Kagi employee here. The search business is sustainable, we don't need a push in AI things to make it work. We're looking at these features/ideas because we think they complement search well, not because we need them from a cashflow perspective :)
Heya, I work at Kagi, and I did the math for this. Our unit economics are sound, and we don't plan on subsiding usage with ties-attached money. We have abuse prevention mechanisms, and we regularly review heavy use use-cases so we can either optimize for them or offer alternative workflows.
Heya, I work at Kagi. This sounds like a great idea, thanks for the input! We'll put it on the requested features list (which our users contribute to).
I work at Kagi. We don't have KPIs that track search quality in that way (we don't have any frontend tracking at all, so we can't know if you click any of the results), and we haven't touched much the sources of data we're using over the last few months. We've also had conflicting reports about this problem, so I'm wondering if it's not variable quality over time and place of our upstreams that's a problem.
That said, we're aware that it's currently something we have to improve, "!g best cafe" is not where we want to be. We're working on it, but if you have specific examples/suggestions, please do submit them to kagifeedback.org so we can track them.
I work at Kagi. I think this is partly a function of who our early user base was, and the tons of feedback they gave which helped improve our search. Because we don't keep the data, we can't do a lot of the ML-powered search improvements that eg. Google could over all search domains.
The good news is as the community expand, so will the feedback, and we'll be able to improve overall. The even better (and quite surprising) news is that we could be better than eg. Google on any topic at all, which tells me that the ML magic is not actually magic, and we will be able to outperform them in other domains as the community grows, the feedback increases, and our code becomes better.
I work at Kagi. I'm as blown away by the recent coverage as you are. We're a 15ish people company, which is staying away from VC money and only raised a relatively small amount of money directly from our users. We don't have the time nor the money to spend on astroturfing. We do have an incredibly supportive community, and I'm sure they help in spreading the word. I think it also help that we have a good product :)
In fact, we even axed our referral bonus program a couple months back to ensure that no third party had anything to gain in promoting Kagi. Recently, that included saying "no" to an independent journalist who explicitly asked for referral bonus for their readers. All you see is organic.
Heya. I just want to let you know that y’all have something extremely special going on over there at Kagi. I honestly have no idea how your universal summarizer or your !expert work — not enough to implement it, anyway, beyond more than a cheap knockoff — and I’ve been in ML for a while now, so it’s genuinely thrilling to see something that even to jaded ol’ me looks like magic. Congrats and keep up the good work. I look forward to reselling your API!! Thank you!!
I work at Kagi. This is a very reasonable fear to have. We do actually not store the data, but of course you'd need to take me at my word for this.
That said, if we did lie or change that, we'd be in immediate breach of our privacy policy (https://kagi.com/privacy), and as a result be a very easy target for a lawsuit. Given that we're intentionally not VC backed, between the horrible press this would be and the actual costs of fighting such a lawsuit, I expect not much would be left of Kagi afterwards. We are liable to users, in a pretty existential way.
Having read your privacy agreement, I don't see where the threat is existential if you are in breach. I think that the knowledge of engineers of the judicial system, both criminal and civil, is very naive. You can sue anyone over anything at any time - you don't need valid grounds. It also doesn't mean that if you win it matters.
Your privacy policy has lots of feel-good language that actually doesn't mean anything - along the lines of the classic "We value your privacy" statement that firms often make. When you analyze it, you find it means nothing. There are no actionable clauses. For example, if you are in breach of "Anonymous logs are aggregated with GCP's logging tools, retained for 30 days." what are the enumerated damages? A counter-party would have to prove show BOTH that you are in breach AND then real damages , which is difficult in this case, and entirely misses the point. E.g. if you sell 1M user data records for $.001 each, and a user has on average 10 records on them, the real damages are $.01, but your firm made $100k on the transaction. I don't see a limit to class action (or forced arbitration) so that's good; but good luck building out that class - especially since you'll resist sharing user data with the class action plaintiff, using the same privacy policy as a shield!
(This is the other trick of privacy agreements, apart from not actually saying anything: the stuff that is measurable is unenforceable).
It's time that the public stop seeing moonbeams and rainbows in these matters. Do you think that a lender will be satisfied with a debtor statement "I value paying back my debts, and will never be late!"? If not, then why are we mollified by similar statements by software firms made to us? What is measurable has no teeth; what has teeth is not measurable.
If you think we should word the privacy policy differently, please do submit some feedback on kagifeedback.org with the specifics - we have changed it in the past through exactly this process. It has been written by engineers, mostly for engineers at the beginning. I'm sure we can improve the wording to make it more binding, we're not trying to squirrel away from it. If you have enough legal knowledge to harden it, we'd welcome the contribution :)
>please do submit some feedback on kagifeedback.org
To do so requires a kagi user account, which I don't have and don't want. It also requires knowing your issue organizational schema to find privacy policy related "bugs" and "features". If you are serious about taking feedback, consider taking the content of this thread to BE that feedback, and do the work of adding it into your bug tracker yourself, with links back to this thread.
And also, I am not a lawyer, and neither are you, so I'd consider hiring one to revise the policy with an eye toward increasing your liability for the right reasons.
Heya, I work at Kagi. This is correct, we do not personalize searches other than by respecting the user's customizations (eg. domain preferences, lenses, etc...) which are all entirely user-controlled.
Hey daveoc64. I work at Kagi. Really cool stuff is coming for Ultimate, and being a early Ultimate user you'll get it before the newer users. If that doesn't work for you (fair enough) and you switch to pro, we'll prorate all your credits. If that also doesn't work, contact support@kagi.com and we'll help.