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.
I’ve seen no evidence that Kagi uses Bing. It’s not listed here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html, nor do the results look anything like Bing’s. Kagi also has their own index. I’m also a fan of the Reddit results showing near the top, if pertinent. I’ve found many “answers” from Reddit posts compared to other sites. Besides, you can “float” Reddit results down (or even block them) if you have a problem with them; that’s the great thing about Kagi.
Disclosure: I’m a paying Kagi user and I love it more every day.
Turns out many cures are worse than the diseases. Big corps are under much more scrutiny. I know it’s not this simple but the ease with which people just give away their privacy in search for some mythical “not Google” is quite baffling.
“real killer feature it has to me is the ability to block domains from your results”
Yep, that’s great. I use Kagi for searching for SEO-spammed terms.
For other stuff, I keep googling.
Started using (and paying) for Kagi a few months ago, and so far been liking it. Don’t really use the “AI” stuff, but was thinking hey, seems basically mandatory to be experimenting with it these days.
The blog post definitely is giving me some new information, something to consider for sure.
Serious question though, if not Kagi, what else should I use? I find the domain blocking to make it better/easier/nicer than DuckDuckGo with results I get back.
Well, you’ll have to accept that sometimes, you have to forego niceties if you want to steer clear of shady and/or morally reprehensible shit.
But _which_ shady and/or morally reprehensible shit? DDG uses Bing backend for results, so that’s MS, even if indirectly. Google is…Google. Yahoo. LOL.
But yeah. Sadly very few companies for this sort of thing are even marginally workable if you’re not a shady tech-bro.
You may want to consider Qwant: https://qwant.com
I’ve been using it happily for years.
@corbeaucrypto apparently we have reply depth limits….
Looks like they do Advertising, unfortunately. Wish I could just pay them some money so they wouldn’t have to worry about that. The person who pays the money always skews the goals/intentions.
But thanks, I’ll take closer look at them.
I do not know too much about Kagi, but I I am not sure this entry is fully informative. The reasons given at Lori’s blog and here sound like personal feelings. I think Kagi claims a) independent search engine and b) privacy. It would be nice to contrast that.
There’s nothing wrong with Lori’s blog post, but that’s just what it is: a blog post. It’s personal feelings about Kagi and some information on why Lori feels that way. I interpret Lori’s post as introducing six concerns: 1) Kagi wastes money, 2) Kagi doesn’t pay sales tax, 3) Kagi isn’t committed to promoting some progressive opinions Lori shares, 4) Kagi’s definition of privacy differs from Lori’s, especially as it relates to AI, 5) Kagi doesn’t comply with GDPR data portability, and 6) Lori doesn’t like that Kagi is using some of its money to develop AI tools.
In my opinion, any of those are reasons someone may choose not use Kagi, but none of those reasons are “news” that are revealing hidden motives or privacy/contractual breaches with its users. I’d argue that every search engine commits one or more of the sins Lori references. I guess the difference is that users aren’t paying money to support those sins? To me, the Discord screenshots just reveal that this is a tech company run by less-than-brilliant tech bros. Welcome to the club.
Maybe this is off-topic because I do not care about the particular case of Kagi…. but 1)kagi wastes money, so we should stop using Boing, google, yahoo, microsoft and GM; 2)kagi didnt pay taxes, which is a nice reason (i could write another list of companies here); 3)maybe, I do not know what to say; 4) I think this is the real point; 6) Kagi is using some of its money to develop AI tools… should we close any R&D department for new products in California?
At this point I have to thank you for the comment 4 and for the 5 particularly. On the one side hand, it looks like Kagi does not have that strong-rigorous basis on privacy and the protection of the digital identity. On the other side hand, the GDPR are tools of governments around the world to protect and to spy people, sometimes I dont know where to put the read line. If you enjoy a government protecting your privacy GDPR looks like a nice thing, but definitely the internal measures to protect the digital identity (or anonymity) even against the company workers and governments are the keystone in current days. It looks like Kagi could do that better.
As Lori points out in the blog post, some of Kagi’s claims and people’s reason for using Kagi are based on faulty assumptions. For instance I was myself interested in Kagi because I thought it was a search engine that unlike the big ones truly focused on privacy and avoided modern tech trends like LLMs (”Ai”), but it turns out that Kagi is both worse at privacy and more into LLMs stuff than mainstream search engine, thus for me, removing any reason to use Kagi over those.
If you’re completely fine with Kagi’s focus on LLMs (and don’t care about their cavalier attitudes to privacy) then you can continue using them of course. It’s all about making informed decisions and a lot of the information here is not widely known.
The business model here is pretty simple:
1. Make a product in 5 mins.
2. Slap the word AI on the box.
3. Pay people to promote adopting it so there’s a maketable user base.
4. Sell out to a VC for mad $$$.
do not use this and this and this. because AI and homophobic and lalalalala… ridiculous. and this word “harassing”.
Email is a simple letter used to initiate dialogue between people. And I read these “harassing” letters, the director of the company tried to establish a dialogue with this person and solve all the problems between this “lori” and the company. there was absolutely no harassment in these letters, Lori simply rejected the dialogue without any words and that’s it, the letters ended.
we need to make “do not read osnews” … ? or just we will stop writing nonsense.
The kagi guys looks amateurish for sure but they are still trying to build an alternative to big names search and have made the poc that people are willing to pay for quality search. That is not nothing.
Maybe a post on how kagi was created, works behind the scene, grow with all those listed limitations would have been more interesting. Frankly for one sentence boycott or rants like this one, we already have mastodon or other social networks. This feels inappropriate (and I am european).
ok this is not one sentence but the title and last sentence just cancel everything.
I don’t see any harrasment.
Back in my days, when someone wanted to stop communicating with someone, they would stop all communication, not reply to each e-mail, thanking them for reaching out and asking them not to reply.
I read somewhere that modern young people feel the email as harassment and passive aggression. I do not understand how immature a person is, who is afraid of a letter written with respect and reasonable questions about a complaint against the company. Is it possible to rely on the opinion of such people? I think not.
That person seems really unhinged and very rude, does she not know how to use a spam filter? It might be better if she did that rather than publicly posting private emails without permission.