I Lost Faith in Kagi

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.

Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

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)

- Kagi CEO

Lori seems (from the blog post and the subsequent email chain with the CEO) to be unnecessarily combative and most definitely too emotionally invested in Kagi.

You're paying, what, 10, 25 USD - are you getting a good service for it? If not, unsubscribe, if yes, what's the problem? Sounds like they're profitable now, so little risk of the service dissapearing.

Unnecessary drama by people who live for drama. My only advice for Vlad would be to not get caught up in it.

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.

I noticed Orion is very very buggy, and I found it odd from a revenue oriented company. I was desperately looking for a way out of the chromium world and also avoiding Firefox, so when I found Orion I thought this is where I'd settle and maybe help development. But the bugs are so counter productive, that you can't even manage bookmarks. Something was off with that browser's team.

I really don't understand why people are so upset about the T-shirts. Like in the grand scheme of things, who cares? If I invested money (I didn't) in Kagi, I would expect some of that money to be spent on marketing. Marketers often do experiments, some of which go well, and others that don't. Only time tells.

This take feels more like being upset about one individual's (Vlad) personal opinions about privacy and politics. But in my opinion, it fails to realize that assigning one person's views to an entire organization is a fallacy. Even if they are the leader.

As a service, I like Kagi. Both in principle, and in practice. I find the "summarize this page" feature to be very useful. I also like the idea of paying for value, rather than being forced to feed the advertising beast. So I pay for value. If it stops being valuable, I will stop paying. I care about privacy, but I also realize that we live in a world where there are serious limits on the amount of privacy that can be expected. So I have to just do the best I can with what is available. Kagi is at least an improvement on the standard "eyeballs are the product" business model.

They lost my faith when they partnered with brave

I am increasingly convinced that the successor/replacement to Google will not be a more clever, AI-powered search engine, but a hyper-curated collection of links, selected by people who understand what good content is. Sort of like Yahoo in the pre-Google days.

I think this is only going to become more apparent once AI-generated content takes over the web.

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.

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.

The real lesson here is that as a founder, don't spend too much time discussing with your users on discord.

Gathering feedback good. But getting involved in philosophical discussion or how to run the company looks like a bad idea.

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.

(this articles formatting was super hard to read, I love the web 1.0 "just get it out there" vibe but man I wish CSS had a good "reasonable default" for lots of text)

I'm a huge fan of kagi and have been paying for it for as long as paying for it has been possible - that said, I think the author is spot on about the long term viability of the project considering their limited funding, limited employees, very wide (yet unproven) interests AND a leader who's maybe not so receptive to feedback.

For example I was part of the Orion beta and I left feedback in the discord that it took ~30 seconds on the then top of the line iPhone (13 Pro Max?) to load the interface which made it hard to use and I thought it was unreasonably slow and he said something like "that's not slow it's totally reasonable" and since then I decided it wasn't worth leaving any more feedback and have since left the community.

The T-shirt thing is dumb and a waste of funds, but TFA describing it as "owning" a T-shirt factory is an exaggeration that makes me question most of the framing of the rest of the article. They partnered with an existing entity in Serbia, what they did set up was the means to distribute them. Still not a great look and definitely still a waste of funds, but if every criticism takes this same form—take a legitimate criticism and blow it out of proportion with exaggerated language—then it's important to take the article with plenty of salt.

My own experience has been that what I get month to month is worth what I pay. If the project is sustainable, then I'll get to enjoy it into the future. If not, I'll get to enjoy it while I can.

A search engine isn't like an email provider or even a web browser, there's basically no lock in that makes transitioning later difficult if something changes for the worse.

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?

(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.

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.

Oh and they own a t-shirt factory.

Maybe I'm being pedantic but Kagi doesn't own a T-shirt factory and presenting it as such is a bad faith argument that does make me question the author. They very clearly point out that they worked with a print shop in Serbia to make the shirts.

I don't know why this is flagged into oblivion. I'm sure most HN users won't agree because Kagi is very popular here but I don't think the arguments are bad or overblown.

Personally I don't use Kagi for 2 reasons: It's not significantly better than what I already have (SearXNG private instance) and I don't really subscribe to the "everything must be paid on the internet". I'm much more comfortable running some dockers and putting a privacy barrier between myself and google, as I do for my searches, for my phones, computers etc. Of course this kind of tech solution is not an option for everyone, but I don't care about everyone :) $10 is a lot of money for me and I rather spend that on something I control like 2 VPSes.

Also I think that once things go commercial eventually they will reach a scale where they will want our data too. After all, data is like free money. A business will never say no to free money. By due diligence law they're not even allowed to. Kagi has that luxury now, but once they become big and own half a northern californian town for their campus they no longer will. That's the idea of enshittification.

Maybe a little off topic, but regarding Orion: Can someone explain to me why every search engine feel like they need to build their own browser, and by build I mean jiggle the handles on Chromium a bit?

It seems pointless. I can sort of see why Microsoft would do it, but that's Microsoft wanting a modern browser for their operating system, not DuckDuckGo, Kagi or Ecosia wanting a browser for their search box.

Why this is pretty much just a weird rant about Kagi, I do agree with the questioning of the investment in maintaining a browser.

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.

The t-shirt thing is inexplicable.

That is why I pay duckduckgo which include vpn. I also run my own searxng. I used to subscribe Kagi last year. But after researching I came to the same conclusion as Tomte. Nothing unusual. Just business. DDG already is Kagi with solid business and proven privacy (almost anyway, I know about their Microsoft connection). DDG interface need improvement though.

From my own experience, the AI built-in to Kagi is excellent. I frequently suffix my query with a question mark to trigger their AI responder (it responds based on the content of a few top results, with citations), and the results are almost always great, and spare me the need to open each of the sites individually and look through them.

I don't care about Orion and Email, but what I'm getting right now in terms of search experience is definitely worth the cost.

As a paying user since day 1, I do not give a rat's arse about AI. In fact, I have moved away from Google because they have focused so much on AI their search got worse to the point of being useless.

I paid for a good search engine that respects my queries and does not try to outsmart me. The more Kagi focuses on AI, and making an """intelligent""" search engine, basically replicating Google's missteps, is the day I stop giving them money. I've already been noticing some of my keywords are being ignored or reinterpreted. Please stop that.

I don't care about email either. I am paying Fastmail for it, and I certainly know better than to attach my search history to my email account, especially when it's from an AI company. Is the goal here to copy Google?

To all startup owners: there is more to software quality and user experience than trying to fit the AI buzzword in anything you do. Stop following the hype and focus on building a damn good product.

VERY ironic to me that a web search company has its community platform hosted on Discord, which is un-indexable. Honestly, companies having their community platform on Discord is a huge red flag for me.

For example, he has stated before that he thinks 3 star reviews on products are "by definition" unbiased, because they must include good and bad points.

... What?

Has this person ever visited a review site? I mean, it varies fairly dramatically, and there are some niches where 3/5, 5/10 etc has a fairly defined meaning (for instance, for TV reviewers it means "meh", for gadget reviewers it means "this will catch fire as soon as you plug it in"), but really, I mean, what?

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'm a subscriber simply because their search is far better than any available alternative. That's the primary thing I want from them and so far they're delivering it at a cost I consider fair.

Their other projects are not interesting or useful to me, but so far I can simply ignore them. Yes, on some level I wish they'd focus and quit wasting money and energy on things I don't care about, but that's really not my affair.

The one growing reservation I have is with regard to Vlad's/Kagi's actual, boots-on-the-ground approach to privacy. Kagi necessarily has the ability to know more about me than almost any other company. I want to see them demonstrate strong and unwavering commitment to respecting and protecting my privacy - through policy, technology, and careful and continuous vetting of partners. Expressed disinterest in collecting or capitalizing on my data is not enough, and seeing Vlad's communications in which he casually shrugs or responsibility-shifts to a third-party heightens my concern.

For now, I remain a customer - but a wary one. I've stopped actively recommending Kagi personally and professionally because as a privacy advocate, it increasingly feels irresponsible to do so.

Kagi Ultimate user here.

This article comes across so unhinged it almost works as an advertisement, except for the founder dismissing privacy issues...

I'm happy to hear Kagi are creating an e-mail service though, I've been looking to get away from Microsoft 365 since I'm not really using the meat of it. I hope they allow multiple aliases per users and perhaps add a masking service as well.

OP’s Mastodon post on Vlad’s follow up: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

Good write-up, I am taking it somewhat with a grain of salt since I am not really invested in this enough to try to verify it for myself, but unfortunately it doesn't really feel like a huge shock either.

Kagi Search is at the very least intriguing, though I honestly didn't find the results very impressive; they seemed alright, but nothing spectacular. The thing that is frustrating is, Google has a massive index, but searching it is an exercise in frustration because it feels like it is basically rewriting your query. Even using "" and + no longer seems to be good at ensuring certain things appear in the results, and so I sometimes try, in desperation, to simply repeat the term I want to emphasize multiple times in the query, which finally sometimes allows me to find things I already know exists. God forbid you wanted to find something you didn't know existed, because in that case, you might never realize Google is fucking up what you're looking for; it has the answer, but it's hidden in a sea of Google-funded blogspam. What a mess.

Will there ever again be a profitable search engine that works as well as Google used to? The answer might be no, and this bums me out.

And he is very, very much the type that believes "not everything is political"

Well, at least we agree on one thing, I have always felt the "everything is political" angle was one of those semantic technicalities, kind of like saying "actually, the glass is always full, just sometimes it's full of air". The lack of a well-defined boundary between "political" issues and non-political issues should not be used as an excuse to drive politics and politically-charged discussion into otherwise rather mundane and apolitical things. I suppose it's not really that important, but this is one of those Internet-era brainrot issues I dislike most. Of course, maybe this is actually trying to make a more nuanced point, but it being phrased like this activated my "uhm, actually" response impulse.

I did pay briefly for Kagi, but ultimately just didn't see the benefit over DDG. Google seems to be too far gone to be useful, but DDG still consistently finds what I need. Other than that, the main issue I have with Kagi from a business perspective is it will always be extremely niche. Even among "tech" people, the idea of paying for a search engine will always be a single digit percentage of the overall market.

I view Fastmail in a similar manner, but the difference with them is they have a real business market for those wanting an alternative to Google or Microsoft.

What I sense here is the same phenomena as when a famous artist gets a fan that turns into a hater that maybe turns into a stalker, but this time it is a small company that gets this kind of attention and zeal.

There's some kind of psychological instinct that makes some people think that they are owed something and have some kind of personal relation to somebody famous or in this case a company, a kind of familiarity that is just one way. The author of course wouldn't direct this kind of attention towards Google or any other huge company, because they understand that there is no relationship between him and them. But now when it's a small company, there is a short circuit. Just like stalkers usually direct their attention to female performers, and not to gangster rappers or a rock band.

Of course there will be nothing that Kagi as a company, or the people behind Kagi could do to please the author. When in "hater mode", exactly everything the other part does or says will be turned and twisted into something bad. Just read the e-mail exchange that was posted.

With that said, Kagi is still the best search engine around and if they someday won't be, it's as easy as unsubscribing.

Aaand, trying to delete your account you get:

    Error: Server Error
    The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
    
    Please try again in 30 seconds.

I am surprised that nobody mentioned Kagi Maps so far. To me this is the largest waste of energy possible, building an Apple/Google Maps competitor is a project too ambitious and time consuming for a 12 person company which is also developing a search engine (and a browser, and AI assistants, etc.). Kagi should nail their search engine first and only then start side projects like that.

Is Kagi actually running their own search engine or are they just representing the outputs of other company's search engines?

I ask because I am considering a subscription.

Kagi does not collect any personal information

Our payment processor does, and you can ask Stripe for that

- Kagi CEO

The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller (...) access to the personal data (...)

- Art 15 GDPR

Controllers are responsible for complying with SARs, not processors.

- ICO https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

Kagi = controller / Stripe = processor

So no Vlad, that is not how the GDPR works.

There is absolutely no reason to trust Vlad on GDPR when they didn’t even pay sales taxes

I got a little more than halfway through the post before I gave up. I honestly don't know of any other tech endeavor that is doing so much good only 16 people. You can diss their CEO all you want, but their product is heads above the rest.

And it's not just recycled google results. It's google's API, which means that it brings back into the light what google was best at before they decided to monetize it with echo chamber algos and toxic ads. I can find it in my heart hate Alphabet and yet pay to mainline their best product with a sprinkle of other vitamins and minerals like Wolfram.

I don't know that I agree with all these complaints.

Making a bunch of free shirts is something DuckDuckGo did too, I have one. Is it a bit weird they incorporated their own factory for it? Yeah, but I guess I just figured that that was part of their marketing budget. How many cool products have we seen die just because their marketing was crappier than their competitors?

I do think that building their own browser is a waste of resources, but I think that the AI tools also are kind of marketing. People utilizing the universal summarizer gets the name out there, and allows people to see the Kagi branding more frequently. Are they spreading themselves too thin? Maybe, but simultaneously I do feel like the second that someone has to reach for Google to do anything, that's going to whittle away at their potential market share. I think the fear is that people are going to say "if I have to do X using Google anyway, why should I stick with Kagi, especially since Google is free?"

It's tough to say, I've been a paying Kagi user for about a year, I like it, it's a product that I actually think is better than vanilla Google. I really want them to succeed, so maybe I'm viewing what they are doing with rose-colored glasses, but most of the complaints in this blog post didn't seem completely horrible to me.

The whole tshirt thing is straight out of an episode of Silicon Valley or the WUPH episode of The Office.

If they go down that direction they should at least make some Kagi branded condoms like Ryan did.

> > Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free.

This guy is a total Ryan Howard.

My perspective as a subscriber for ~6 months:

Search just works, 90%+ of my searches are on kagi. Much better than google, bing, ddg, etc. Worth the $10.

I do use fastgpt and the summarizer sometimes. As with any of these AI tools, you have to get a feel for what suits it and when to use it.

The unbiased review idea _sounds like_ it would be ultimately fruitless as the requirements get philosophical, but it may very well lead to more useful tools in the process.

The GDPR perspective is unfortunate. I'm willing to wait and see if they eventually accept it.

Overall, I like their focus on user experience, customization, fast and light websites, and search quality. Sure it might not as objective as it's portrayed, but it is giving me great tools _today_.

I’m using Orion and I pay for Kagi. Orion works great (despite a few glitches I had run into over year or two, miles ahead of competition).

Like others, I think that they had to raise money is a worrying signal they are not sustaining themselves. However, that’s only a signal.

I may not think the CEO is a particularly nice guy (though he was not too pleasant when responding to tickets, which yes he apparently does himself (unless it’s a shared account?), he was not rude either), but realistically can I demand that from him? Push comes to shove, can’t really claim I’m extremely nice either, and I have achieved less.

Regarding the use of ML or Kagi being originally an AI company, I don’t think it necessarily condemns the project.

Kagi Email drama seems ridiculous, but is very new to me.

Unless there are some further bad revelations about the company or the CEO, I will reserve my judgement for now…

I am Kagi subscriber because I think their search is great. I would like them to focus on it.

I don't care about closed-sourced browser nor their AI offering

Kagi is not a product I'd use, nor do I get the hype around it.

The company has apparently made a significant amount of bad business decisions.

The author is a politically-obsessed weirdo who gets upset when people deny their delusions.

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."

I'm a kagi subscriber, and this is the first I'm hearing of the t-shirt thing. I'll be happy as long as the search is good.

I've been using Kagi since the early in the beta, and I've been happy with it. I think most of this article is maybe a bit overblown, but there are a few things that give me pause.

On the positive side, I still think Kagi's search results are, practically speaking, better than other search engine's results. I don't make heavy use of filters, but used sparingly they've had a really positive impact on my experience. Same with the AI integrations- I don't use them much, but sometimes I do and I'm glad I have the option.

The investment in AI seems totally sensible to me. I'm not "all in" on AI, but it seems obvious to me that AI both clearly compliments document retrieval for a search engine, and integrating AI services fits well with the idea of putting together a service backed by things like Google or OpenAI's APIs (and maybe slowly replacing those dependencies as you grow).

I'm not a mac user, and Orion on iOS was super buggy so I stopped using it, but I guess I can see an argument that it's a worthwhile investment if it's an effective funnel to get people into Kagi. Apple users seem more likely than other groups to pay for things (like a kagi subscription), and if there aren't other ways of getting Kagi added as a default search engine in Safari or Chrome then it seems like a plausible investment I suppose. Maybe not the choice I'd have made, but not something that really makes me question the company either.

Email seems to fit the same narrative as Orion to me. If I were in charge I'm not sure I'd prioritize it, but Google has normalized bundling of email and search for a lot of users, and I can definitely see a plausible argument that people who are already logging into google to use their gmail account would be more likely to churn than people who stay in the Kagi ecosystem.

I had no idea the tshirt thing happened, and sure, it seems like a weird choice but whatever, I don't think it's worth getting up in arms about either.

All that said, the privacy angle does concern me a fair bit. I'm going to give Vlad a bit of the benefit of the doubt here on email. As a fairly privacy conscious person I still pay Google to host my email. Why? Because email is really only as private as the counterparty you are emailing with. The vast majority of people I correspond with are already using Google for email, so keeping my side of the conversation private has a lower ROI than a lot of other things I could spend effort on.

I do worry a lot about other areas of privacy with Kagi though, especially in light of the "let's not get political" comments. We're only getting one side of the conversation, but it had very "right leaning dogwhistle" type vibes to me. Of course with only a few screen shots of a discord conversation it's very hard to know how accurate those vibes might be. I suppose for the moment I'd just say that it gives me pause, and makes me think about how I could recommend Kagi to people who might not be technically savvy enough to understand the potential consequences of their online behavior. Without a much stronger idea of privacy, I would very much worry about anyone using Kagi to search for information related to, e.g. pregnancy if even something as innocuous as searching for pregnancy tests could be used as evidence in a criminal trial against someone accused of a felony for having an abortion- as is the direction many US states are headed. Similarly, I would wonder if I could, in good conscience, recommend people use Kagi to search for any LGBT related material today because they are significant concerns that such searches could be used to persecute people today in many countries, including some US states today and possibly many more US states in the near future.

I'm not likely to cancel my subscription or stop using Kagi over this today. I'm still getting value out of the product, and I think the basic idea that we should have an option for things like search where users are the customer and not the product is a fundamentally sound and important one. The very fact that a lot of people commenting in this thread about privacy concerns are customers and not the product is a great opportunity to demonstrate why it's an important idea.

I use them and none of this stuff really matters; they basically have deep pockets available to them and in the current operating model can continue indefinitely.

I'd love to see more focus on their own search engine/results, as well as technical means of ensuring anonymity/unlinkability within their infrastructure, but they're well worth the $250/yr for a pro subscription today.

Like most search now Kagi has chosen to include Instant Answers that are AI generated, which means they're often wrong, as well as a "Universal Summarizer" tool, that again is more of the same old AI bullshit.

I started turning away from Google when they implemented this a few years ago, because the "answers" they selected always came from bullshit sites. Looking up Excel formulas for example, you're more likely to see a lightly disguised sales pitch page from an Excel barnacle company like AbleBits or ExtendOffice than the many forum posts and tutorial blogs that would actually answer my question.

Kagi uses Google products under the hood for everything. So you are not really avoiding Google/Alphabet when you use Kagi. The pay Google a lot on money for various services and index data and such.

From this and other things, Vlad has seemed to have a heavy Elon Musk vibe, which is unfortunate.

My partner works in mental healthcare. There are absolutely more than 100 people who need anonymity. Far more than 100 people who have patients show up at their residence with bad intentions. I think men are also more predisposed to think that "most people" don't have anything to worry about with their personal safety.

All I want is a search engine that

1. ignores junk 2. allows me to up/down/pin rank certain sites 3. efficiently gets me to what I'm looking for

Kagi was that, and still mostly is, but all the AI stuff is pretty distracting, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to be willing to support a company with a good piece of tech but bad human leadership.

First of all, as a project, Kagi stretches itself way too thin. "Kagi" isn't just Kagi Search, it's also a whole slew of AI tools, a Mac-only web browser called Orion, and right now they are planning on launching an email service as well.

Like most search now Kagi has chosen to include Instant Answers that are AI generated, which means they're often wrong, as well as a "Universal Summarizer" tool, that again is more of the same old AI bullshit.

I agree that Kagi should focus their efforts on delivering the best possible search experience (the image search is horrendously slow at times). But as for the above-mentioned AI tools, I love and use daily. For a short question style query, most of the time, the quick answer is all I need. Universal Summarizer is excellent at summarizing the uncountable YouTube videos that my friends send to me.

At one point someone suggested the idea that searching for suicide-related terms should bring up a helpline, and he rejected that idea because it would be "biased" (I guess towards not wanting people to kill themselves).

Why is the so hard to accept for some people that not everything should push a message? If I want to know about a controversial topic, I need results about it, not a lecture. Their responsibility is to serve me good results.

I use Kagi heavily. I don't make time to follow their Discord but have submitted some bugs to their feedback forum. I also paid for Kagi+ because Orion is a cool project and I want very badly for it to replace Safari as my main line browser.

Honestly, this gave me the impression that Kagi is a move fast and break shit kind of company, with Vlad as a benevolent dictator type. Finances are often (I think) a disaster at these kinds of companies that gets fixed later. The t-shirt thing is sus but those shirts look really cool and I might buy one. Vlad being flippant about getting sold is better than lying about "nothing will change; we will find a buyer that agrees with our values" while looking for the highest bidder, values be damned. The email thing makes sense technically (they're basically trying to be a Google alternative) and seems like too much, but, hey, it's Vlad's money (I believe he bootstrapped this? If so, the investments they got were probably more donations than investments) and if the devs want to do it, more power to them!

Vlad is "my way or the highway" unless you convince him that the highway is actually better. I've seen this happen with many feature requests, like them improving WebAuthN support or integrating support for Apple's iCloud Keychain extension, both in the Orion browser.

Also, while Kagi seems to have pivoted from an AI answering service to search, it seems like a really logical pivot and comments like this:

1 AI should be used to the extent that it enhances our humanity, not diminish it (AI should be used to support users, not replace them)

give me the impression that they're at least trying to be responsible with this tech.

Everything in this article is mildly concerning, but the alternative (going back to Google Search and embracing a mono-browser future) is so much worse. I don't regret supporting their mission at this time.

the only real killer feature it has to me is the ability to block domains from your results, which I can currently only do in other search engines via a user script that doesn't help me on mobile

User scripts are doable on Firefox for Android.

For iOS, somewhat ironically, I think you'd need Orion.

Kagi just works for me. I pay a monthly bill and I get a good search engine. Until they do something that disrupts that relationship or signals a disruption to that relationship, the things in this post don't strike me as that, I don't have much patience for posts like these. It's like a child making a "dead game" post for a game that made a change they didn't like.

That’s ok. Faith is what you need for Google.

I don't know if I'll ever use Kagi, if their founder fully understand privacy laws, if I agree with him clarifying anything when clearly this person doesn't want to discuss it, etc... but after reading the post and some stuff on Mastodon, I'm glad I don't have to deal directly with customers. I'd hate to have people like this using my service.

I don't use Kagi, but this post reads much more like a PR smear campaign than anything else.

Fair criticisms, but at the end of the day, Kagi offers a better search experience then all the alternatives for a fair price, so I pay for it. I don't really need to have 'faith' in it, though I do hope it sticks around.

Also, can't wait to get my tshirt! (closed beta user here)

I didn’t know about the T-shirt thing and I didn’t know about Brave either. The email stuff is also new to me and I have zero interest in it.

At the end of the day, Kagi was a way for me to filter out certain sites and raise/lower others. To be honest I’ve considered turning off the ranking modifications, I often have to scroll to find the business I’m searching for’s website because I’ve up-ranked SO/GitHub/HN and the like. It’s more frustrating than useful. I wish there was a way to up-rank the “definitive website for a brand” when I search.

Furthermore, the lack of local results is painful. I just have to go to Google to find the restaurant/business in my town since Kagi seems unable/unwilling to do that. And in that vein, all my !bangs seems to have disappeared which is frustrating, even more so since on mobile it won’t save new ones (last time I tried) and manually going to Google gets redirected to Kagi due to the way their extension (has to?) works.

I’ve been paying for a while now and while the AI doesn’t bother me (I don’t use it) the Brave stuff turns me off massively. I don’t know how I’ll decide but I found this post (and the emails the founder sent) very informative.

This is a great argument against the kind of blog where you just drop your stream of consciousness into a publicly available document, which may be archived and searchable. Uptake on a site like HN may seem like a win now, but it also means there will be no hiding from it.

This is the kind of thing that comes up when you're trying to form new relationships (whether personal or career/business) so you may not want to put your worst side forward.

(I have no opinion on Kagi, BTW, since I know virtually nothing about it.)

So he's mad they bought promotional t-shirts after a hitting a subscription goal?

If it's deeper than that, I'd recommend adding a summary. It's a big ask to expect strangers to read a ranting wall of text.

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

A lot of this seems to be "I do not like Vlad".

The only issue that has been brought up here that concerns me is privacy, and the important thing there is that whether search history data is stored and can be linked to and account. Some things like personalisation features require it, but what about the rest? It does concern me that I have to take their word for it.

Honestly after reading this guys follow up rant about the CEO contacting him directly for an opportunity to address any of the points made in this post, this comes off as nothing more than a hit piece. Just saying ive said my piece and I have no interest in hearing any follow up or rebuttals is just classic modern day social media journalism. Suprised the CEO stayed so cool in his follow ups with this guys attempt to goad the CEO into loosing his cool in a private email so he could plaster it all over the web - he comes accross as nothing more than a drama troll.

I was a Kagi subscriber for about 5 months. I had noticed a slight improvement for random software development related content vs my previous search engine (bing). After cancelling 6 months ago I don't miss Kagi at all.

The thing that made me cancel my subscription was one specific interaction.

One day I was trying to buy tickets to a podcast tour, the sales for tickets was set to open at a specific time and I was searching for the purchase page at the moment of opening. I frantically searched "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets", the first search failed to bring relevant results. I tried "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets $YEAR", nothing.

I tried many searches for about a minute along these lines and thought maybe their site just wasn't public and I needed a specific link. Then I typed my original "$SHOW_NAME $CITY tickets" query into bing and got the exact correct webpage on the first try.

Bought the tickets I wanted and immediately cancelled my subscription to Kagi.

To any of this, so what? As long as Kagi makes a good product, and they do, I'll keep paying. As for privacy, my main goal is to protect myself from advertising, which Kagi does excellently.

they 100% don't own a T-shirt factory. this feels like finding a reason to seethe over them using genai&llm.

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.

Jesus this approach to privacy is just awful. "it's not data collection if the user volunteers it" I mean wtf. "emails aren't PII because you can use a burner".

GDPR was designed to protect consumers from companies like this.

I really love using Kagi Search. It’s awesome. I think Arc is becoming very similar with all their AI features that are kind of boring, but that their team is obviously focusing on.

It is quite strange that they are doing all these other things that I basically don’t use at all though. Classic entrepreneur chase shiny objects and get bored with the core idea. In their defense though, people do believe that search is going towards an ai future.

But I do want to say that Kagi Search is really awesome and I hope it works and I won’t go back.

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.

Bad faith arguments and personal attacks. 0/10 woulnd't read again

I don’t have the full story on the t-shirts, but isn’t this a typical “we want to give tshirts to our supporters” without realizing that it’s crazy expensive and complicated? They probably didn’t intend to spend 1/3 of their round on tshirts, but this is pretty much a microfunding cliche at this point. Kickstarters often reel at their tshirt promise after the fact, and I believe there’s even a YC company or two that started just to solve the problem of sending supporters their promised swag.

Yeah every time they mention AI I am more sure that I do not care about them.

I did not know all of this about the org. The t-shirt situation is just unfathomably stupid, that last line about anonymity might convince me to cancel.

I still do like the product they offer, though. It'll be difficult to give up their bullshit result filtering. I also cancelled my ChatGPT plan because I could use GPT4 through Kagi. They also provide access to Gemeni, Mistral, and Claude. Probably actually an unsustainable value.

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.

and they have fully bought into AI being the future of search

Good, because as far as I can tell it is. I use their "Quick Answer" feature very often in my searches, to the point where it's the first thing I click when searching. It's fantastic on mobile so I don't have to go trawling through ad-ridden websites. I am a happy customer because of this feature.

But the developers of Kagi fully believe that this is what search engines should be, a bunch of AI tools so that you don't even need to read primary sources anymore

At least with "Quick Answer" it links to their sources used. This is a non-issue.

There was some demo where you could put someone's Twitter handle in and it would give you a summary of who that person was (nightmare shit)

Really? Providing a summary of someone who willingly posts publicly is the stuff of nightmares? This is not a serious person and their opinion should not be taken seriously.

And he is very, very much the type that believes "not everything is political" and "we don't get into politics"

Because not everything is political. I have never met a stable or amicable person who has thought that everything is political. Every time they have had a coarse personality that has a warped perception of reality. If I had a discord channel for my product and people were going into it mucking it up by trying to make everything political, they would get a swift ban. Keep that shit on Twitter.

I see a lot of their extra features as just that, extra. I don't buy Amazon Prime because I want to use "Twitch Prime" and "Amazon Music" as well, I buy it because I want faster shipping times. The rest is just extra and is of no concern to me.

A third of their investment on free t-shirts aside (which ain't good AFAICT), most of what Vlad is talking about comes off as reasonable. The only thing I do take concern with is his stance on <100 people on earth who really need anonymity. That does not inspire confidence.

I get where he's coming from, but I don't really find those arguments to be a huge problem. Probably because my "ideal" search engine doesn't exist. I have to choose out of the offerings on the market, and Kagi is the least objectionable of them for me.

In terms of letting me find what I'm looking for, Kagi is the best search engine I've tried. At worst, it's no less "private" than the alternatives.

The AI stuff is irrelevant to me until it starts degrading the search results I get. I just ignore their AI-related features. No big deal, and certainly no worse than others.

All the other criticisms (t-shirts, etc.) don't matter at all to me. What matters is search quality.

I’ve been suspicious of and disconcerted by the amount of AI-related news coming out of Kagi. I unapologetically hate the current AI craze and am turned off whenever I see it appear in one of the products I use.

I’ve also already stopped using Kagi on mobile, because they made the experience of editing the search field terrible with some JS. In particular moving the text cursor in the search field in Kagi on mobile Safari is an exercise in frustration that’s not replicated by any other text field in any other search engine, website or anything at all on iOS.

This confirmation about their core focus being LLM stuff seals the deal for me and I’m cancelling my subscription. I fully agree with this sentiment from TFA:

> They just don't want to admit to being an AI company anymore. Frankly, it's not something I want to pay them to keep developing. It's something I want less of out in the world.

And he is very, very much the type that believes "not everything is political" and "we don't get into politics".

Seems like a feature, not a bug. The only politics I care about from my tech products is whether they will collect/sell my personal data or not. Too many tech companies use a veneer of support for various political causes to take attention away from their own misdeeds. At this point it's a red flag when a company talks more about their politics than about their product.

Thus the quotes at the end are quite bad:

people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than a 100 in the entire world. definitely not typical hKagi users (edited)

unless they are criminals, in which case we don't care they don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)

Women seeking abortions in the US weren't criminals two years ago and now, in some places, they are. I don't think he's thought about this position very carefully.

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.

Did I mention that the t-shirts don't even have the Kagi name on them? Just the Kagi dog mascot, who is at this point the only thing I like about Kagi

I don't even like the dog mascot.