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9mo ago

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

Attached: 4 images As many of you know, I posted recently about my experiences and outlook on Kagi, the paid search engine. It's gotten some positive press recently, ironically right after I made my blog post about why I no longer liked or trusted it. This blog post was called "Why I Lost Faith I...

206 comments

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
- Can I ask a sincere question? whats a tech sociopath apologist, could you demonstrate an example?
  Again, im sincerely genuinely asking
  
  Someone who takes it on themselves to act as apologist for the words/actions of tech sociopaths
  Often seen as “weird nerds coming to defense of $x” (such as musk, or in this case the kagi dudebro)
- but why is mr wonka so easily offended? all I did was feed myself into the machine that makes chocolate chips but he called me a stupid motherfucker while his staff sang a jaunty tune
  
  he's probably just triggered. RENT FREE
- We have even better solutions for them!

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.
- i absolutely love the "clarification" that an email address is PII only if it's your real, primary, personal email address, and any other email address (that just so happens to be operated and used exclusively by a single person, even to the point of uniquely identifying that person by that address) is not PII
- i wonder why that coincidence keeps happening over and over

- I'm in a forum where some person claims that the sealion is actually the reasonable one.
  It's proof to me that this throwaway comic is such a good summary for certain online behavior that there's an entire subculture built around trying to subvert it.
  (also Wondermark is great in general)

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

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.
- Ok but did they spin up their own shirt printing company in another country using one third of their investment money to print them or did they just pay a shirt printing service that already existed at a bulk discount rate?
  
  Exactly. Even Google, who have piles and piles of cash just sitting around and could easily afford it, don’t move into the printing business to save a few bucks. They just contract some company who offer that kind of thing as a service to arrange it for them. The company I worked for don’t even print the t-shirts, they just arrange the printing via a range of companies who do offer such a service. Everyone in between takes a little cut and Google still get their t-shirts at like £5 each.
  Google love a t-shirt. Sold more t-shirts to Google than any other client by a mile and a half.

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.
- I KNOW RIGHT
  they just got THE BEST word of mouth
  and then Vlad just ...
  
  So close!
  We were right there!
  And then Vlad had to do his impaling thing...
- Ah man, same. Thought I'd give it a go after reading about if from Cory...
  Honestly, for what I search for, DDG is sufficient, and it's not gonna hassle me about subscriptions.
  What I'd really like to find is something like a pihole for search, where you have your blocklist, cache of things you've searched already (your own mini search engine?), and then a fallback engine (DDG, bing, Google, whatever) for things it doesn't already know.
  I dunno. Search and AI botshit is everywhere, and it's gonna keep getting worse. Self-hosting tools seems to be the only way to take control back.
  
  I was trying and failing to do something like that. Basically, using ArchiveBox to download bookmarks, and then use recoll to index the webpages + PDFs + my own writing. Assumption was that I probably already bookmarked or had copies of what I wanted and just needed a quick way to find them. Was eventually going to import my browsing history as well. It ended up being more trouble than it was worth. (Too many bookmarks, not enough disk space, didn't know what the best setting for ArchiveBox were, Archivebox has its own search and I wasn't sure how that compared to recoll, unsure most efficient way to delete useless downloaded pages or curate them, etc.)
  I do use uBlacklist and the Huge AI Blocklist subscription to try to clean up my search results. Not sure how effective they are over all though.
  
  @shadow @V0ldek What I’d really like to find is something like a pihole for search, where you have your blocklist, cache of things you’ve searched already (your own mini search engine?), and then a fallback engine (DDG, bing, Google, whatever) for things it doesn’t already know.
  I think SearXNG sort of fulfills this, from what I've heard? It's more or less a self-hosted search engine that can combine indexes from various other engines, and I presume that means you can set your own rules and filters and such. There are public instances as well.
  
  Isn't the DDG guy an asshole as well though?
- I found that while Doctorow post weird like an ad in the form of a post.

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.
- Actually, that email exchange isn’t as combative as I expected.
  i suppose the CEO completely barreling forward past multiple attempts to refuse conversation while NOT screaming slurs at the person they're attempting to lecture, is, in some sense, strictly better than the alternative
  
  The bar hasn't been so high in a while, christ that's sad.
- That's a really fucking low bar. Remember to bring plenty of rope, emergency o2, and extra lights, should you go seeking it.

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 love it. It screams xkcd-386 energy and he keeps digging

I'd say he's a milquetoast narcissist at best, his boilerplate deflectons were totally hinged the whole time.
- running through the sales playbook big time over a post with no readers
  and now the original blog post, which had almost no readers, is front page on HN as I write this, and (in between the sociopath apologetics) even the horrible nerds are noticing he's bizarre on privacy, GDPR and AI obsession ...
  
  Dare I say... womp womp?
  
  AI obsession
  To be fair, of all the problems with that CEO, this one I fail to see
- wat

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 want vlad to list his criteria for who makes that list of 100 people, cause something tells me it’s all oligarchs and other powerful and monied people, and absolutely nobody whose life or livelihood is directly threatened by an information leak

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?
- Feel entirely free to use Kagi, just remember that it's run by an idiot and could blow up at any moment.
  
  Apologies, my question wasn't rhetorical, I was genuinely looking for suggestions. I don't want to use kagi if this is who is running it... BUT all the alternatives that I'm personally aware of are not options for replacement.
- Also looking for answers. I've been a Kagi convert for 5 months now and it has absolutely saved me time and effort.
  I was looking at Perplexity but it isn't exactly the same.
  
  You may want to have a look at this list for possible alternatives
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ is the only actually good search engine.
  
  ok but for real... it's not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results with search.marginalia.nu than any other search engine. It's the only search engine that I find actively fun to just browse around on recreationally.
- There are a couple, though the quality varies. Mojeek and marginalia seem to be good alternatives personally
  
  thanks a lot for shouting us out, Marginalia is also impressive (basically a one-person project etc.), the random button is delightful
- I can't remember the names of the projects, but there are actually some self hosted search engines that I keep meaning to get around to actually installing on "Ullr"

I knew something was fucky about that cultish service.
- Yeah I had a weirdass email exchange with that same guy that pushed me away from Kagi forever. It was one of those "borderline technically honest but still blatantly dodging and obfuscating" type situations.
  I shared a screenshot once, but got nothing but defense for the guys dodgy behavior, so I've been quiet about it, so this feels pretty validating that my gut feelings were right.
  I think a lot of people get cultish about it because they're paying a subscription for it, so they have to believe it's good.
  
  yeah, they've fostered an audience of unhinged stans

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.
- Kagi basically admits they're just piggybacking off of Google, Bing, et al, so getting into the space shouldn't be a serious PITA.
  
  yall really are making me want to massively overextend and start that federated search engine project based on human-driven indexing and whichever APIs each instance wants to query and cache. yes, like a fancy web directory
  maybe this is a good idea for a FreeAssembly project once Philthy’s in a good state? it’s a better idea than starting a shitty Wikipedia clone at least
- It's very similar to the feeling you get when you read a very middle-quality novel, innit?
  
  I resemble that remark
- Well the article says they have 16 (half are only half time) employees working between at least 5 projects, so it looks pretty possible, and most of the smaller engines are made by one or two people

i didn't spot that Kagi are coiners too
- No clue why they'd willingly accept crypto - they aren't doing anything that'd have credit card companies running for the hills.
- Eh, nothing wrong with accepting payments in crypto. Sometimes the gas fees are a lot less than what a payment provider / credit card provider would charge.
  
  wow, you’re fucking lost aren’t you
  let me show you the way out
  
  2018 called, it wants its shitty coiner propaganda talking points back
  (actually not sure if by 2018 coiners had moved on from dunking on credit card fees)

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.
- It's incredible because the blogger based their beliefs off of evidence and reality instead of markov chains and hallucinations.
- incredible for him, presumably
  
  'lol you did more research than I did for my whole company'
- Perhaps he is passive aggressively saying that he doesn't believe it?

I was about to jump off DuckDuckGo as its also going down, was going to go for kagi, in very much reconsidering that now... But then what?
Running your own personal search engine might be a bit much to chew off for most people, but is there a good open source federated search engine out there that I can contribute a server to, perhaps?
Edit: and before anyone ironically says "Google that yourself", I already searched and found a lot of blog posts, GitHub projects, but nothing concrete, no "that's the one!" Project that is and open source and federated...
- clearly, finding things is not a good idea
- a good open source federated search engine out there that I can contribute a server to
  I’d love to contribute to something like this. it might even make for a good replacement for lemmy’s awful built-in search
- Check out searxng
  
  looks interesting. got any experience with it / any references you can share? don't think I've run across it before
- A federated search engine sounds terrible tbh, how would that even work?
  
  Why terrible?

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.
- Corporate shit is corporate shit is corporate shit.

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?
- apparently so, I'm said to say
  
  Vader voice: noooooooooo
- Depends what you mean by "the same thing"
- Small AI startup makes somewhat working search engine (as opposed to the enshittified crap other search engines have become) because CEO has Ideas What Need Doing (e.g., a search engine, an Apple exclusive browser, investing a third of the raised capital on establishing a company in Germany to make twenty thousand T-shirts to give away for free, without even the company's name on them), becomes famous for said search engine (it's slightly less bad than the others — even if it's really just repackaging their results —, so people not only are willing to pay for it, but will evangelise for it any chance they get), they lose interest in said search engine (though, to be fair, they seem to be ~fifteen to twenty-something people — plus whoever they've got in Germany making free T-shirts —, only half of them working full time, so there's only so much they can focus on at a time) and focus back on AI (new CEO Idea: fast AI! Doesn't matter if not good! FAST!), news at eleven.
  Oh, and they apparently forgot VAT was a thing (maybe their accountant is one of the half working half time?), and even then were operating at a loss (the free T-shirts might also have something to do with that), so now they have to raise prices from just absurd to outright offensive, to try and pay back the taxes they owe...
  (And speaking of the CEO, he not only had Ideas What Need Doing, he also seems to have Ideas, period... like the Idea that email addresses are not personal information protected by the GDPR, the Idea that Kagi doesn't have to abide by the GDPR because their payment processor already does, or the Idea that only ~100 people in the world really needing anonymity anyway; also his whole approach to privacy seems to boil down to “trust me bro, I don't want your data, I just want your money... but if you do anything illegal I will report you”).

The whole internet loves Kagi
Lol no
Also Kagi is a glorified Google front end.
- Also Kagi is a glorified Google front end.
  The fact a glorified Google front end manages to be less shit than Google is a pretty damning indictment of Google, I'll give Kagi that. Quoting Cory Doctorow, gratuitous italics and all:
  The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework
  
  A Danish ad company made a Google interface that they called "impersonal me" which searched Google with no personalisation. And not only was it better than Google search, it found things that normal Google just didn't show. In particular old comments I had written and lost track of. In the impersonal search they were easily found, in the normal search they weren't way down on the list, they weren't in the list at all.
  Fascinatingly bad.
- This is a reference to the milkshake duck tweet
- Yup. Last time I checked, you paid money to get the exact same results. Brilliant.
  
  Ya but they are in a different order
- *Bing

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.
- That’s egregiously 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 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.

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'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.
- We need open search. Like Wikipedia for search, or something.
- I saw this post earlier that mentions some other search options, along with plenty of other suggestions in the comments. Hopefully you can find something you like in there! I haven't checked them all out myself yet.
- are you able to let us know what you use Mojeek for? Just interested in where we slot in
  
  Tldr: I like your ranking algo. Feels like a breath of fresh air reminiscent of the old days of search and internet
  Long version: When I want to get results for a query, not for an intent per se, I use Mojeek.
  It works best for certain types of queries. When I want to get out of the commercialized, centralized, sanitized, SEO-ridden bubble that is every other search engine, Mojeek let's me find way more potentially obscure, unique, and satisfying results per query that likely wouldn't rank favorably with the modern page quality criteria used by Google. Plus, compared to the same 5 websites you'll see for every query on other engines because of that very criteria, Mojeek has way more diversity in sources.
  With all these corporations incentivized to further commercialize and consolidate the internet and with the rise of AI as a source of knowledge, Mojeek is one of the places I hang onto to explore a web of humans instead of a web of reputation and money.

Removed
I'm just trying to fit in

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.

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