"Should we not be buying VW, BMW, Siemens and Bayer technology and products today because they participated in holocaust and directly collaborated with Hitler?" -- CEO of Kagi when given feedback re: Brave partnership
"Should we not be buying VW, BMW, Siemens and Bayer technology and products today because they participated in holocaust and directly collaborated with Hitler?"
No actually, you shouldn't. Thanks for asking.
The new vw electric car wasn't on my list of potential cars to get because it was out of my price range. Now I found another reason not to get it. Totally forgot they produced for Nazi germany
their CEO also moderates the discussion on Kagi's Discord. he's been removing criticism by queer folks, while - the last time I've checked before I've left their group - keeping replies like "stop shoving LGBTQ down our throats".
https://nyan.lol/@zicklepop/111716138453426218
edit: also their response regarding a request to add a "don't do it" widget to suicide searches basically boils down to "but if we make a moral choice now, we'll have to do more moral choices in the future!", which is... suboptimal. https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probably-have-a-dont-do-that-widget-like-google/
These people are obsessed with things being shoved down throats
Wow, this topic in the edit is bad, and I wasn't aware of it. Just canceled my subscription. Now I have until 14/01 to choose an alternative.
The best I can say is that it technically does the job, just slowly and not particularly well. There really isn't anything which even approaches the search quality and featureset of Kagi. I don't even have the strongest opinion on working with Brave even though they're clearly awful given how monstrous both Google and Microsoft are (who are both part of the core foundation of their search), but their approach to this whole situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I turned off auto-renewal of my subscription but I really hope they take a step back and realize how much goodwill they're destroying for a significant part of their userbase so I can resubscribe. There's no suitable replacement.
For me, it is doing a good job, and it's pretty fast. I think in the past was slower and with many issues, but it improved a lot. I never tried Kagi and I don't think it's rational to "login" and identify myself to be able to get results, even if it's working better, everyone should be able to get good results without needing to pay.
As a Kagi subscriber, I've been very happy with their transparency in general. The feedback site is open to the public and Vlad and other staff members regularly engage in conversation about possible future features, limitations, and even business decisions in the Discord. It's been refreshing.
...which makes the response to this issue all the more frustrating and disappointing.
I think Vlad's comments in the original feedback thread were fair enough, but then later, in the Discord, I saw a lot of "let's move this to a private chat". They even changed their General channel to "slow mode" to prevent live conversations as this topic became hot. Now I see they were also deleting threads?! Ugh. That's not transparent at all. Not what I expected based on my previous experience with Kagi.
Well, I was giving him a few days to backpedal but it seems like he's not going to do that. There goes my subscription, back to ddg I guess. Since they are supposed to be 100% subscription funded (they still are, right?), this is one of the few companies where that hopefully might actually have a noticeable effect if enough people care about it.
edit: also their response regarding a request to add a “don’t do it” widget to suicide searches basically boils down to “but if we make a moral choice now, we’ll have to do more moral choices in the future!”, which is… suboptimal. https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probably-have-a-dont-do-that-widget-like-google/
Meh, good for them tbh. I find these messages to be incredibly patronizing and somehow I doubt you can find a single person who will say "google posting the suicide number has made me reconsider killing myself"
Reading about the suicide thing: I might try kagi again this year. This is the exact type of software I want. It should only perform its intended function (returning relevant results to any query) and not try to influence me into following someone else's moralisations.
Is he saying that Brave ceo is comparable to Hitler... :)
Anyway, I'm staying with Kagi. People who search for perfect companies will search forever, and probably keep using Google while they do.
I am no fan of Brave, but is there a way we can configure our Kagi preferences to exclude results from Brave Search? I think SearXNG allows for that. Under SearXNG preferences, there's an Engines tab, and under that, I can configure which search engines to enable and return results for my search. I haven't found anything like that on Kagi yet, but if anyone knows of a way to do it, please share.
There will be according to the Discord but they haven't changed their attitude.
They responded with some stuff (allowing users to opt out of Brave results/paying Brave) but it wasn't enough and their attitude hasn't changed. I want to leave but... nothing is as good enough. Keyboard navigable UI, better results, and easy custom bangs as well as the whole DDG bang library are amazing.
