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.

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.

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.

The OP of that thread seems like the only one in the wrong here. The founder of the company they were criticizing reached out to them directly to clarify some misunderstandings and they instantly took a curt, defensive attitude in their replies. Replying to every email someone sends and rage baiting them doesn't exactly read: "I don't want to talk to you." Funny enough, they said they didn't want to take the phone call because the other person could claim that anything was said, but then controls the narrative themselves by posting screenshots that we have no way of knowing were cropped or manipulated. This is actual teenager behavior.

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.

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

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?

Permanently Deleted

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

I am coming from cold on this, I knew kagi existed, It was on my bucket list to do research before even considering any trial, well kagi is not for me since I will never make an account to search web.

That being said, I read through both the blog and the email chain, and I was still so confused on whose side to take i read through OP's other articles and comments and oh my god. Only thing i concluded is Vlad may have crossed boundaries in terms of emailing someone against their wishes, but the email chain wasn't enough for me conclude he is narcisst, OP however is definitely pot calling the kettle black.

I don't use Kagi. Frankly, I hadn't heard of them before this, but I'm not sure what classifies this as unhinged narcissism. I don't know if there's more to see but what I saw was an email trying to address concerns with the product.

No "apologist" stuff here, I'm just not sure why this would be classified as unhinged narcissism. Can someone explain? Genuinely would like to know.

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.

First time this community came up on my feed and it'll be the last time I read it, as I'm filtering it out. Seems like a couple permanently-online perpetual victims looking for attention. Here's a tip, kids: getting emailed by someone who wants to refute your assertions is not abnormal. In the real world, people will try to defend themselves when you make allegations about them or their work. Receiving an unsolicited email is not harassment and it does not cross any boundaries.

Burying your head in the sand and yelling "you can't argue with me because I'm not listening" is how a toddler interacts with their world.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Refusing to discuss in fear of being cornered sounds childish to me, especially as a reply to a first message! If your arguments are strong and reasonable, there is absolutely nothing wrong in discussing a subject.

Looking at this, it even sounds great that he would be willing to discuss with users.

I dont understand the hostility really What do you want them to do instead? Just cave in to every request anyone may have?

I don't want to enagage with you on this while I keep engaging with you.

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.

This seems like a totally even keeled response though?

I'll take my ban for saying that Lori seems like they have a bit of stick up their ass and that the CEO of Kagi seems to react how most people who are offended act.

Not very professional for a CEO to directly react that way to someone, for sure.

I read the whole transcript and I came to conclusion that the author is , to put it gently, bad faith.

Of course if you’re going to give negative opinion on the product made by a single man he is going to want to talk with you. The opposite would be strange, and denying its right to answer is disrespectful and childish.

Doesn’t mean you have to apologize or concede anything, but giving the man a quick and sincere talk about it is just basic level of dignity.

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.

It sounds like CEO and OP are both a bit sus. Stay clear of both equally.

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 didn't see anything wrong with vlad's emails. Nothing wrong with trying to talk things out with someone who doesn't like your platform. Kind of like how I think this post is shit and you don't want to talk about it lolol

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.

vlad should’ve stopped at the first time lori told him to stop, definitely, but this whole thing just turned into something else.

and, what surprises me the most, is this attitude of “either you are completely defending lori or else you are a transphobe, queer hater, dehumanizing piece of shit”. my opinion goes, not to defend the actual piece of shit ceo, but to defend our opinions against anyone, and lori failed to do so. lori’s attitude comes closer to throwing a stone and hiding the hand, even though i agree with lori’s point.

by no means the poster is forced to debate, i recognize that. and if lori did not want to, perfectly fine. respectable. but the action (and public posts) are still subject to criticism; like mine, that goes against the fact that saying something controversial and then proceeding to be shocked like “omg, how odd, is people being critical of what i said? outrageous!” is funny.

and the mod banning and removing what he feels are apologist crap is the cherry on top. authoritarian vibes all around.

Maybe I'm the crazy one but I read the full email thread and his responses didn't seem deranged or unhinged as the author claims. Weird a tech CEO gets into it like over email with a blogger but I just see a guy defending his product. (I haven't seen the stuff he's posted on discord though, as another commenter mentioned)

It seems like he was rude to email you specifically when you told him not to, but the rest is just standard CEO behaviour.

It seems like he had answers/responses to a lot of what you said so I'm still kind of with him (though guardedly). Mainly due to lack of a better option; I do think paid search is the way forward.

Probably what he should have done is a response blog-post that we could have also discussed publically, and at our own leisure.

Reading your article I get why he would have got defensive (regardless of if he's covering his ass or has genuine counter-arguments).