• David Gerard@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    note: tech sociopath apologists in this thread will be removed and banned for everyone’s best interests

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • MetaCubed@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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?

    • AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Also looking for answers. I’ve been a Kagi convert for 5 months now and it has absolutely saved me time and effort.

      I was looking at Perplexity but it isn’t exactly the same.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      7 months ago

      Feel entirely free to use Kagi, just remember that it’s run by an idiot and could blow up at any moment.

      • MetaCubed@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Apologies, my question wasn’t rhetorical, I was genuinely looking for suggestions. I don’t want to use kagi if this is who is running it… BUT all the alternatives that I’m personally aware of are not options for replacement.

      • 200fifty@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        ok but for real… it’s not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results with search.marginalia.nu than any other search engine. It’s the only search engine that I find actively fun to just browse around on recreationally.

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          it’s not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results

          Dunno if this is just poorly phrased or… Finding actual answers to queries is the only job of a search engine, what does “interesting” mean here?

          • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            You can use a search engine to explore the world wide web and find curious little pages made by real human beings. Google et al. and the SEO twats have made that mostly impossible without drastic measures.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            For me instantly evoked the memory of using the internet from when I first got to access it (~92) until 2012…2014ish, years I could describe as “the party is emptying, not as big as earlier”, vs 2014…2016 which I’d describe as having definite “okay there’s only 3 people left on the dancefloor” vibes (and the downslope started being felt 2008…2009 already, but slowly, only later more pronounced).

            It was a time when you truly could just randomly browse search results and find all kinds of interesting things. It’s hard to convey, in today’s ecosystem, what that felt like. The fedi scratches a similar itch, but it feels (and I don’t mean this as criticism) more “a diamond in the muck”, a glimmer of hope in a sea of awful. A general optimism was quite prevalent among the internet of then, even despite it also having its awful aspects

            I have years of irc logs in multiple channels, filled with the shared experiences of years of people delighting and gaping and pointing at all kinds of stuff like this. And things rarely feel the same.

            I will never forgive the walled gardens for what they took from all of us, for what they destroyed

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I can’t remember the names of the projects, but there are actually some self hosted search engines that I keep meaning to get around to actually installing on “Ullr”

      • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        thanks a lot for shouting us out, Marginalia is also impressive (basically a one-person project etc.), the random button is delightful

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      I’m in a forum where some person claims that the sealion is actually the reasonable one.

      It’s proof to me that this throwaway comic is such a good summary for certain online behavior that there’s an entire subculture built around trying to subvert it.

      (also Wondermark is great in general)

  • Steve@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    I swear I knew these fuckers were dodgy when I saw how UX designed their website was. A better search engine would sell itself even if it looked like craigslist.

  • mommykink@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The OP of that thread seems like the only one in the wrong here. The founder of the company they were criticizing reached out to them directly to clarify some misunderstandings and they instantly took a curt, defensive attitude in their replies. Replying to every email someone sends and rage baiting them doesn’t exactly read: “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

    • dragnet@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      The only thing I thought was an error on the CEO’s part (not regarding his views, just the way he handled himself) was the long followup email when the blog author said he wasn’t interested in debating with him. That email should have been a blog post of its own if it was worth writing in the first place, imo.

      About his views, though: I’m turned off by his lack of regard for user-supplied details as PII. For me to use a search engine that requires an account, and therefore associates all of my searches with me directly, I would need to be supremely confident that my information is in good hands. Otherwise, how am I better off than using any other search engine on the internet without an account?

      I’m glad I read through this post, Kagi has been on my radar but I hadn’t looked into it enough to decide if I might have any interest. Seems like the answer is, at least for now: no.

    • random8847@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      100% agree. The “don’t want to be cornered into a call” sounds more like OP is afraid of being proved wrong. The CEO was very generous in addressing their concerns personally, OP was the one that took that as an attack.

    • PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      If the CEO respected peoples boundaries, all communication from him should have stopped right then, meaning there would be nothing to “keep engaging” with. It’s a massive red flag for both him and you.

      Of course if they respected peoples boundaries they wouldn’t have been tracking them down and emailing them in the first place, but at least that’s a grey area.

    • LinkOpensChest.wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      Yeah I had a weirdass email exchange with that same guy that pushed me away from Kagi forever. It was one of those “borderline technically honest but still blatantly dodging and obfuscating” type situations.

      I shared a screenshot once, but got nothing but defense for the guys dodgy behavior, so I’ve been quiet about it, so this feels pretty validating that my gut feelings were right.

      I think a lot of people get cultish about it because they’re paying a subscription for it, so they have to believe it’s good.

          • self@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            this thread has been an excellent honeypot for some of the worst people on Lemmy, and TechTakes definitely needed some cleaning up now that our threads keep hitting all

            it’s very funny to see how those posters react to the idea that their fucking garbage takes in defense of an asshole CEO aren’t welcome here, and that we have a minimum standard they just aren’t meeting. there’s this weird concept in a lot of folks’ heads from shareholder-oriented social media like Reddit that every community is for them and has to suffer their garbage, but that thankfully isn’t the case here.

            • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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              7 months ago

              it’s also hugely amusing that the default Lemmy behaviour is mod-removed comments get removed from their home instance too

              • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                7 months ago

                proposal to change the mod button to be a mini icon of a nuke

                for maximum points, a small animation of a nuke from orbit

  • Nia_The_Cat@beehaw.org
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    7 months ago

    Maybe it’ll stop being evangelized so heavily in every single search engine thread now, honestly just manipulative behavior from the CEO

  • noride@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

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

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      7 months ago

      running through the sales playbook big time over a post with no readers

      and now the original blog post, which had almost no readers, is front page on HN as I write this, and (in between the sociopath apologetics) people are noticing he’s bizarre on privacy, GDPR and AI obsession …

      • lad@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        AI obsession

        To be fair, of all the problems with that CEO, this one I fail to see

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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          7 months ago

          It isn’t in this post, but it’s in the post this one is about. Kagi started as an AI company, pivoted to the search engine, and it’s still trying to put AI into everything.

          • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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            7 months ago

            They didn’t pivot.

            The search engine was just a side Idea What Needs Making the CEO had, that just happened to make the startup famous because of being somewhat less bad than the enshittified crap other search engines have become, then they lost interest (to be fair they seem to be about fifteen to twenty-something people, plus whoever they’ve got in Germany making free T-shirts, only half of them working full time, so there’s only so much they can focus on) and went back to their main thing (which is apparently very bad but very fast AI).

            At this point they’re probably just keeping the paid search engine to try and pay back the taxes they owe due to having apparently forgotten taxes were a thing, though it was operating at a loss even before the tax thing (and before they wasted a third of their investment cash on free T-shirts), so they’ll be having to raise their prices…

    • Bipta@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      Yeah this is a big overreaction to someone defending their life’s work. I see nothing wrong here. The writer’s immediate and thorough disinterest in discussion doesn’t make the owner wrong to explain, and to call it mansplaining when you say you won’t even read it?

      • Nia_The_Cat@beehaw.org
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        7 months ago

        Repeated messaging or communication when the person has been asked multiple times to stop communicating is harassment, they aren’t on some public channel where he’s explaining to the masses, he’s just harassing someone who’s asked him multiple times to stop.

        • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          7 months ago

          I think a lot of folks, in my experience especially those who didn’t grow up with the Internet, don’t see online interactions as “real” as offline. I think it explains a lot of the harassing behavior we see online.

          For the peanut gallery, if someone asks you to stop communicating with you but you persist, it’s harassment regardless of the venue.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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            7 months ago

            I’d like to think so, but I think you’re being unduly generous here and actually they’re just entitled shitheads

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      7 months ago

      Eh, nothing wrong with accepting payments in crypto. Sometimes the gas fees are a lot less than what a payment provider / credit card provider would charge.

        • Deborah@hachyderm.io
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          7 months ago

          This post has been a real honeypot, hasn’t it?

          (Can we try mixing the honey with a little borax so they bring it back to the nest, like you can do for ants?)

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        2018 called, it wants its shitty coiner propaganda talking points back

        (actually not sure if by 2018 coiners had moved on from dunking on credit card fees)

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      No clue why they’d willingly accept crypto - they aren’t doing anything that’d have credit card companies running for the hills.

  • ebu@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    i was impressed enough with kagi’s by-default deranking/filtering of seo garbage that i got a year’s subscription a while back. good to know that this is what that money went to. suppose i’ll ride out the subscription (assuming they don’t start injecting ai garbage into search before then) and then find some other alternative

    switching topics, but i do find it weird how the Brave integration stuff (which i also only found out about after i got the subscription) hadn’t… bothered me as much? to be exceptionally clear, fuck Brandon Eich and Brave – the planet deserves fewer bigots, crypto grifters, and covid conspiracists – but i can’t put my finger on why Kagi paying to consume Brave’s search API’s just doesn’t cause as much friction with me. honestly it could be the fact that when i pay for Kagi it doesn’t feel like i’m bankrolling Eich and his ads-as-a-service grift, whereas the money for my subscription is definitely paying for Vlad to reply-guy into bloggers’ inboxes who are critical of the way Kagi operates correct misunderstandings about Kagi.

  • ikidd@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • faintwhenfree@lemmus.org
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      7 months ago

      I am coming from cold on this, I knew kagi existed, It was on my bucket list to do research before even considering any trial, well kagi is not for me since I will never make an account to search web.

      That being said, I read through both the blog and the email chain, and I was still so confused on whose side to take i read through OP’s other articles and comments and oh my god. Only thing i concluded is Vlad may have crossed boundaries in terms of emailing someone against their wishes, but the email chain wasn’t enough for me conclude he is narcisst, OP however is definitely pot calling the kettle black.

      (I’m aware this is just a copy paste of another comment i made on parent level, but that was me fat fingering where to reply, I meant initially to reply to this comment, but ended up replying to OP, anyway I’m gonna keep both)

    • ebu@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      Actually, that email exchange isn’t as combative as I expected.

      i suppose the CEO completely barreling forward past multiple attempts to refuse conversation while NOT screaming slurs at the person they’re attempting to lecture, is, in some sense, strictly better than the alternative

      • Kroxx@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        The bar hasn’t been so high in a while, christ that’s sad.

    • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      That’s a really fucking low bar. Remember to bring plenty of rope, emergency o2, and extra lights, should you go seeking it.

  • archchan@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    I’m just trying to use independent search engines with their own index/crawler. I used DDG for many years but the fact that it’s basically a front end for Bing and Microsoft started to bother me, particularly since they put ChatGPT into Bing.

    I only know of Brave Search, Mojeek, and Kagi to be independent and private at this point. I don’t want to pay for Kagi, Mojeek has its uses but I wouldn’t use it as my main engine, so that left Brave Search. The company and CEO is sus, I don’t use their chromium browser, and their search results seem to emulate and optimize ranking based on the big guys (Google and Bing) but in 2024 search is hard to come by and it’s more important to me to be fully independent of big tech.

      • archchan@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        Tldr: I like your ranking algo. Feels like a breath of fresh air reminiscent of the old days of search and internet

        Long version: When I want to get results for a query, not for an intent per se, I use Mojeek.

        It works best for certain types of queries. When I want to get out of the commercialized, centralized, sanitized, SEO-ridden bubble that is every other search engine, Mojeek let’s me find way more potentially obscure, unique, and satisfying results per query that likely wouldn’t rank favorably with the modern page quality criteria used by Google. Plus, compared to the same 5 websites you’ll see for every query on other engines because of that very criteria, Mojeek has way more diversity in sources.

        With all these corporations incentivized to further commercialize and consolidate the internet and with the rise of AI as a source of knowledge, Mojeek is one of the places I hang onto to explore a web of humans instead of a web of reputation and money.

        • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          Thanks a lot for sharing such a detailed rundown of what you find Mojeek to be useful for. I’ve shared this with the wider team.

          This being said, if you have things that you’d like to wing our way in terms of improvements, or feedback on individual results, our inbox is always open (aloe at mojeek dot com) and there’s a submit feedback button on results pages. Mojeek thrives and grows off of feedback, the good and the bad 🙏

    • Zoop@beehaw.org
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      7 months ago

      I saw this post earlier that mentions some other search options, along with plenty of other suggestions in the comments. Hopefully you can find something you like in there! I haven’t checked them all out myself yet.

  • ChallengeApathy@infosec.pub
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    7 months ago

    I don’t use Kagi. Frankly, I hadn’t heard of them before this, but I’m not sure what classifies this as unhinged narcissism. I don’t know if there’s more to see but what I saw was an email trying to address concerns with the product.

    No “apologist” stuff here, I’m just not sure why this would be classified as unhinged narcissism. Can someone explain? Genuinely would like to know.

    • Nia_The_Cat@beehaw.org
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      7 months ago

      The main reason is that the CEO continues to respond after 2 requests to stop the conversation, it would’ve been more appropriate after the request to just simply make a blog post or something addressing the points made on the blog post itself without naming the author, that way they’re talking to their community about community concerns.

      Repeated responses via direct message after being asked to stop 2+ times is harassment. The initial reach out itself was perfectly fine and expected, but respecting when someone doesn’t want to engage in the conversation directly, and reaching out to the community in its entirety about the concerns is what should’ve been done by the CEO here for this to have ended in a better way for everyone.

    • self@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      oh hey, you’re also an apologist for the bigot Brendan Eich so thanks for making it easy to determine that this stupid bullshit is a pattern for you