thanks, it's clearly a red flag , you saved me some time: one less tool to chec k on later!

Thanks, that's an interesting read.
I know that's one person's opinion and not a thorough research, but that's still plenty of red flags.

I've used the 100 searches in the free trial, thought the search was fine, better than Google's these days. The subscription is a bit steep so I held off, kinda glad I did after digging more into this.

Having what little employees they have also make a mac-only browser, AI stuff and email that their user base doesn't seem to want is all a bit weird.
Buying a t-shirt factory (wtf) with the money they could have used to potentially lower the subscription, but decided to burn through it to give out free t-shirts. That just screams narcissism-driven to me.

Their vague statements on privacy isn't convincing at all.
Some variation of "we don't care about your data" isn't in any way compelling evidence that you care about protecting the privacy of said collected data.

In my opinion they lack focus, commitment and conviction into what I thought was their primary mission at first glance: being a privacy-focused no nonsense search engine.
Although that's probably on me for reading what I wanted to see between the lines and that never was their stated mission, which would explain a lot.

it is better than the competition but it will never be like Google before 2019 because they'll never build their own index.

people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than 100 in the entire world. definitely not typical Kagi users

unless they are criminals, in which case we don't care that they don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)

If this is where you're drawing the "believes only criminals want privacy" argument from, that's not exactly what the quote says. The wording sucks, but it's saying:

• Very few people need anonymity.
• Anonymity seekers aren't our target market.
• The criminal subset of anonymity seekers are even more "not our target market".

(This bit about criminals is completely unnecessary, though, and its inclusion makes me inclined to believe that Vlad looks down on people who want anonymity. I'm definitely not a fan of this guy.)