as you continue doing what you're doing.
The number of times I've heard people extol the virtues of targeted ads on this site is absurd. I've even heard folks here say that Google ads are more helpful than the search results as if that's a good thing. And these are far more common comments here than comments in favor of actually returning good search results or aligning your income with user interests.
How often do you think the CEO pf Delta Airlines flies in first class versus on a private jet? My guess is only often enough to gin up a little PR.
And to be clear, I'm not even talking about being intentionally dishonest. AdTech workers likely believe the pro-ad propaganda they spout because they have to in order to live with themselves.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that HN is a very specific niche of the Internet. But for a slightly nerdy, not mass-market, product like mine (or Kagi) this niche is a great place to grow.
You just have to be mindful to see the feedback through the lens of the fact that you're talking to a niche audience and keep an eye on what a broader market might be looking for if that's where you're planning to go
You can find some people on HN who will say anything. That's the nature of a large distributed community.
But I also think the fact that there are people who would say that is a good thing. I despise ads, ad-tracking/privacy invasion, etc with a passion. I won't use anything that has ads. I won't even install most apps, even paid/premium, if they collect personal information. So you know my biases.
Their argument is a whole lot more nuanced (and better) than you are presenting it. The main point is that they find (or consider) ads to be useful for helping people find new products they might be interested in. And that does quite obviously happen sometimes (how often is very much up for debate though(. For them, the privacy tradeoff is worth it. I would guess that a portion of people who agree with that would fall into the "what do I have to hide if I'm not doing anythign wrong" camp. I think they're nuts, but it is an interesting viewpoint to consider that is a lot more nuanced and contextual then just "I enjoy targeted ads."
Honestly I get the T-shirt part this way. You got to Doo crazy stuff as a start-up. I also get that you try ai stuff. As long as you keep up de search.
However what scares me is the apparent lack of knowledge about privacy, gdpr and what is PII in a product that, to me, is all about privacy. Have one person in the company be an expert in privacy and GDPR etc and use their insights, since it is critical for your right of existence.
They'll likely discover that GDPR is not that optional as soon as a customer (or a competitor with a grudge!) reports them to their relevant national privacy/personal data protection authority, after which they'll get to have a very uncomfortable conversation where they will not be able to use those arguments
(Do you regularly check to make sure you're obeying laws in countries you don't ever intend to visit? No? Then why should Kagi?)
I suppose a serious breach of regulations, and if Kagi decided to ignore fines, apart from a bad reputation, could ultimately lead to things like judicial decisions of blocking access to the website or blocking payments for EU customers.
The scope of GDPR is clearly including businesses operating from the US, but has any company registered only in the US ever been fined by EU?
This means they're exposed to GDPR not only indirectly by serving EU citizens but also directly by operating within the EU.
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/
Quick (but difficult) question: do you foresee there arising a reasonably reliable way to filter out the coming wave of ai spam? I’m told that half of Twitter is bots talking to each other at this point, and I’m sure this is coming to other media as well. Eg, massive, massive waves of content marketing, sock puppets, etc.
Is there reason to be optimistic that you or other actors will be able to sift through it?
That's as good as 0% accuracy.
And AI text will keep changing.
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.
After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, money and energy you spent on those t-shirts. Your customers are complaining because they want you to succeed. If they didn't care about you, they'd just cancel the subscription and move on. And your response to it is "nah, what we did was right" and not "yeah, maybe we shouldn't have spent all that resources on a stupid t-shirt that nobody wanted"?
I just don't get it. And what are you gonna do when you hit 50K members? Are you planning to send an entire wardrobe (from undies to a suit) to all your 50K customers (assuming IF you ever hit that many customers)?
Oh, and nitpick: It's outside the box, not out of the box...
The Founder of the company decided to pour in his own money worth of millions ( assuming that is true ) into the company. He bootstrapped it.
They were on track to becoming profitable. And now, as the replies shows they are now profitable.
He decided to spend some money to buy everyone a t-shirt as a gift.
And all I see is not thank you but anger and frustrations. Pointing to waste of time as if the product is going downhill or not iterating fast enough. But in fact according to changelog they are doing pretty well.
Spending my own money to say thank you in my own way and all I got was, all these negativity.
I just don't get it.
Read the article, the author clearly lays out how Kagi is scattering their attention, money and energy on things that do not matter one bit.
He decided to spend some money to buy everyone a t-shirt as a gift.
A gift that nobody asked for, a gift that has zero impact, a gift that took their attention, time and money away from their core product.
Let me repeat - people are complaining because they care, because they want Kagi to succeed. Google search has gotten so bad that people are desperate for an alternative. Instead of taking it as "people are mean to us", perhaps Kagi should take it as "let us listen to our customers, they really do want us to succeed". If you see it from the perspective of a Kagi fan/customer, your opinion might change
To move my mother to Kagi, I had to install Brave Browser on her android cell phone, make it the default browser on Android, change Brave's default search engine and create a desktop shortcut to it.
Android is ubiquitous in Brazil. I won't be able to move much people to Kagi with a process this involved.
Happy to chat further about this topic if you wish, privately or publicly.
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.
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.
Quality is there for the most part, IME, but I definitely agree that their local features need a LOT of work.
He was successful about building a community around the store but not successful at the paperwork so it turned out we had not paid the sales tax for a few years which led the state to put up signs in front of the store, thankfully he was able to scrape up the money. Boy it was a near death experience.
(2) If you are working on search in 2024 and you are serious you’re going to be using A.I.
Pretty sure Marginalia doesn't use AI and to the best of my knowledge Viktor hasn't written about plans to do so. But maybe he's not serious because it sure seems like he's having fun!
PS: Lovely username =)
(2) One of the most depressing experiences of my life was reading through the first ten years or so of TREC conferences looking for something useful to improve the search engines I was building. Eventually I found a volume that revealed the handful of useful results that they got in the first ten years (here https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262220736/trec/)
Advances in search quality are rare and come along about once a decade; BM25 was such an advance, on paper. Even though BM25 is in Elasticsearch and a lot of other products very few people are taking advantage of it because they don't want to do the parametric tuning it requires to get superior results.
https://sbert.net/
is a similar once-in-decade advance that actually works out of the box with relatively little tuning. It doesn't address all the issues of search and should be integrated with more traditional search, but if you are building a search engine in 2024 you can expect to wait another 10 years for another advance like that.
(3) Marginalia particularly interests me because it is a small collection and the problems of search over a small collection are very different from those over a large collection. Gerald Salton started IR research with a deck of punch cards and he thought 80 documents was a lot and with 80 documents you are going to be very concerned about missing relevant documents because you didn't pick the right word. If you have 80,000,000,000 documents you have a very different problem. My take is SBERT and related techniques are particularly effective against small collection problems.
"why pay for shirts or advertising when we can own it?"
Anyway, that's how I felt it happened. Build over buy. Siphoning is an interesting thought
It's mind blowing. The earliest internet ventures were selling shirts that somebody else made for huge margins.
Why take on the costs in-house, lol. Either way: by making it yourself or dealing with problematic suppliers, it's not worth the hassle.
Shirts aren't their business and for those still in it, the margins are razor thin. Madness.
Useless snark aside, if the Kagi team wanted more "money directly into their own pockets" they could just raise their salaries. If their product is comparable to Google their salaries could be as well.
And they'd get the money for those massive salaries from what magic money tree? They're at best barely profitable, revenue is probably around $2m, and they only raised $670k in funding. This isn't a particularly money making enterprise.
The t-shirt thing is inexplicable.
Except it's less expensive than just going for the providers. Which is puzzling to say the least.
Kagi is for a subset of the internet and specifically for the part that has content. The good parts of cyberspace if you like. OP seems to be looking for something bigger like someone they can trust to replace Google and save the internet as well. For that search I say good luck sailor
(see, that is the good thing in Kagi too - you can downvote ;)
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 live lives that aren't tethered to a search engine in a meaningful way. Google "wins" their traffic because they don't care, and every bit of friction in-between them and their content is extra work. Kagi's payment-upfront mentality is unrealistic for everyone except the most well-paid Bay Area engineers.
That's not to say I don't understand the "avoid ads at all costs" concept. I do oppose to using anti-advertising sentiments as a populist rallying cry so people will line up at your Search SaaS kiosk and pay you whatever you ask for. At this point you really might as well just invest in your own Searx instance, it's plenty cheaper. And you can't even "dropbox comment" me since there have been third-parties providing search for free since before HN was a website.
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.
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.
It is a business, what did you think? That's why they charge money for their service. Like millions of other businesses, they will never get any significant part of the world's population as users. Why is that a problem to you?
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 benderThen 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 they are criminals, in which case we don't care they don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
- Kagi CEO
You can see various baubles glint in Vlad's eye.
If you are a collection of 10x devs, you can afford to make multiple bets and test for traction. You can sample the Brave waters, or try to head off Proton claiming ownership of privacy first, or get in front of perplexity and phind. Arguably, only products you've shipped can tell you the truth about product market fit.
Which is to say, I don't think these "let 1000 flowers bloom" experiments are a bad thing... so long as the core product has no appearance of inattention and never goes backwards in usability or quality while "net promotion" is still part of the growth plan.
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.
If they go down, I will switch to another search engine… no need to do so preemptively from my PoV.
So, it does not matter that "all search engines are problematic in terms of privacy"-- this one is marketed to not be. That's why people have concerns about how serious they're taking that committment and why people would hold them to a higher standard. It's also why a sale to a company which does not respect privacy is potentially a major issue, especially if current customer data isn't being handled in the manner they had expected.
The complaint is about the marketing for sure. But that's not so different from the other "privacy-oriented" engines I'm aware of.
I'm not saying Kagi is (or is not, I don't know) being a good actor here. I'm just saying that if you want to use a search engine at all, you're effectively having to choose the lesser of evils.
Kagi may not be a saint, but since there aren't better options, I'm willing to settle with a search engine that actually gives me useful search results and isn't totally egregious on privacy issues.
Vlad needs to walk that "criminal" comment WAY the hell back.
Christians can be labeled criminals in China. Young women try to get a 1st trimester abortion in Texas.
What the hell is he talking about? Anyone with even a basic understanding of human liberty and dignity knows anonymity and free speech are bedrocks. Especially disturbing coming from someone trying to run a search engine which can collect very detailed and targeted information from users via their search history!
That "criminals" comment flipped my advocacy off like a light switch, for all the reasons described here in this thread. Perhaps it will get walked back.
* Lately, the results seem more Bing-like, and I've even had to !g things for the first time in a year to find a non-spam result. The core product has to be 10x for people to advocate and people to switch, not just more of the same or slightly better.
** Although, I couldn't convince him to make a team plan that would effectively let me pay full price (pro or ultimate) per employee for everyone registering from a domain. I cannot fathom why he wouldn't let a company pay him for double or triple digit employees, it's free money. Plus, those employees that use it for free at the office, will get frustrated at home, and buy the family option and tell their friends... Refusing to let me cover my employee base is a weird flex for someone still counting subscribers trying to get to 25,000.
Granting and fiercely protecting privacy is a simple matter of respect for your fellow human beings. Doing so also has the side effect of slowing descents into various forms of totalitarianism.
— Eric Schmidt, 2013
Full anonymity is hard to achieve.
Kagi is aiming for more privacy, I.e. a search engine and browser that doesn't track your habits or sell them to data brokers to identify you. Kagi does that very well.
At least not a definition of privacy I really care about.
It's very Mark Zuckerberg 2004.
And his comment about needing privacy? Name one person that needs privacy while taking a shit. Just because your desire for privacy doesn't rise to the level of need, that doesn't make it any less valid.
People helping other people escape slavery were criminals.
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 online).
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.
You can check Mullvad's privacy policy to see how they are handling GDPR. It's not written in "corporate words" and is very clear to me. For example, they don't even need email address to sign up but once payment comes to the table, GDPR comes - depending on which method of payment, regardless of how you insist on "no data collect": https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy
The correct thing to do is transparenting that process with your legal/GDPR person.
[It would also be selling point to offer at least GDPR levels of privacy to everyone -- embrace it and do it right for the EU and don't fuck over people in the rest of the world just because you aren't required to do it here]
Speaking about their whole business, I think three things left me a negative impression:
- the tshirts were really unnecessary. I didn’t understand that. I am not sure the world needed more trash being produced and for sure it was not a good use of their money.
- I think AI as a tool has a place in their offering (Quick Answer, Summarizer). I don’t think the Assistant stuff makes sense for a search engine.
- the apparent lack of care for privacy that appears in the quotes in the blog posts are not good and I hope Vlad changes his mind and addresses that properly. Everyone needs privacy. Moreover, GDPR is no joke and it should be followed properly.
But in all seriousness, I’ve been a subscriber ever since they started and I’m an ultimate subscriber still, and I’d be sad if they went bankrupt due to mismanagement of the funds.
Yes. The part where the CEO claims that of all the people seeking anonymity that less than 100 of them aren’t criminals o_O
Check out the last discord screenshot.
You might want to consider actually reading things for yourself, rather than assuming the magic robots are telling the truth (the magic robot did not tell you the truth, here).
It cautioned me that "it's important to recognize the limitations of such tools" and said:
> Tools like Claude3 may struggle with understanding the context of certain claims or the overall tone and intent of the article. They might flag statements that are not actually problematic or miss important context that affects the interpretation of claims.
And whatever the heck is going on with all the other stuff. There's no way one should stretch oneself this thin.
Gathering feedback good. But getting involved in philosophical discussion or how to run the company looks like a bad idea.
This does invite trouble but interacting with users of the product I am building is also the only way I know how to do it and is keeping me sane. Not to mention it helps build a great product, as users probably 'built' half of it with feedback.
I never thought that talking too much with the customers can be bad but it also may be true that full openness approach becomes a burden at some point and that it would be healthier to separate from it a bit.
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.
Here, I asked Claude about it, since you like that approach.
> A CEO of a search engine states "people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than a 100 in the entire world". Is this concerning from a privacy perspective?
> Yes, this statement by the CEO of a search engine company is quite concerning from a privacy perspective for several reasons:
> 1. Underestimating the need for anonymity: The claim that only a few people in the world "really need anonymity" is a gross underestimation. There are many legitimate reasons why individuals may need anonymity, such as whistleblowers, journalists, activists, victims of abuse, members of persecuted groups, and even ordinary citizens who value their privacy.
> 2. Privacy as a fundamental human right: Privacy is widely recognized as a fundamental human right. By dismissing the need for anonymity, the CEO is essentially disregarding the right to privacy for a large segment of the population.
> 3. Potential conflict of interest: As the CEO of a search engine company, which collects and monetizes user data, there is a potential conflict of interest. Downplaying the importance of anonymity and privacy could be seen as a way to justify the company's data collection practices.
> 4. Centralization of power: The statement reflects a concerning centralization of power, where a single entity (the search engine company) gets to decide who "really needs anonymity" and who doesn't. This goes against the principles of a free and open internet.
> 5. Chilling effect: Such statements from a prominent tech leader could have a chilling effect on individuals who seek anonymity for legitimate reasons, as it may discourage them from exercising their right to privacy.
> Overall, this statement by the CEO reflects a concerning lack of understanding or appreciation for the importance of privacy and anonymity in a free and democratic society. It underscores the need for strong privacy protections, decentralized systems, and a broader recognition of the fundamental right to privacy for all individuals, regardless of their specific circumstances.
As a follow-up...
> How do you feel about the claim "I might like anonymity but it is absolutely a 'want', not 'need'."
> I would disagree with the blanket claim that anonymity is absolutely a "want" and not a "need" for everyone. While that may be true for some people, there are many legitimate scenarios where anonymity can be a crucial need, not just a want...
> blah blah blah
> While anonymity may just be a casual preference for some, denying that it can be a critical need for others is concerning. It dismisses the reality that millions face real threats to their safety, freedom or even lives which anonymity helps protect against. Reducing it to just a "want" is dismissive of these legitimate needs.
I do not read the attitude at Kagi to be downplaying the importance of privacy. To me it seems like a mature realization of the limits of online life. Anonymity is very expensive. Try to buy something online if you doubt it.
I disagree with your interpretation of Vlad's position but, I'm cool with your seeing it differently. I suggest you stick with Google and their much better () attitude toward privacy.
ps, I 100% could prompt Claude to rebut every sentence in your post. I do like that approach when it is productive. Except that I decided to talk back to all of you, Claude saved me the time it would take to interpret the original rant. I consider saving time to be a good use. Of course, you probably had fun playing with my text and Claude, so good for you.
Yes. That should give you pause, and is why I included the above.
It will happily confirm your priors for you, even incorrectly. Like when it told you the article didn’t say anything about privacy.
I thought this article was actually quite varied – there are issues about personal interactions and communication style, AI hype, marketing and business blunders, tax issues, privacy issues, politics. Some of those matter more to me than others, but I'd imagine most Kagi users would care about at least one of them, given the product is pitched at users who care about some of these.
If you read the article, you will discover that your magic robot is mistaken.
> Per ChatGPT the government agency that can sue you for false advertising is FTC, not DMV.
His only criticism of the search results is to say he doesn't think it's better than anyone else.
And yes, it's going to be a thing now. We have cool tools that help us get stuff done quicker. In this case, I read part of the article, then skimmed it before asking Claude3 to read it carefully. Then, because you people are full of fantasy, I read it personally carefully and confirm that my magic robot is exactly right. That encourages me to do it more.