Much like the current hullabaloo about the head of ProtonMail being suspect because of his support of Trump, there's a ton of shady shit about Kagi, too. They're Venture Capital funded. What's the deal with the T-shirt company? Why did they lie stupidly about stuff like "we don't do paid advertising... oh wait whoops now we do."

Further, the CEO of Kagi just has that techbro attitude of "You are required to listen to what I have to say."

https://mastodon.social/@lori@hackers.town/112258758788834454

Discussions with Vlad are him telling you his side and expecting you to accept it as the truth and not keep arguing. His goal isn't to discuss, it's to keep talking at you until you agree or go away. HE thinks he discusses with people, but he talks AT people. So I don't feel bad making a blog post and forcing him to be talked at for once (which I never even expected him or that many other people to see it, I'm trying to figure out how many hits I even got rn to see how bad he Streissand'd this).

But yeah I knew that already, and that's why I didn't engage with him. I know what a Vlad conversation is and I wasn't willing to be lectured by the CEO of a company I criticized on my tiny personal blog. Thats an insane proposition. And it's really not even irony--I suspected this is exactly what would happen. I knew that arguing with Vlad would only benefit his own ego, but I knew that bluntly repeating "I will not discuss this with you quit emailing me" will just prove what I already knew, that he does not care what people say (and probably barely reads what they say given that he linked me the same post I already read twice) and that he will do whatever he's driven to do no matter what. The only options were he quits emailing me (great!) or he digs himself in deeper and deeper (great???? idk but it proves a point)

Seriously, his behavior is unhinged.

Kagi includes search results from the big search engines, which would mean Google and Bing. So while they do some of their own crawling to improve the results, some of your money will still be going to Google and Microsoft. It's still a step in a better direction though. I don't know whether Kagi has any plans to become more independent in future.