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I still pay for Kagi for its search but this has kind of been the problem from the beginning with their org. - Search has been a breath of fresh air, I wish th

I still pay for Kagi for its search but this has kind of been the problem from the beginning with their org. - Search has been a breath of fresh air, I wish they dedicated more time to it. - Orion...is ok? I use it off and on and it is fine but would rather have better search. The premise of the browser is nice but it feels like this could probably be a whole separate company or a purely open source endeavor. It has always been kind of clunky and not something I want to pay for. - AI tools, I get the multiple pivots and I do believe that more recent advancements in ML/AI will make search a better experience but I do wish they had a little more focus. - The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in their org. The way I look at it is instead of making their products better, they flushed a bunch of money down the drain for t-shirts and its offensive to paying customers who are paying because they enjoy the product and want it to become better, they don't want a t-shirt. - I don't care about email, I don't care about other tools, make a great search experience first. Release all of the AI enhancements that you think will make sense, focus, focus, focus. Edit: As I was adding my comment this post flagged and marked dead. Sometimes HN is weird.

Sakos 3y ago
As a "hard-core" Kagi user: 1) I legit can't fathom going back to Google or any other search engine. I don't know what I'll do if they go under. 2) Investing in integrating AI into their search is absolutely vital and I like a lot of what they're doing there 3) Everything else, including the insanity of the t-shirts thing, is a complete waste of time and money. I don't understand what their strategy is if it isn't to set money on fire.
- jonpurdy 3y ago
  I considered investing a small amount in them when they were raising a round from customers since I loved the search product so much. I too can't imagine going back to anything else, especially now that I have prioritized and blocked domains set up perfectly and added lenses, and this stuff works across desktop and mobile! I've been mildly regretting not investing up until 5 minute ago when I read about spending 1/3 of that on the t-shirt factory.
  - sithadmin 3y ago
    The claim that's made in this blog - that Kagi 'owns a t-shirt factory' seems disingenuous, or lazy at best. Kagi's own blog says that instead of going with a major branded merch manufacturer/distributor, they chose to work with a small print shop instead. Nothing about blowing funds on an actual factory/print shop. "Owning a merch operation end to end" just means they're not paying some manufacturer to do production, warehousing, order fulfillment/drop shipping, etc.
    - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
      I do not understand this distinction. Either they "own" the merch operation "end to end", or they don't. You can't have it both ways.
      - EasyMark 3y ago
        You can contract facilities or output percentage. You don't have to only "own it end to end" or not.
        baobabKoodaa 3y ago
        If you contract facilities then you don't "own" the merch operation "end to end".
    - wasmitnetzen 3y ago
      Kagi's post says further down that they > allocate[d] nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts Though it sounds like they don't actually own "a t-shirt factory", but rather a t-shirt distributor.
- infecto 3y ago
  Totally agree on all points. I don't believe I have the technical capability for it but both the fear of losing great search and the lack of direction has made me think about what it would take to replicate the search experience.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  Investing in better search is absolutely vital, and AI may be the right tool there, but I don't care about the AI. I pay Kagi to be a better search and informational retrieval tool, not to do AI.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    It's not like they've gone all-in on AI though. Going through their changelog https://kagi.com/changelog https://kagi.com/changelog it looks like they regularly make improvements to their core product and there've been a lot of significant QoL improvements in recent months. Just the Wolfram change alone has cut my need for Google significantly. The one thing I really hope they put more work into is searching for local news. That's one of the areas where I still have to turn to Google.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  > Everything else, including the insanity of the t-shirts thing, is a complete waste of time and money. Presumably the tshirts are a marketing cost that they hope will lead to greater brand exposure and more subscribers.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    They should've spent it on a marketing agency, because I don't know how a shirt which doesn't even have the name Kagi on it is supposed to give them brand exposure.
    - Tempest1981 3y ago
      Or advertise on a billboard along Hwy 101 as you enter San Francisco.
    - OccamsMirror 3y ago
      I was giving them the benefit of the doubt up until this. Wtf? I’d be happy to wear a brand t-shirt “Kagi” and that’s it. What an own goal. I’m sure it made sense to them but I’m worried they don’t truly understand their customer base.
    - aendruk 3y ago
      A shirt that looks less like an ad is one I’d actually wear.
- daft_pink 3y ago
  I agree with a lot of your sentiments, but we’re just in peak ai I think.
- troyvit 3y ago
  I can't speak to the t-shirts. I was on duckduckgo before Kagi and also can't imagine returning there. I don't know what they're doing there but it's not improving. And yeah I am so with you on 2). It seems like (again, t-shirts aside) Kagi is throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I hope they're having fun because I sure am.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  I agree, but not necessarily that AI will make results better. Search engines already rely heavily on heuristics, and I really doubt that LLMs or vector databases are going to improve results in any combination. At best, they will overfit results to the lowest common denominator. What I want is a search engine that supports full-text queries with exact matches. This quite literally no longer exists anywhere, and maybe that's because it just doesn't scale. Nevertheless, I would find a lot more value in a search engine that returns exact matches. Someone will probably reply saying that Kagi, DDG, or The Google do exact matches with quotes, but this is not true. When it works, you've just gotten lucky. At best, it will filter out inexact matches, but that doesn't mean it will actually return every exact match in the index.
  - chipsrafferty 3y ago
    Agreed, I want that + the page ranking that Kagi has, and literally don't care about any other features.
    - ravenstine 3y ago
      Yeah, the page ranking is great. Same with lenses. Though I wish they would improve the lenses. They're pretty basic.
- EasyMark 3y ago
  I agree pretty much verbatim. I don't see how anyone could criticize them for getting into the AI game as well or at least using a 3rd party AI software for some results. That would just be silly these days. I like Orion browser but to be honest firefox does what I need.
Raed667 3y ago
orion is the only browser i use on ios as it supports uBlockOrigin and a bunch of other extensions. i’m glad they spent the time and effort on it.
Dayshine 3y ago
Re the t-shirts: last time I checked the were private equity not VC and priced their product for profitability not growth. Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
- infecto 3y ago
  So if I understand your comment, you are suggesting that they went and raised money to make t-shirts? Not upset in the slightest, I love Kagi search and want to see it continue. Merch is a solved problem and there was no reason to bring it in-house and make such a big announcement around it.
  - fireflash38 3y ago
    Maybe they wanted to make T shirts. Who knows. I don't get why people are up in arms about it.
  - Dayshine 3y ago
    I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations. The difference they don't tell you about their internal accounting so you don't join the dots. Start ups burn money on silly things like offices way too nice for what they need all the time. That's much closer to unethical than a company with no real duty to outsiders throwing away money.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I don’t see any claims that they are unethical. “Losing faith” seems to be being used more like losing hope or something. People are worried that they are doing things that seem a bit wasteful because they don’t want them to fail.
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      > I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations. Bradford Shellhammer (fab.com) wanting to speed run getting his United Global Services (invite only, elite tier, qualification criteria believed to be $50K annual base fare spend or 150K miles/year) so would fly back and forth between New York and Frankfurt every week, first class, while laying off employees left right and center.
Zambyte 3y ago
> I wish they dedicated more time to it. What changes you have in mind to search functionality? I feel like the core search is rock solid as is, but they address search quality reports on their feedback forums all the time. To me, the AI features (and specifically how they are only used when you opt in per query) are enhancing search, and the time they have been allocating to those features has continuously improved Kagis utility to me. Note: I subscribe to Kagi Ultimate, so I use some AI features that are not available in the base plans.
- hiddencost 3y ago
  Search quality requires maintenance and continual tuning. It's not a one and done "add more functionality" kind of product.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    Fair. I was trying to make the point that they are already dedicating time to continuously tuning based on feedback on their forums.
- Closi 3y ago
  I mean they could focus on actually building out their own search engine as an example? (i.e. moving further away from using Google and Bing APIs) It's just a matter of focus with a team of that size.
- dustincoates 3y ago
  I love Kagi, I'm an early paying subscriber, but I think the quality of their results is overstated. Anytime you get past result #5 or so, the results just get _weird_. If you have to do deep research on something, you'll often get pages that seemingly have nothing to do with the query, or these class of pages that seem to be poor answers to common queries aggregated together.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    I hope not to sound like I'm blaming you, but do you actually use the features that are unique to Kagi? Over time my manually configured block/lower/raise/pin list has continuously grown, quickly leading to higher and higher quality search results. I also have integrated custom lenses and bangs into my workflow more and more over time. I often end up searching seemingly very generic things and getting exactly what I'm looking for in the first or second result. Maybe my results after the first couple are weird too, but it doesn't really matter to me because I don't actually get very deep into results most of the time.
keyle 3y ago
Orion is my daily driver and I hope they don't crush that. It has bugs, but it works.
laborcontract 3y ago
Kagi’s killer feature is somehow managing to get literally every post about them featured on the front page of HN. If they fail with all of the free marketing they’ve been gifted by this community I can only shake my head.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  A lot of us either use them or have used them in the recent past
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> Edit: As I was adding my comment this post flagged and marked dead. Sometimes HN is weird. I'm a full Kagi shill. But I also want the stuff I like to remain stuff I like and reasonable criticism is the path there.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
freediver 3y ago
> The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in their org. The way I look at it is instead of making their products better, they flushed a bunch of money down the drain for t-shirts and its offensive to paying customers who are paying because they enjoy the product and want it to become better, they don't want a t-shirt. Kagi founder here and I want to clarify the train of thoughts around Kagi printing and giving away 20,000 t-shirts for its users. - Kagi is not a typical VC funded startup. - It is company I bootstrapped by going all in (meaning I put millions of dollars of my money into it). - After all these years building it, we are lucky to have such incredibly passionate user community. - That community is 100% responsible for Kagi's growth as a business through word of mouth (Kagi does no paid advertising). - We are also famously taking a firm stance against ad-tech, so conventional advertising is not something I want to do. - To do something as crazy as to start a company that builds a paid search engine and browser you obviously need to be thinking out of the box. So combine all of this together and I thought that sending a t-shirt to all the people who supported us along the journey made a lot of sense. The only thing I did not count on is how difficult will be to pull this off as I did not want to settle with less than premium quality for these t-shirts. As a result they will be delayed (my best guess is July/August) and I apologize for that to our users. In hindsight, we probably should have opted out for something easier to pull off (someone mentioned a billboard on 101, that would certainly be much easier). This did not jeopardize Kagi's finances in any way at any point, nor I would do anything like that ever (as I said I am all in and have everything to lose, so I run a fiscally responsible business). In fact, Kagi has turned profitable recently. This has also not impacted our ability to hire (we went from 10 people twelve months ago to 25+ now) and it did not impact our ability to ship a great product (check Kagi and Orion changelogs). I would venture to say that most Kagi users agree that Kagi is getting better and better every week with great speed. So would I do it again? Well let's wait and see what we have in store for hitting 50,000 members mark :)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- recursivegirth 3y ago
  I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. Your gut got you this far, but to be a profitable company you are going to need to consider the advice and concerns of your stakeholders. Based on your current description, you have two stakeholders (yourself + customers). If the venture fails, you will ask yourself if you listened enough. Be proactive, address concerns, do not put yourself in a defensive position. Embrace change, be agile, and most importantly listen to your feedback. Wish Kagi nothing but success, I would very much like a disruptor in this space. Best of luck to you and your team.
neurostimulant 3y ago
I'm actually looking forward for the t-shirt...
erickhill 3y ago
I can't stand the randomness of how posts seem to be getting flagged more and more on HN. Seems like if a post is flagged and killed a reason should be given somewhere on the page by the flagger. Educate us on why our discussions should be off-limits, please. It would also be interesting to see if certain topics are always flagged by the same individuals and patterns emerge.
- lolinder 3y ago
  FWIW, this one got unflagged pretty quickly. I didn't flag it, but I came close just because the tone of the piece is so sensational and needlessly aggressive. I left it put because it's the first negative Kagi piece I've seen and I didn't want to silence an alternative perspective, but the quality was definitely below what I hope to see on the front page.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    It’s a pretty good thing to discuss though?
claytongulick 3y ago
I'm a deep technical nerd, but I approach Kagi from a basic user perspective. Things I love and can't live without: - When I search for something, I don't have to deal with weeks of whatever I searched for coming up in ads on every web page I visit. - I don't feel like "the man" is snooping on me in some sort of weird dark social credit score thing. (I literally got a call from Google once offering me a job based on what I'd been searching for. Flattering, but totally freaked me out) - The quality is good for non-local things - I'm the customer, not the product - That makes things like blocking or enhancing sites possible What I'd like to see improve: - I don't want AI. I don't want summaries, I don't want hallucinations, I don't want assistants. I don't want it. - Local results and map integration. When I click on a local result, actually having the map go to the result I clicked on. Currently this doesn't work well. - Hours for local businesses. I find myself still going to google for these things, and while it doesn't seem like a lot, aside from work stuff those kinds of searches are probably 80% of what I need. Where can we go for dinner tonight that's near by and still open? Who has all-you-can-eat deals near by? Where can I find some floating shelves to put in my office near by? Those are all examples of things that Google does really well, and I don't have much luck with on Kagi. I agree with the author that I'd rather see the quality there improve before AI features.
- rjbwork 3y ago
  Personally I love the AI tools. The summary tool is what got me converted from the trial to a paying user. Quality is there for the most part, IME, but I definitely agree that their local features need a LOT of work.
sirdvd 3y ago
I've been using Kagi only for a couple of months, so I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase. Perhaps they're still searching for their identity. Very much hope they rest independents and good at web searches.

Sakos 3y ago

As a "hard-core" Kagi user: 1) I legit can't fathom going back to Google or any other search engine. I don't know what I'll do if they go under. 2) Investing in integrating AI into their search is absolutely vital and I like a lot of what they're doing there 3) Everything else, including the insanity of the t-shirts thing, is a complete waste of time and money. I don't understand what their strategy is if it isn't to set money on fire.

jonpurdy 3y ago
I considered investing a small amount in them when they were raising a round from customers since I loved the search product so much. I too can't imagine going back to anything else, especially now that I have prioritized and blocked domains set up perfectly and added lenses, and this stuff works across desktop and mobile! I've been mildly regretting not investing up until 5 minute ago when I read about spending 1/3 of that on the t-shirt factory.
- sithadmin 3y ago
  The claim that's made in this blog - that Kagi 'owns a t-shirt factory' seems disingenuous, or lazy at best. Kagi's own blog says that instead of going with a major branded merch manufacturer/distributor, they chose to work with a small print shop instead. Nothing about blowing funds on an actual factory/print shop. "Owning a merch operation end to end" just means they're not paying some manufacturer to do production, warehousing, order fulfillment/drop shipping, etc.
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    I do not understand this distinction. Either they "own" the merch operation "end to end", or they don't. You can't have it both ways.
    - EasyMark 3y ago
      You can contract facilities or output percentage. You don't have to only "own it end to end" or not.
      - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
        If you contract facilities then you don't "own" the merch operation "end to end".
  - wasmitnetzen 3y ago
    Kagi's post says further down that they > allocate[d] nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts Though it sounds like they don't actually own "a t-shirt factory", but rather a t-shirt distributor.
infecto 3y ago
Totally agree on all points. I don't believe I have the technical capability for it but both the fear of losing great search and the lack of direction has made me think about what it would take to replicate the search experience.
datadrivenangel 3y ago
Investing in better search is absolutely vital, and AI may be the right tool there, but I don't care about the AI. I pay Kagi to be a better search and informational retrieval tool, not to do AI.
- Sakos 3y ago
  It's not like they've gone all-in on AI though. Going through their changelog https://kagi.com/changelog https://kagi.com/changelog it looks like they regularly make improvements to their core product and there've been a lot of significant QoL improvements in recent months. Just the Wolfram change alone has cut my need for Google significantly. The one thing I really hope they put more work into is searching for local news. That's one of the areas where I still have to turn to Google.
iamacyborg 3y ago
> Everything else, including the insanity of the t-shirts thing, is a complete waste of time and money. Presumably the tshirts are a marketing cost that they hope will lead to greater brand exposure and more subscribers.
- Sakos 3y ago
  They should've spent it on a marketing agency, because I don't know how a shirt which doesn't even have the name Kagi on it is supposed to give them brand exposure.
  - Tempest1981 3y ago
    Or advertise on a billboard along Hwy 101 as you enter San Francisco.
  - OccamsMirror 3y ago
    I was giving them the benefit of the doubt up until this. Wtf? I’d be happy to wear a brand t-shirt “Kagi” and that’s it. What an own goal. I’m sure it made sense to them but I’m worried they don’t truly understand their customer base.
  - aendruk 3y ago
    A shirt that looks less like an ad is one I’d actually wear.
daft_pink 3y ago
I agree with a lot of your sentiments, but we’re just in peak ai I think.
troyvit 3y ago
I can't speak to the t-shirts. I was on duckduckgo before Kagi and also can't imagine returning there. I don't know what they're doing there but it's not improving. And yeah I am so with you on 2). It seems like (again, t-shirts aside) Kagi is throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I hope they're having fun because I sure am.
ravenstine 3y ago
I agree, but not necessarily that AI will make results better. Search engines already rely heavily on heuristics, and I really doubt that LLMs or vector databases are going to improve results in any combination. At best, they will overfit results to the lowest common denominator. What I want is a search engine that supports full-text queries with exact matches. This quite literally no longer exists anywhere, and maybe that's because it just doesn't scale. Nevertheless, I would find a lot more value in a search engine that returns exact matches. Someone will probably reply saying that Kagi, DDG, or The Google do exact matches with quotes, but this is not true. When it works, you've just gotten lucky. At best, it will filter out inexact matches, but that doesn't mean it will actually return every exact match in the index.
- chipsrafferty 3y ago
  Agreed, I want that + the page ranking that Kagi has, and literally don't care about any other features.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    Yeah, the page ranking is great. Same with lenses. Though I wish they would improve the lenses. They're pretty basic.
EasyMark 3y ago
I agree pretty much verbatim. I don't see how anyone could criticize them for getting into the AI game as well or at least using a 3rd party AI software for some results. That would just be silly these days. I like Orion browser but to be honest firefox does what I need.

Raed667 3y ago

orion is the only browser i use on ios as it supports uBlockOrigin and a bunch of other extensions. i’m glad they spent the time and effort on it.

Dayshine 3y ago

Re the t-shirts: last time I checked the were private equity not VC and priced their product for profitability not growth. Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?

infecto 3y ago
So if I understand your comment, you are suggesting that they went and raised money to make t-shirts? Not upset in the slightest, I love Kagi search and want to see it continue. Merch is a solved problem and there was no reason to bring it in-house and make such a big announcement around it.
- fireflash38 3y ago
  Maybe they wanted to make T shirts. Who knows. I don't get why people are up in arms about it.
- Dayshine 3y ago
  I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations. The difference they don't tell you about their internal accounting so you don't join the dots. Start ups burn money on silly things like offices way too nice for what they need all the time. That's much closer to unethical than a company with no real duty to outsiders throwing away money.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I don’t see any claims that they are unethical. “Losing faith” seems to be being used more like losing hope or something. People are worried that they are doing things that seem a bit wasteful because they don’t want them to fail.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    > I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations. Bradford Shellhammer (fab.com) wanting to speed run getting his United Global Services (invite only, elite tier, qualification criteria believed to be $50K annual base fare spend or 150K miles/year) so would fly back and forth between New York and Frankfurt every week, first class, while laying off employees left right and center.

Zambyte 3y ago

> I wish they dedicated more time to it. What changes you have in mind to search functionality? I feel like the core search is rock solid as is, but they address search quality reports on their feedback forums all the time. To me, the AI features (and specifically how they are only used when you opt in per query) are enhancing search, and the time they have been allocating to those features has continuously improved Kagis utility to me. Note: I subscribe to Kagi Ultimate, so I use some AI features that are not available in the base plans.

hiddencost 3y ago
Search quality requires maintenance and continual tuning. It's not a one and done "add more functionality" kind of product.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Fair. I was trying to make the point that they are already dedicating time to continuously tuning based on feedback on their forums.
Closi 3y ago
I mean they could focus on actually building out their own search engine as an example? (i.e. moving further away from using Google and Bing APIs) It's just a matter of focus with a team of that size.
dustincoates 3y ago
I love Kagi, I'm an early paying subscriber, but I think the quality of their results is overstated. Anytime you get past result #5 or so, the results just get _weird_. If you have to do deep research on something, you'll often get pages that seemingly have nothing to do with the query, or these class of pages that seem to be poor answers to common queries aggregated together.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  I hope not to sound like I'm blaming you, but do you actually use the features that are unique to Kagi? Over time my manually configured block/lower/raise/pin list has continuously grown, quickly leading to higher and higher quality search results. I also have integrated custom lenses and bangs into my workflow more and more over time. I often end up searching seemingly very generic things and getting exactly what I'm looking for in the first or second result. Maybe my results after the first couple are weird too, but it doesn't really matter to me because I don't actually get very deep into results most of the time.

keyle 3y ago

Orion is my daily driver and I hope they don't crush that. It has bugs, but it works.

laborcontract 3y ago

Kagi’s killer feature is somehow managing to get literally every post about them featured on the front page of HN. If they fail with all of the free marketing they’ve been gifted by this community I can only shake my head.

edgyquant 3y ago
A lot of us either use them or have used them in the recent past

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

> Edit: As I was adding my comment this post flagged and marked dead. Sometimes HN is weird. I'm a full Kagi shill. But I also want the stuff I like to remain stuff I like and reasonable criticism is the path there.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

freediver 3y ago

> The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in their org. The way I look at it is instead of making their products better, they flushed a bunch of money down the drain for t-shirts and its offensive to paying customers who are paying because they enjoy the product and want it to become better, they don't want a t-shirt. Kagi founder here and I want to clarify the train of thoughts around Kagi printing and giving away 20,000 t-shirts for its users. - Kagi is not a typical VC funded startup. - It is company I bootstrapped by going all in (meaning I put millions of dollars of my money into it). - After all these years building it, we are lucky to have such incredibly passionate user community. - That community is 100% responsible for Kagi's growth as a business through word of mouth (Kagi does no paid advertising). - We are also famously taking a firm stance against ad-tech, so conventional advertising is not something I want to do. - To do something as crazy as to start a company that builds a paid search engine and browser you obviously need to be thinking out of the box. So combine all of this together and I thought that sending a t-shirt to all the people who supported us along the journey made a lot of sense. The only thing I did not count on is how difficult will be to pull this off as I did not want to settle with less than premium quality for these t-shirts. As a result they will be delayed (my best guess is July/August) and I apologize for that to our users. In hindsight, we probably should have opted out for something easier to pull off (someone mentioned a billboard on 101, that would certainly be much easier). This did not jeopardize Kagi's finances in any way at any point, nor I would do anything like that ever (as I said I am all in and have everything to lose, so I run a fiscally responsible business). In fact, Kagi has turned profitable recently. This has also not impacted our ability to hire (we went from 10 people twelve months ago to 25+ now) and it did not impact our ability to ship a great product (check Kagi and Orion changelogs). I would venture to say that most Kagi users agree that Kagi is getting better and better every week with great speed. So would I do it again? Well let's wait and see what we have in store for hitting 50,000 members mark :)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
recursivegirth 3y ago
I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. Your gut got you this far, but to be a profitable company you are going to need to consider the advice and concerns of your stakeholders. Based on your current description, you have two stakeholders (yourself + customers). If the venture fails, you will ask yourself if you listened enough. Be proactive, address concerns, do not put yourself in a defensive position. Embrace change, be agile, and most importantly listen to your feedback. Wish Kagi nothing but success, I would very much like a disruptor in this space. Best of luck to you and your team.

neurostimulant 3y ago

I'm actually looking forward for the t-shirt...

erickhill 3y ago

I can't stand the randomness of how posts seem to be getting flagged more and more on HN. Seems like if a post is flagged and killed a reason should be given somewhere on the page by the flagger. Educate us on why our discussions should be off-limits, please. It would also be interesting to see if certain topics are always flagged by the same individuals and patterns emerge.

lolinder 3y ago
FWIW, this one got unflagged pretty quickly. I didn't flag it, but I came close just because the tone of the piece is so sensational and needlessly aggressive. I left it put because it's the first negative Kagi piece I've seen and I didn't want to silence an alternative perspective, but the quality was definitely below what I hope to see on the front page.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  It’s a pretty good thing to discuss though?

claytongulick 3y ago

I'm a deep technical nerd, but I approach Kagi from a basic user perspective. Things I love and can't live without: - When I search for something, I don't have to deal with weeks of whatever I searched for coming up in ads on every web page I visit. - I don't feel like "the man" is snooping on me in some sort of weird dark social credit score thing. (I literally got a call from Google once offering me a job based on what I'd been searching for. Flattering, but totally freaked me out) - The quality is good for non-local things - I'm the customer, not the product - That makes things like blocking or enhancing sites possible What I'd like to see improve: - I don't want AI. I don't want summaries, I don't want hallucinations, I don't want assistants. I don't want it. - Local results and map integration. When I click on a local result, actually having the map go to the result I clicked on. Currently this doesn't work well. - Hours for local businesses. I find myself still going to google for these things, and while it doesn't seem like a lot, aside from work stuff those kinds of searches are probably 80% of what I need. Where can we go for dinner tonight that's near by and still open? Who has all-you-can-eat deals near by? Where can I find some floating shelves to put in my office near by? Those are all examples of things that Google does really well, and I don't have much luck with on Kagi. I agree with the author that I'd rather see the quality there improve before AI features.

rjbwork 3y ago
Personally I love the AI tools. The summary tool is what got me converted from the trial to a paying user. Quality is there for the most part, IME, but I definitely agree that their local features need a LOT of work.

sirdvd 3y ago

I've been using Kagi only for a couple of months, so I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase. Perhaps they're still searching for their identity. Very much hope they rest independents and good at web searches.