Comment on There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business
Crotaro@beehaw.org 1 day agoLike most search now Kagi has chosen to include Instant Answers that are AI generated, which means they’re often wrong
You briefly mentioned in your user-experience-list that the AI answers are only there when you want them to be, but I just want to emphasise it, since to me it makes a world of difference in comparison with other Search Engines like Google. You only receive an AI answer if you press a specific “Gimme AI answer”-button (which is very unobtrusive) or add a question mark at the end of your search query!
I rarely jump to the defense of some company, but I only know of this one lori-person who tried to lay out reasons why Kagi is bad and, as you showed very well, @AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social, most of their reasoning/arguments aren’t really all that good when you look at them in more detail. And when they just plain refused to take an interview with the lead of Kagi, by burying their head in the sand and going “I don’t care if you want to clear up misunderstandings, I don’t want to talk to you!”, it kind of sealed this person as not being a trustworthy source of criticism and more of “I’m mad that a new company is doing something different than other companies in the same sector”
I’ve been using Kagi for about 3/4 of a year now and I will certainly renew my annual payment to them. Of course it’s not a magic bullet without any flaws at all, but currently it does the things it offers much better than any competitor I could find and all they want is around 10€ per month. They won’t spam you with advertisement nor will they suck up your (arguably infinitely more valuable) private info to sell to the highest bidder. For now, Kagi has been doing and still is doing more good than most other tech companies.
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 21 hours ago
They also literally just released SlopStop as a community-based filtering mechanism that’ll downrank AI slop, with the CEO saying "We believe AI slop is an existential threat to an internet that should belong to humans. This is the first step towards our ultimate goal: to kill AI slop so you never see it again."
Apparently they’ll be using this to train something that can identify AI slop better based on the database of user-reported sites, and they’ll be making the database open.
Their AI integration philosophy feels incredibly reasonable to me with how out of the way it is, how it properly cites its sources and shows how much of the answer each one influenced, and how the search results are often so good it doesn’t even feel like you need the AI model, and this just sweetens the deal.
I can understand having issues with Kagi, they’re a company, after all, but their stance and actions feel very good thus far.