I want to start by inviting everyone who are looking into this post to check the git commit linked before reading and after that read their current page, it will make more sense.

I think most people don’t understand the fact that Kagi is meta-search engine which literally collect the results of other search engines and display it and add very small amount of results from their index(tecilis).

They are starting to act shady this year(check the attached git commit to see their changes to their documentation page).

People basically pay them to search Yandex and Brave for them.

Before anyone say but privacy, they are closed source and there is a better open source meta search engines which actually respect your privacy and need your donations more than Kagi shareholders.

Open source alternative:

  • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    even being that expensive, they’re not breaking even

    huh, I guess starting their own T-shirt business wasn’t that great of a move after all

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      It wasn’t even a business, it was just a huge purchase of tshirts for marketing, apparently, right at the beginning of their startup. Like, I have no idea why you would think distributing t-shirts would build your search engine’s business, let alone doing it when you’re trying to get your technology sorted out and running.

      “Hey, neat shirt, what’s Kagi?”

      “Why, it’s a search engine you pay for that searches other search engines and aggregates the results for you!”

      “For realz, where has this been all my life?!? Sign me up, my brother!”

      • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

        The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database. So, we basically ended up owning a merch production operation end-to-end, just so that we could ensure premium quality of these t-shirts!

        like… why