Why I Lost Faith in Kagi
Why I Lost Faith in Kagi
53 comments
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deleted by creator
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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.
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the CEO sealioning after the author asked them not to contact them anymore is a bit icky, too.
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I had no faith to lose. Its a search engine sign into. How could that be private.
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They allegedly don't know their user's search queries. That's how it's allegedly private.
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I enjoyed reading the article. To me, the perspective of the owner reminds me of the owners of Brave in that they are Libertarian in ways that seem aligned with mainstream views at a glance but the Venn diagram also overlaps with a disdain for regulation, while portraying a (potential) facade of being eternally infallible and trustworthy while also being a for-profit company.
Elon Musk also comes to mind in that his intelligence leaves him vulnerable to overlooking the nuances of conversations and alternative point of views. I think there's a general over reliance on artificial intelligence as a savior that will be fully embraced that will lead to large issues in the short/long term for Kagi.
Personally, it always felt a little bit like astroturfing hearing all of the kagi fanboys in every privacy thread, but for what it's worth, seeing them show up live In the flesh in this thread as well makes me feel a bit less like I'm talking to bots lol
Personally, I self-host my own version of searXng that only uses search engines that don't track my IP address. I'd say that those results are good enough 90% of the time, and when I need something more granular, I use a publicly hosted version of searXng that uses Google in its results
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How can anyone worry about IP addresses when the search engine also knows your real world payment credentials? That and privacy don't really mix.
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They know the names of their customers but they don't know their search queries. There's the privacy. At least that's what they said. Since Kagi isn't Open Source it always comes down to trust.
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So, this means Proton is not private either? Any product you pay for cannot be private?
There is a difference between anonimity and privacy.
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Wow, those unsolicited emails are icky
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Am I the only one thinking Lori comes across as a bit of a dick here?
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I am suspicious of anything I see being pushed as heavily as Kagi is pushed by it's alleged users.
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We're just vocal because we've been suffering over the enshittification of Google search for so long.
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There are numerous other popular search engines out there though.
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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.
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Did we read the same article? His responses to GDPR were very concerning, and I say that as an American.
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Right?! Super easy to be "privacy focused" when you just flat out refuse to acknowledge anything as personally identifiable information!
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I agree with you. I wasn't referring to the actual contents so much as OP's attitude about the e-mails from the CEO. I think Kagi could benefit from hiring, or at least consulting, with specialists in the field to better define their position. It's clear that OP has legitimate concerns.
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I haven't seen many public diatribes against Kagi, but the ones I have seem to be like this person. They complain very publicly based on their perception of Vlad, spend their days in Discord fomenting drama (which seems like something only children should be doing) and are so fragile that they think getting measured emails from someone they went after publicly is a form of harrassment. It's absurd.
I can only hope this was written by a teenager, otherwise it's a pretty rough way to live as an adult.
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You wish the CEO of a company would harass you?
You wish a CEO would give general denials and the same non-answers you see in a comment thread while pretending to engage with you in good faith?
Fuck off, the CEO gave no new info or perspectives and just showed himself to be the asshole that recent emerging evidence had been showing he was.
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I spun up a docker container for searxng
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Next step is to make it public to help other people and blend your data/traffic
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Well that sucks... that vlad dude is ehm... weird. I am happy with the service I am getting from Kagi, but such behaviour is not acceptable...
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To me it's understandable. Imagine you start a project like this that grows over the years and you even have some employees after a while. Now someone writes an article about your project with accusations that are wrong (at least in your mind). Wouldn't you be pissed either? At least I can't imagine anyone who could just ignore that.
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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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Successful CEOs need to learn to shut the fuck up.
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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.
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Wtf is wrong with someone sending you emails to an email you decided to make public
there's nothing wrong with that. continuously messaging someone after being told more than once that the recipient doesn't want to continue the conversation, though? that's not okay.
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I get that but it's a dick move by the author of that article to publicly speak bad about a product and then don't even wanna listen to what that person who made that product has to say to defend it. Especially if there's some false information that get's spread by that article. I'm not saying anything written in that article is true or false - just explaining the situation from Vlad's view.
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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 :\
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I'm still considering giving it a try. I've been using the free perplexity app to do all my searching with recently and that's worked pretty well, but not perfect.
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Just try it. You can always cancel your subscription if you don't like it (or just pay once without subscribing). I've been using it for half a year now and absolutely love it.
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I use it primarily because of the fact that I can pay with cryptocurrency and I wish to support more companies that take cryptocurrency directly. I do wish it were Monero instead of Bitcoin, but since I can just do an instant swap to convert from one to the other, it's at least okay. Proton is the same way.
53 comments
That was a huge wall of text - TLDR :
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
I've been really enjoying Qwant since I started using it after Mozilla announced their partnership.
I am super annoyed when the "turn of ad blocker" popup shows itself. They'd get many more users by not using that and serving ads from the same domain as searches. I get that they have to pay for their services somehow.