The whole internet loves Kagi, a lovely paid search engine that can find things! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the CEO is an unhinged narcissist who will harangue you in email

note: tech sociopath apologists in this thread will be removed and banned for everyone's best interests

edit: or just acting like a pointless dipshit. jfc you people

There seems to be an incredibly large intersection between sociopathic dipshits and failure to understand the basics of GDPR.

"Email address is not PII" is such a deep level of not getting it it's indistinguishable from satire.

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

Thats demonstrably false. I used to work for a merch company on the Google account and 20k custom printed Google t-shirts to give away at some event is a once every one or two months kind of order.

they did in fact reach at least 20,000 users, and to celebrate they set up a business entity in Germany (they are currently US based), in order to start a tiny little t-shirt printing company. And their goal was to print 20,000 t-shirts to give out, FOR FREE, to their first 20,000 users (with users paying only shipping costs). But I cannot stress enough, they did not just spend money on 20,000 tshirts to give out, they set up a whole new business entity in Germany to run their own t-shirt printing operation, with its own building and warehouse and employee(s? I get the sense it's one guy but I don't know). And this cost them 1/3 of their $670k funding round. One, fucking, third. For t-shirts. Did I mention that the t-shirts don't even have the Kagi name on them? Just the Kagi dog mascot

0% interest rate behavior

I literally learnt about Kagi like a week ago from a Cory Doctorow's post. I was like oh, cool, someone there to fight google.

Actually, that email exchange isn't as combative as I expected.

I'm not going to de-anonymize my search history, so Kagi isn't a thing for me, but he doesn't seem as unhinged as some of these other techbros.

I've never had anothee CEO mansplain his company to me

🤣

Slayed me.

I haven't paid Kagi much attention up to this point, so I'm coming in cold to this. But gawd Vlad (makes himself) sound like a huge dork.

I'd say he's a milquetoast narcissist at best, his boilerplate deflectons were totally hinged the whole time.

Can I sincerely ask what we're supposed to use instead?

Kagi has given me the best search experience ive had in at least a decade, I'm not going back to the enshittification engine, and everything else is just bing in fancy wrapping paper. Is there something else like Kagi? Is there something like DDG or Searx that arent just slightly better bing?

Copy-pasting the alt-text from one of the screenshots because I can't be assed to type it out myself:

Discord convo from 07/15/22, Vlad: 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)

yikes, double yikes and triple yikes.

I guess he doesn't care to help women find a safe way to have an abortion in 14 out of 50 US states (source), for starters. Nor to help the doubtlessly more-than-100 queer folk in places that outlaw homosexuality.

Or maybe he's such a genius that he knows how to keep them safe without actually keeping them anonymous - and in that case, he should start selling such a technique as its own product /s

I knew something was fucky about that cultish service.

Seeing how successful Kagi is when run by someone who actively sets their own money on fire for no reason almost makes me want to try and start a search engine company. I mean I couldn't do it any worse right? And there is a market for it.

i didn't spot that Kagi are coiners too

That he called the blog post 'an incredible amount of research' is quite odd. Either it is a failed attempt at sucking up, or a sign Vlad has a very bad idea of what research is.

Wait whats this about AI? Can anyone explain? I just started the free trial because i was tired of shitty google results, are they literally doing the same thing now?

The whole internet loves Kagi

Lol no

Also Kagi is a glorified Google front end.

I'll be honest, I wanted to like Kagi because Google has become so useless. But I've not had any better success finding things on it than Google.

He missed the opportunity of just replying unsubscribe or signing the CEO up for cat facts.

I was delighted to find a sci-fi story hidden between pages full of AI shilling on the website, and then disappointed because it's not even funny-bad.

i was impressed enough with kagi's by-default deranking/filtering of seo garbage that i got a year's subscription a while back. good to know that this is what that money went to. suppose i'll ride out the subscription (assuming they don't start injecting ai garbage into search before then) and then find some other alternative

switching topics, but i do find it weird how the Brave integration stuff (which i also only found out about after i got the subscription) hadn't... bothered me as much? to be exceptionally clear, fuck Brandon Eich and Brave -- the planet deserves fewer bigots, crypto grifters, and covid conspiracists -- but i can't put my finger on why Kagi paying to consume Brave's search API's just doesn't cause as much friction with me. honestly it could be the fact that when i pay for Kagi it doesn't feel like i'm bankrolling Eich and his ads-as-a-service grift, whereas the money for my subscription is definitely paying for Vlad to reply-guy into bloggers' inboxes who are critical of the way Kagi operates correct misunderstandings about Kagi.

I mean, I think the harassment is unwarranted and clearly the CEO thinks he's too important to be ignored. But the content of the email itself seems to make sense to me. Am I missing something?

I will say that, with Kagi, I enjoyed the custom site ranking feature. That said, the image results usually sucked, the site searches weren't really that much better than something like DDG, and it overall wasn't worth supporting a company with another egotistical tech bro CEO.

Removed

I'm just trying to fit in

I'm just trying to use independent search engines with their own index/crawler. I used DDG for many years but the fact that it's basically a front end for Bing and Microsoft started to bother me, particularly since they put ChatGPT into Bing.

I only know of Brave Search, Mojeek, and Kagi to be independent and private at this point. I don't want to pay for Kagi, Mojeek has its uses but I wouldn't use it as my main engine, so that left Brave Search. The company and CEO is sus, I don't use their chromium browser, and their search results seem to emulate and optimize ranking based on the big guys (Google and Bing) but in 2024 search is hard to come by and it's more important to me to be fully independent of big tech.

A programmer's search engine it is not, that's for sure from my experience.

I swear I knew these fuckers were dodgy when I saw how UX designed their website was. A better search engine would sell itself even if it looked like craigslist.