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

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.

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

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.

I literally learnt about Kagi like a week ago from a Cory Doctorow's post. I was like oh, cool, someone there to fight google.

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.

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'd say he's a milquetoast narcissist at best, his boilerplate deflectons were totally hinged the whole time.

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

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?

I knew something was fucky about that cultish service.

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.

i didn't spot that Kagi are coiners too

That he called the blog post 'an incredible amount of research' is quite odd. Either it is a failed attempt at sucking up, or a sign Vlad has a very bad idea of what research is.

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...