- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
That was a huge wall of text - TLDR :
- Kagi has private investors
- Kagi has had some questionable uses of the private funding, such as opening a t-shirt company
- Kagi started as a AI focused company and pivoted to search
- Kagi is spread too thin over many different projects
- Kagi doesn’t take privacy, or user data seriously
Fair enough, but as long as google, bing, ddg, etc get more and more unusable there will be fans of alternative searches
Even if Kagi crashes and burns, it has demonstrated there is a market demand for useful search results that users pay for directly.
FWIW I don’t use Kagi because of the login / payment info requirements, so I agree broadly with the author. As bad as public searching is, its good enough to not give up privacy.
Thanks for the summary!
I’m not a Kagi user but I see people enthusiastically promote it often on Lemmy so I thought it was worth sharing this. After doing this post I noticed it is on HN as well, with 100 comments : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314
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Turns out Kagi does do advertising
They promote their search engine but their users don’t get to see ads. I don’t know what’s wrong about that. Every company advertises with its products. I don’t see what’s reprehensible about that.
We did not say we maintain anonmity, but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.
They’re right, anonymity and privacy are two different things. Since you have to pay to use Kagi, you’re not anonymous. But they allegedly don’t know what you as the user search for when using their search engine. So they’re being honest here and how can honesty be bad here? Anyways, we’re on privacy@lemmy.ml, not anonymity@lemmy.ml or whatever.
“AI is mentioned zero times”
While I still give you this one, they’re technically correct. The word “AI” isn’t there but they mention AI features, haha. It’s a bit debatable since Vlad said “kagi.com” - which doesn’t mention AI or AI tools. Only when you go to the pricing page there are mentions of AI tools.
Am I the only one thinking Lori comes across as a bit of a dick here?
Yeah kind of, but the CEO needs to learn that not everyone will like their products, you cant convince everyone.
The person said that they dont want to engage with the discussion, then the CEO should have just let it be.
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Holdup, what did the tumblr CEO do? Havent heard about that, im curious.
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Im with Kagi on this. Wtf is wrong with someone sending you emails to an email you decided to make public. This person is projecting how fragile their argument is by reacting this way.
Vlad was doing the right thing discussing it in private first before they probably address this stupid attempt at causing drama. I read all of the shit they posted and it sounds to me like they are nitpicking/strawmanning AI features which are very VERY optional.
TBH, OP sounds like a bit of an
entitled douche, edit: not the most appropriate descriptor, but I do think OP should try and look at the situation from another perspective.In their blog post they complained about lack of transparency and noted numerous issues with Kagi that caused them to lose faith in the company. The CEO personally responds to explain themselves (i.e. make things more transparent) and OP sticks their fingers in their ears and acts liked they’re a victim because the CEO attempts service recovery.
I’ve made public complaints about companies before. I wish I received such tailored and personalised responses.
I spun up a docker container for searxng
Next step is to make it public to help other people and blend your data/traffic
I’m still trying to understand searxng, does it start with nothing and build up its index each time you search? Will your results be rubbish for a while?
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Conflicted! Cory Doctorow just endorsed it & I’m way less smart than that person so i usually do what they say :\
it’s very likely that Cory didn’t have enough time to do research, visit the company’s Discord, and so on.
Rule of thumb is don’t judge anyone by their discord
when it’s listed as one of the company’s official communication channels with the owner of the company frequently participating, then I sure as hell am going to judge the company by it.
I am suspicious of anything I see being pushed as heavily as Kagi is pushed by it’s alleged users.
We’re just vocal because we’ve been suffering over the enshittification of Google search for so long.
There are numerous other popular search engines out there though.
yeah they suck
Seems like this one is in good company then.
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I mean, that seems like a really sceptical way to live. Often things get shilled because people are just happy with the service and think the business is doing things well. I am a kagi user and have brought it up to some others, including outside of lemmy, because I find it produces better search results than ddg etc. And it’s a definite step up from google in privacy
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We’ll try and get that okay up to a good and then a great as time goes by! There’s a submit feedback button on results pages if you’d like to be a part of that.
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🙏
Successful CEOs need to learn to shut the fuck up.
Wow, those unsolicited emails are icky