This post was originally posted on 04-02-24, on 10-22-24 I added a followup at the end discussing the aftermath.
I've posted many times before about paid search engine Kagi but I really wanted, like I have with other sites in the past, to make a post that just outlines why I don't have any faith in it. Because the majority of my reasons come from being in their Discord, which tons of average users will never really look at, and I suspect a lot of Kagi supporters do not know a lot of this backstory. This isn't a heavily researched deep dive or anything, I feel like I always need these kind of disclaimers when I'm just posting my thoughts about something backed up with my reasons for thinking it...it's just a quick rundown of why I personally went from a Kagi subscriber to a Kagi Naysayer, so that I can have my reasons in one place that I can link others to. And I have seen a lot of people recommend Kagi that I personally know would be a lot less interested in doing so if they knew this information, but they don't because it's not readily apparent just from using the site.
For those unfamiliar to start with, Kagi is a paid search engine that purportedly focuses on privacy. It's meant to be a no-nonsense platform focused on being the best search it can be. Frankly, I think at this point it's a very nonsense-focused platform that has an extremely disinterested view of privacy, and I think it's not a particularly sustainable project either.
First of all, as a project, Kagi stretches itself way too thin. "Kagi" isn't just Kagi Search, it's also a whole slew of AI tools, a Mac-only web browser called Orion, and right now they are planning on launching an email service as well. None of these projects are particularly profitable, so it's not a case of one subsidizing the other, and when they announced Kagi Email even their most dedicated userbase (aka the types who hang around in a discord for a search engine) seemed largely disinterested. For products this niche, I don't think you can afford to be running multiple niche products at once. Your developers are going to be running far too ragged to keep them all going. Last I could find Kagi employs about 16 employees, half full time. Presumably not every single one of those 8 or so full timers are web devs. That's not a lot of people to throw at this many things.
Oh and they own a t-shirt factory.
You see, when Kagi had a funding round and raised about $670k. This funding came from an investment round including "42 accredited investors, most of whom are actual Kagi users". Unfortunately unlike Cohost I can't give any kind of huge financial breakdown here, because Kagi's finances are even less transparent. If there are Kagi financial reports, I haven't seen them, just the occasional Discord comment from Kagi employees. A while back they raised their prices, which lost them a lot of subscribers, because they were losing money per search at the old prices. They were actually still losing money per search on the new prices. They eventually lowered the prices back down a bit (and maybe raised them again? I've completely lost the plot on their pricing at this point) and have claimed that at 25,000 users they would be breaking even. I am unsure what happened in all of this for this math to be true, but my point is that 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, who is at this point the only thing I like about Kagi, to the point where if I wasn't worried people would try to talk to me about Kagi I'd opt for one of the shirts myself. Great artist, whoever did this. Terrible financial choice to start a whole t-shirt business to make 20,000 free t-shirts that do not even get your name out there.
T-shirt companies aside, there's one other thing about Kagi's finances that was revealed recently in an update stream they did that caught my attention--Kagi was not paying sales tax for two years and they finally have to pay up. They just...didn't do it. Didn't think it was important? I have no idea why. Their reactions made it sound like they owed previous taxes, not that they just now had to pay them. They genuinely made it sound like they only just now realized they needed to figure out sales tax. It's a baffling thing to me and it meant a change in prices for users that some people were not thrilled with.
But let's say that you can live with their financial issues. They'll either survive or they won't and you'll just enjoy the ride. Yet, there's a lot of reasons that I can't just enjoy the ride either. I think the ride is going to get worse and worse in ways the casual users haven't really noticed yet because of how much of it is in beta or just Ideas That Vlad (the founder of Kagi) Had. And most of them are surrounding AI. I have to assume a lot of people don't understand how deep the AI rabbithole for Kagi goes, because I have seen people recommend Kagi to people frustrated with Google's own AI bullshit. If AI is the thing you are trying to get away from, moving to Kagi is a lateral move at best.
As it turns out, Kagi was founded originally as an AI company, who later pivoted to search. And going by their comments in their Discord, AI tools seem to be what they spend most of their time on these days. They're launching AI features left and right, and they have fully bought into AI being the future of search. They believe that by embracing AI, that will be the thing that sets their product apart (kinda late now) and get them the kind of userbase that can keep them afloat financially. They have "FastGPT", where their focus is having a ChatGPT style service that is focused on being fast, not accurate. And boy, it sure isn't, I messed around with this for a while and it very confidently gave me a lot of extremely inaccurate information about old sitcoms. But of course, it's all stuff where if you didn't already know the answer to the question you asked you wouldn't know it was wrong--like when I asked it about the All in the Family episode Cousin Liz, it kept identifying the woman Edith and Archie are talking to in the episode as Cousin Liz, but Cousin Liz is instead Edith's deceased cousin who they were attending a funeral for. Following a theme I asked it more broadly about homosexuality in All in the Family and it spit out a bunch of text repeatedly saying that Lionel Jefferson was gay. But I guess it did spit all of this wrong information at me faster than some of the alternatives! I wrote more about this experience on fedi, even though the content warning says ChatGPT this was done with Kagi's FastGPT, I was just trying to keep the thread simple at the time.
Like most search now Kagi has chosen to include Instant Answers that are AI generated, which means they're often wrong, as well as a "Universal Summarizer" tool, that again is more of the same old AI bullshit. There's also a beta tool called Kagi Assitant, which I...don't know what's really different about it than the other AI stuff they're doing, I think it has a chatbot mode? I believe you have to be a subscriber to see this. It's getting increasingly hard to tell some of these services apart. There's also another beta feature called Sidekick that puts Kagi AI stuff as a sidebar on your own website. There was some demo where you could put someone's Twitter handle in and it would give you a summary of who that person was (nightmare shit). But the developers of Kagi fully believe that this is what search engines should be, a bunch of AI tools so that you don't even need to read primary sources anymore. If AI is your problem with Google or Bing, Kagi is in no way a solution for you. Kagi loves AI bullshit and they are going to find more and more ways to use it. If you check out their Discord and listen to founder Vlad talk about AI tools, it's clear that he will not listen to anyone saying they might be bad in any way. To the point where he truly believes that AI should be used to remove bias from news articles, and show you which articles are "constructive" or "good" to view. This is something he legitimately wants to implement and he seems completely oblivious to the fact that this is not something AI can do, that AI spits out exactly as much bias as it is fed in its model. He's 100% a true believer in AI as unbiased. (Note in the below screenshots: freediver is Vlad's HackerNews account)
It's honestly impossible to write this without discussing Vlad a little bit. Vlad is very "my way or the highway", but is the type that will try to appear very measured and calm while completely unwilling to budge. And he is very, very much the type that believes "not everything is political" and "we don't get into politics". I won't get into all of the Brave stuff because many people have written about this already, but the support thread about it should give you some ideas. His personal conception of bias is a guiding factor in a lot of Kagi's decisions but it's frankly ridiculous. For example, he has stated before that he thinks 3 star reviews on products are "by definition" unbiased, because they must include good and bad points. Nevermind that a lot of people's reviews of the recent Star Wars films were "good space war stuff but too many minorities in it". At one point someone suggested the idea that searching for suicide-related terms should bring up a helpline, and he rejected that idea because it would be "biased" (I guess towards not wanting people to kill themselves). But at the same time, Kagi partners with a service called Looria to provide "unbiased reviews" on products in Kagi's shopping page. Nevermind that unbiased reviews do not exist (there is just a difference between a sincere review and a paid advertisement), but isn't promoting certain products in search at least as biased as telling people to not commit suicide? You're letting a third party decide what reviews your users should see.
And Vlad's attitude is also where Kagi's dedication to privacy falls apart for me. Generally, if someone brings up a security or privacy concern, Vlad's response is either "trust me bro" or "that's not actually important". He has repeatedly stated that he feels less than 100 people on earth need full anonymity in a search engine (he has never, that I could find, explained where he got this number or idea from). He believes that email addresses don't count as personally identifiable information, because you can simply use a burner account. If you say that you wouldn't want Kagi using information from your theoretical Kagi Email Address in your search results, and would rather have a Proton-style privacy focused email? He says that there's nothing to worry about, Kagi wouldn't do anything bad with your data. If you bring up "what if Kagi gets sold to someone else?" He says well, if they sold to someone who did something bad with your data, they'd lose all of their privacy focused customers, so clearly they'd never do that. Basically anything where you say "I don't want someone to have this data about what I'm doing in a search engine", his reply is "well, we wouldn't do anything with this information." A lot of questions about what information Kagi collects on people is met with either saying nothing (which isn't true, they connect your account to an email address for payments, since it's a paid service), or saying he isn't sure, or saying it doesn't matter because they won't use it anyway. Asking what data Stripe collects on them through Kagi, and more importantly what data Stripe sends back TO Kagi, also gets you a vague "I don't know" answer. He doesn't entertain any discussions about GDPR because he thinks they have nothing that applies anyway. Questions about what would happen if the government tried to force him to collect information about users are just brushed away with "well we'd simply close the company", although he also notes that he has no problem with criminals being caught through their searches and doesn't want criminals using the platform.
I want to note with the above, I'm not a GDPR expert either, I don't know what counts legally and what doesn't, but I strongly disagree with Vlad's handwaving of the issue and his insistence that email addresses aren't PII because you can use a fake one, because that's true for names and almost any other information as well, that logic doesn't hold up for this, and the logic is what I have the issue with.
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. They just don't want to admit to being an AI company anymore. Frankly, it's not something I want to pay them to keep developing. It's something I want less of out in the world. Do you need to quit using Kagi? That's up to you. I'm not really trying to debate anyone into leaving Kagi. My only interest is to explain why my opinion shifted on it, and to share information that may or may not shift your opinions. If they don't, it's not something I want to debate people into. But I think most of the info here is going to be news to a lot of people, and that's the thing. Most people aren't going to dig into the discord for a project and read what the developers have said about it over time, that's a bonkers thing to do that I did, just do what you will with my findings. Because I know for a fact, from talking to people, that a lot of Kagi users don't know any of this.
When I wrote this post originally, it was primarily to organize my thoughts about Kagi and put them in one place, because I often had people asking me why I quit using Kagi and this made for a quick way to explain without having to repeat myself over and over. As you might guess by my plain text HTML blog, this is more of a personal project for myself and not something particularly widely read. I had very little traffic when I posted it and very few boosts/favorites/etc. on social media where I linked it. So I was surprised about two weeks later to receive an email from Vlad, Kagi's CEO. The entire email exchange is preserved here.
The long and short of it is, Vlad wanted to get me on a call to discuss what he felt were "misunderstandings" in my post. I declined. He pressed a bit with more argument, I explicitly spelled out that I did not want to hear from him again. His response to "stop emailing me" was to write me a big essay arguing with my post (kind of, I'll discuss this more). I sent one more reply reiterating for him to stop emailing me, and that was it.
I found this interaction very inappropriate and decided to post about it on my fedi account. Unlike the original blog post, that DID get spread a lot more widely, which led to it ending up on HackerNews. I opted to not interact with the comments there, though I did read a lot of them. Let's just say reactions were very mixed. Not surprising really. I was pretty much content to just leave it at that. But, as it turns out, months later this post is still being shared with people when they ask about Kagi. I'm happy that this post has turned out to be useful for others! But at this point it felt like not including the aftermath of it means people are missing half the story. So, I thought I'd discuss it a bit here, and talk a little about responses I saw.
I don't want to cover Vlad's big rebuttal post itself. It came after I made it clear I did not want further replies from him and he does not deserve the time just because he demanded it. The only thing I will point out here is that his corrections of my "misunderstandings" are...largely just a difference of opinion. If I say that the Universal Summarizer is "the same old AI bullshit" and his response is that he finds it a useful tool, that isn't evidence of me being wrong, we have extremely different feelings about AI. Most of his reply is just this, it's not proving me wrong, it's simply frustration that I do not see things the same way he does.
I had many people wonder why I responded with such hostility towards Vlad straight from his initial email and why I was so rude, or refused to hear him out, or whatever. This wasn't my first time interacting with Vlad, and I have seen many, many interactions between him and users before. Don't forget, I was in their Discord. I know exactly, exactly what "discussing" things with Vlad looks like, and, well, it looks like the email he sent me. It's a lot of "correcting" you on things that are pure opinion, and also reframing and rewording the points you made into completely different points that he can more easily argue with while ignoring you saying "that's not what I'm saying". There's also other reasons--for one, he specifically requested that I talk to him on a call. There is no universe in which I would want to discuss something with the CEO of a company in a format that is hard to have a paper trail of later. He could have said absolutely anything in a call and unless I recorded it I would be unable to prove any of it happened.
But I found this conversation wildly inappropriate even before I told him to stop emailing me and he continued to do so. And that's because it is extremely threatening when the CEO of a company emails you about a no-name blog post that almost nobody read that boils down to little more than a bad review. I've been told since posting this that people have experienced Vlad emailing them in similar ways over their comments in the "why are you unsubscribing" box when cancelling their Kagi subscriptions, which aren't even public. The first thing I think if a CEO emails me about a negative blog post is "is this guy going to try to sue me?" To be the CEO of a company, you really need to be able to handle people not liking your product. My post had barely even been read before he emailed me, I cannot fathom being able to argue any sort of slander, but some CEOs are extremely unhinged about this kind of thing, and there absolutely are CEOs out there who start trying to threaten lawsuits if you say anything negative about them. I don't suspect Vlad is going to do this. However, I don't know him, I don't know that he wouldn't. He has the money to do so. He's certainly very thin skinned about his product and very noticably personally upset when anything negative is said about it. Obviously, the only right thing to do in that situation is not talk to him. And I think when you run a business you need to realize that coming after someone for writing something negative about your product is going to look like this. At worst, it's going to look massively unprofessional.
Some people felt I was being a bad journalist by not getting a response from Vlad. Frankly, I have no idea how you looked at my plaintext HTML blog whose biggest source of Google results is a guide on how to play Bakugan and thought I was a journalist. The only reason this was a blog post and not just a random fedi thread is because I wanted it to be easy to find later and link people to. I appreciate that you mistook me for a journalist, but trust me, I'm not. Anyway, in a roundabout way he did get a chance for his rebuttal to be publicized through me, when I shared his emails. I assume he would have preferred that didn't happen given that that's what caused people to see the blog post in the first place. This would have been very easily avoided by not repeatedly emailing me when I asked him not to.
Some people felt that I was intentionally baiting him for a reaction. I think if your reaction to being told "stop emailing me" is to keep emailing someone, that is a personal problem you need to deal with on your own time. I quite literally did want him to stop emailing me.
Some people felt I posted his emails to try to get attention on my blog post, and thought the fact that it ended up on HackerNews meant that was my goal. I extremely did not want it to be on HN, and generally do not want people posting my blog there, because it makes for a really shitty day when you get posted there. Just because I'd like for some people to read my blog, that doesn't mean I want hundreds if not thousands of people from that specific sphere of tech news readers looking at it. I would have preferred significantly less attention that day. I shared the emails because if a tech CEO is going to be acting like that, some percentage of the people who are giving that person money would prefer to know about it. Seems like my instinct on that is right, given how I had some people tell me they were dropping Kagi over it. And note in the post itself, I make it very clear--my goal wasn't to get people to stop using Kagi. My goal was to share why I stopped supporting it, because of how many people I was seeing online who found out about the things I covered and said "god, I had no idea, I wish I hadn't given this my money". I wanted the people this stuff did matter to to know about it. If you love AI stuff, then sure, maybe you don't give a shit, and I'm not here to convince you. If you hate AI stuff, but simply don't know that Kagi is doing AI stuff in the first place, then you want to know about it! I talked to a ton of people who specifically went to Kagi under the impression they didn't do anything AI, and were upset to learn otherwise. That's what this post was for.
And some people felt I wrote too many words about something so stupid, and that it was too long to read. I hope they did not look at how many more words I wrote about Bakugan or Cohost's finances. I got my degree in computer science but I minored in English, and I have ADHD real bad. I can crank out an absurd amount of words in a short time. I did not spend days and days on this, I sat down and cranked it out in maybe two hours at most, and most of that was digging the Discord screenshots up, not the actual writing. One guy used Claude to do an AI summary of the post because he felt it was too long to read. The AI summary, as another commenter pointed out, was incorrect. So as my parting comment, I will say: lol, and lmao.
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