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
3 years ago by David Gerard to c/techtakes
I got recommended to read this guy by Robert Evans, noted anarchist.
So yeah, removing people who are breaking rules one just made up feels like Robert might have missed the mark a bit.
Or maybe "book good, attitudes on feedback and personal authority bad". The duality of mod.
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)
Im not sure what JAQing is.
I appreciate your response thanks
No reason following this community when you can't have an opinion. Feels like Reddit? I'm out.
Yeah. I didn't even realise he wrote the 50ft Blockchain.
I don't get why he thinks this is any different to Spez deleting anti-reddit or pro-lemmy posts.
I had discussion in my comments and the replies are mainly just aggression and insults. But I get deleted?!
Countdown to this message being deleted? Maybe 2hrs.
We have even better solutions for them!
twat
Alrighty, thanks for letting me know to add this community to the block list.
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'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)
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.
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
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.
The searxng public instances tend to be a bit shit.
They're slow. Maybe only several seconds but that feels like an eternity in 2024.
They also frequently seem to be blocked by the services they're scraping.
Isn't the DDG guy an asshole as well though?
He's not getting paid?
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
That's a really fucking low bar. Remember to bring plenty of rope, emergency o2, and extra lights, should you go seeking it.
The only thing I thought was an error on the CEO's part (not regarding his views, just the way he handled himself) was the long followup email when the blog author said he wasn't interested in debating with him. That email should have been a blog post of its own if it was worth writing in the first place, imo.
About his views, though: I'm turned off by his lack of regard for user-supplied details as PII. For me to use a search engine that requires an account, and therefore associates all of my searches with me directly, I would need to be supremely confident that my information is in good hands. Otherwise, how am I better off than using any other search engine on the internet without an account?
I'm glad I read through this post, Kagi has been on my radar but I hadn't looked into it enough to decide if I might have any interest. Seems like the answer is, at least for now: no.
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
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?
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.
it’s not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results
Dunno if this is just poorly phrased or... Finding actual answers to queries is the only job of a search engine, what does "interesting" mean here?
For me instantly evoked the memory of using the internet from when I first got to access it (~92) until 2012..2014ish, years I could describe as “the party is emptying, not as big as earlier”, vs 2014..2016 which I’d describe as having definite “okay there’s only 3 people left on the dancefloor” vibes (and the downslope started being felt 2008..2009 already, but slowly, only later more pronounced).
It was a time when you truly could just randomly browse search results and find all kinds of interesting things. It’s hard to convey, in today’s ecosystem, what that felt like. The fedi scratches a similar itch, but it feels (and I don’t mean this as criticism) more “a diamond in the muck”, a glimmer of hope in a sea of awful. A general optimism was quite prevalent among the internet of then, even despite it also having its awful aspects
I have years of irc logs in multiple channels, filled with the shared experiences of years of people delighting and gaping and pointing at all kinds of stuff like this. And things rarely feel the same.
I will never forgive the walled gardens for what they took from all of us, for what they destroyed
You can use a search engine to explore the world wide web and find curious little pages made by real human beings. Google et al. and the SEO twats have made that mostly impossible without drastic measures.
There are a couple, though the quality varies. Mojeek and marginalia seem to be good alternatives personally
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"
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?
They didn't pivot.
The search engine was just a side Idea What Needs Doing the CEO had, that just happened to make the startup famous because of being somewhat less bad than the enshittified crap other search engines have become, then they lost interest (to be fair they seem to be about 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) and went back to their main thing (which is apparently very bad but very fast AI).
At this point they're probably just keeping the paid search engine to try and pay back the taxes they owe due to having apparently forgotten taxes were a thing, though it was operating at a loss even before the tax thing (and before they wasted a third of their investment cash on free T-shirts), so they'll be having to raise their prices...
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
(feels quite fucky to type the following without coming across as a naysayer; not quite the intended meaning, but.. I guess you'll see)
it'd probably be cool if this could exist, but also there's a couple of extremely hard problems in going for it, along with a couple of (to my current knowledge) entirely unsolved ones
one of the presently-unsolved things I know of is that we don't yet have anything like scalable performant homomorphic encryption so there's no way to do fully-private query operations on a dataset, which thus gives way to the operator snooping space combined with user privacy angles. there are some technical solutions to some aspects of this, and a number of social things that would apply too
might be interesting either way
definitely a hell of a big project.
Personally: I'd love to, but I have a conflicting non-compete so I'd definitely have to quit my job first and I'm not ready for that level of adulting. The good news is that if I ever do quit I'll have a lot of relevant skills
maybe this is something you're looking for idk https://github.com/StractOrg/stract they have their own index and their own crawler
covered by 404media https://www.404media.co/...
Omg so much tech jargon in this comment
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 knew something was fucky about that cultish service.
nice try but we know the contents of lori’s blog and posts elsewhere and if you’ve got an issue with a queer person posting their takes on tech and being queer, you can fuck on off of TechTakes
actually, i don't think possessing the ability to send email entitles you to """debate""" with anyone who publishes material disagreeing with you or the way your company runs, and i'm pretty sure responding with a (polite) "fuck off" is a perfectly reasonable approach to the kinds of people who believe they have an inalienable right to argue with you
I think you might have just made it clear for me why the worst debatelords on the internet are rallying around this asshole. he’s just them but with the perceived prestige of being the CEO of a very momentarily successful internet company
fucking right? like it’s so important to come here and scream a barely changed variant of “I disagree that the ceo is acting unhinged because reason not given” and demand a Very Serious Debate with us
like fuck me, I’ll take a post defending the ceo if it’s not all bad faith debatebro shit and low effort garbage. if it’s a bad point not made maliciously I’ll just downvote it. there’s also a fair few folks (including some of our regulars) who use kagi enough they can’t dump it because there’s no good alternative. that’s fine! this isn’t a fucking purity test, but this is a honeypot for posters we don’t want here. this instance and its communities will never choose growth over quality.
also, if any of these fuckers are going to come at a queer person for sharing a tech opinion they don’t personally like, they’d best have something much stronger than “no I think lori’s the unhinged one” cause we’ve seen this game played before
No clue why they'd willingly accept crypto - they aren't doing anything that'd have credit card companies running for the hills.
It's incredible because the blogger based their beliefs off of evidence and reality instead of markov chains and hallucinations.
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...
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
never used it, mind, but author has written a lot about its development.
So basically 37.com from the 90s/2000s
A federated search engine sounds terrible tbh, how would that even work?
you’re right
the other poster was most likely trying to stir up shit given we’re on a federated network (see also their other post), but I have been obsessed with the idea of a federated search engine this weekend
it’s definitely a worthwhile idea, but anything that does federated indexing will have to deal with moderation and abuse prevention first. those are hard problems in ordinary federated networks, but search engines specifically are targets of hostile SEO and spam in ways that few other systems are. those aren’t insurmountable problems though — just ones that need to be solved before federation is practical.
I dunno. Google is currently overwhelmed by SEO optimized crap (at least I guess so, I stopped using it years ago because of that) and I think a federated system where members have different prioritizations would make SEO optimization very very hard to abuse.
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.
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”).
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.
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/...
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
If the CEO respected peoples boundaries, all communication from him should have stopped right then, meaning there would be nothing to "keep engaging" with. It's a massive red flag for both him and you.
Of course if they respected peoples boundaries they wouldn't have been tracking them down and emailing them in the first place, but at least that's a grey area.
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.
So in reading the comments from Lori there is a pretty good reason why the initial offer for a call was rejected, this was left out in the main body of the post. Their point was if a private conversation takes place, especially over a call where information isn't recorded, then the CEO could claim whatever they want took place during that conversation.
Here is the quote, you can find it in the third comment from the top:
"1) If there's one thing I know about online interactions, it's not to let someone take you to Crime Scene Number Two. Having a private debate with Vlad about this would mean no witnesses and no accountability, meaning he could claim anything about the discussion. Even moreso when done through a call instead of text."
So I do agree that it seems a bit hostile for a first response but it does seem to come from experience with these situations. You could give the CEO the benefit of the doubt and say that wasn't his intentions, but if I was in Lori's shoes I would have reacted the same way and not given the benefit of the doubt.
RISE, COMRADES, AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF....checks notes....ANY MODERATION WHATSOEVER
(e: adding /s, because otherwise this is going to become a fucking magnet for more dipshits)
If a CEO emails some random unsatisfied user out of the blue with strong "no one must ever be unhappy" energy and they reply with:
I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject
Then the only even keeled response is silence.
Look at me. I am the CEO now.
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.
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.
Thanks a lot for sharing such a detailed rundown of what you find Mojeek to be useful for. I've shared this with the wider team.
This being said, if you have things that you'd like to wing our way in terms of improvements, or feedback on individual results, our inbox is always open (aloe at mojeek dot com) and there's a submit feedback button on results pages. Mojeek thrives and grows off of feedback, the good and the bad 🙏
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.
yeah so just to be clear: you missed that the title of this thread is barely modified from a dril quote and spent so little time reading the linked article that you missed it wasn’t written by David Gerard?
your original post was just barely not bannable because “CEOs are just like this” is a shitty but valid take. now it’s obvious you didn’t put even a minimal amount of effort into your post.
@awful.systems
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
go to feed...
@awful.systems
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
go to feed...
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
save