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Do not use Kagi

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For quite a while now, you might have noticed various people recommending a search engine called “Kagi”. From random people on the internet, to prominent bloggers like John Gruber and David Pierce, they’ve all been pushing this seemingly new search engine as a paid-for alternative to Google that respects your privacy. Over the past few months to a year, though, more and more cracks started to appear in Kagi’s image, and I’ve been meaning to assemble those cracks and tie a bow on them.

Well, it turns out I don’t have to, because lori (I’m not aware of their full name, so I’ll stick to lori) already did it for me in a blog post titled “Why I lost faith in Kagi“. Even though I knew all of these stories, and even though I was intending to list them in more or less the same way, it’s still damning to see it all laid out so well (both the story itself, as well as the lovely, accessible, approachable, and simple HTML, but that’s neither here nor there).

Lori’s summary hits on all the pain points (but you should really read the whole thing):

Between the absolute blase attitude towards privacy, the 100% dedication to AI being the future of search, and the completely misguided use of the company’s limited funds, I honestly can’t see Kagi as something I could ever recommend to people. Is the search good? I mean…it’s not really much better than any other search, it heavily leverages Bing like DDG and the other indie search platforms do, the only real killer feature it has to me is the ability to block domains from your results, which I can currently only do in other search engines via a user script that doesn’t help me on mobile. But what good is filtering out all of the AI generated spamblogs on a search platform that wants to spit more AI generated bullshit at me directly? Sure I can turn it off, but who’s to say that they won’t start using my data to fuel their own LLM? They already have an extremely skewed idea of what counts as PII or not. They could easily see using people’s searches as being “anonymized” and decide they’re fine to use, because their primary business isn’t search, it’s AI.

↫ lori at lori’s blog

The examples underpinning all these pain points are just baffling, like how the company was originally an “AI” company, made a search engine that charges people for Bing results, and now is going full mask-off with countless terrible, non-working, privacy-invasive “AI” tools. Or that thing where the company spent one third of their funding round of $670,000 on starting a T-shirt company in Germany (Kagi is US-based) to print 20,000 free T-shirts for their users that don’t even advertise Kagi. Or that thing where they claimed they “forgot” to pay sales tax for two years and had to raise prices to pay their back taxes. And I can just keep on going.

To make matters worse, after publication of the blog post, Kagi’s CEO started harassing lori over email, and despite lori stating repeatedly they wanted him to stop emailing them, he just kept on going. Never a good look.

The worst part of it, though, is the lack of understanding about what privacy means, while telling their users they are super serious about it. Add to that the CEO’s “trust me, bro” attitude, their deals with the shady and homophobic crypto company Brave, and many other things, and the conclusion is that, no, your data is not safe at Kagi at all, and with their primary business being “AI” and not search, you know exactly what that means.

Do not use Kagi.

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tsukasa
205 days ago
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Bad article that promotes a biased and hate-filled individual. It seems Thom is okay with broadcasting just about anything as long as it allows him to crap on AI these days.

The fact that loaded language like "harassment" is used for a simple, friendly chain of e-mails is beyond ridiculous. Lori seems like a completely unhinged individual in dire need of help. I also doubt that Brave as a whole is homophobic (from the CEO down to the cleaning lady). Also, it has absolutely no bearing on the use or quality of their technology - so why bring it up at all?

Sad to see OSnews fall to such lows after two decades.
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satadru
206 days ago
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😐
New York, NY
freeAgent
205 days ago
This article has some odd factual errors that don't make a ton of sense. Kagi doesn't really seem to be saying the future of search is AI, but that it's a helpful tool. Most of their AI tools aren't even available to anyone but their highest-priced tier users (which I assume is a small minority of overall users). You can do more than block domains, too. You can raise, lower, and pin domains. It's also untrue that they're raising prices to pay back taxes. They're paying back taxes from company/investor funds and raising prices to pay future/ongoing taxes. Here's their take on AI in search...hardly as gung-ho sounding to me as this article paints it: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search

Scar Tissues Make Relationships Wear Out – John Ousterhout

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tsukasa
529 days ago
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Code Lifespan

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Surely (no one/everyone) will (recognize how flexible and useful this architecture is/spend a huge amount of effort painstakingly preserving and updating this garbage I wrote in 20 minutes)
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tsukasa
647 days ago
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6 public comments
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582 days ago
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DexX
648 days ago
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648 days ago
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10/10 can confirm.
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649 days ago
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649 days ago
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649 days ago
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Surely (no one/everyone) will (recognize how flexible and useful this architecture is/spend a huge amount of effort painstakingly preserving and updating this garbage I wrote in 20 minutes)

Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code likely to be buggy

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tsukasa
680 days ago
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Hamburg, Germany
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AI's Jurassic Park Moment, a real and imminent threat to the fabric of society

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tsukasa
686 days ago
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Collection of 88×31 pixel web buttons from the early web

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A.N. Lucas:

"Here is a collection of more than 700 88×31 web buttons from the 1990's and 2000's, including the famous "Netscape NOW" and "Internet Explorer" buttons as well as various other buttons for websites of past and present. All were rescued from a now defunct http://harrypagerubbish.webs.com/buttons

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tsukasa
707 days ago
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