200 sats \ 7 replies \ @franzap 11 Apr \ on: I'm Vlad, founder of Kagi Search and Orion Browser. AMA. AMA
Kagi user here, love what you're doing!
Your privacy model boils down to "trust me bro", though, and I do. But as you may know in these communities we value trust minimization. One could argue that free search engines are better as they don't have a token associated to every web search.
Do you have any concrete plans to improve this situation? Have you considered ecash tokens in a pay-per-query model?
Also, I'm having constant FastGPT failures ("Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again", all the time) but I found it painful to have to register with email on your feedback platform. Are you planning alternative log ins, like with nostr?
Our model is not "trust me bro". We are very transparent about our privacy practices.
There is also lack of incentives. Once you understand that any piece of information we collect is just a liability for us, you will understand why we want as little as possible. We just want your $10/mo, and we want to offer something much more valuable in return.
if you want anonymity with Kagi you can get it too, as we do not need a verified email address and you can pay the fee in Lightning.
One could argue that free search engines are better as they don't have a token associated to every web search.
There are no 'free' search engines. You either pay with your wallet, or with your data/attention. But web scale search is never free, and is actually very expensive to do.
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I understand the incentive structure, but how can I be certain that you're not taking the $10 AND selling my data?
There are no 'free' search engines
Yes they are, if you know how to use them (can definitely run them through proxies). But they're financed with the privacy of other people and I hate that model so I don't want to feed it.
LN payments are awesome, thanks for that.
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What I meant by no 'free' ones, is that there is always currency involved - either your money (eg Kagi) or your data/privacy/attention (eg. most legacy search engines).
understand the incentive structure, but how can I be certain that you're not taking the $10 AND selling my data?
Because the moment something like that leaked, our business would be dead. This is what alignment of incentives means.
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I hope I am not coming as dismissive. If you have a concrete issue you want to raise I suggest using https://kagifeedback.org to bring our attention to it, this is the main way our users raise various issues with us.
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Yes, I got the impression that you assume you have the privacy aspect all sorted out.
There's a huge difference between WON'T RUG and CAN'T RUG.
In an adversarial scenario, let's assume you do keep all searches linked to a token. If for whatever reason my token was associated to my identity then you could deanonymize me.
Please allow logging in with nostr or LNURL on kagifeedback! 🙏
Again - thanks for what you're doing and I hope this has been constructive feedback you can take from here.
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And allow logging in with nostr or LNURLauth on Kagi itself. @vladquant, you could use stacker news' integration of these for an idea of how it could be done.
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