I considered investing a small amount in them when they were raising a round from customers since I loved the search product so much. I too can't imagine going back to anything else, especially now that I have prioritized and blocked domains set up perfectly and added lenses, and this stuff works across desktop and mobile!

I've been mildly regretting not investing up until 5 minute ago when I read about spending 1/3 of that on the t-shirt factory.

The claim that's made in this blog - that Kagi 'owns a t-shirt factory' seems disingenuous, or lazy at best. Kagi's own blog says that instead of going with a major branded merch manufacturer/distributor, they chose to work with a small print shop instead. Nothing about blowing funds on an actual factory/print shop. "Owning a merch operation end to end" just means they're not paying some manufacturer to do production, warehousing, order fulfillment/drop shipping, etc.

I do not understand this distinction. Either they "own" the merch operation "end to end", or they don't. You can't have it both ways.

You can contract facilities or output percentage. You don't have to only "own it end to end" or not.

If you contract facilities then you don't "own" the merch operation "end to end".

Kagi's post says further down that they

> allocate[d] nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts

Though it sounds like they don't actually own "a t-shirt factory", but rather a t-shirt distributor.

Investing in better search is absolutely vital, and AI may be the right tool there, but I don't care about the AI. I pay Kagi to be a better search and informational retrieval tool, not to do AI.

It's not like they've gone all-in on AI though. Going through their changelog https://kagi.com/changelog it looks like they regularly make improvements to their core product and there've been a lot of significant QoL improvements in recent months. Just the Wolfram change alone has cut my need for Google significantly.

The one thing I really hope they put more work into is searching for local news. That's one of the areas where I still have to turn to Google.

Totally agree on all points. I don't believe I have the technical capability for it but both the fear of losing great search and the lack of direction has made me think about what it would take to replicate the search experience.

> Everything else, including the insanity of the t-shirts thing, is a complete waste of time and money.

Presumably the tshirts are a marketing cost that they hope will lead to greater brand exposure and more subscribers.

They should've spent it on a marketing agency, because I don't know how a shirt which doesn't even have the name Kagi on it is supposed to give them brand exposure.

Or advertise on a billboard along Hwy 101 as you enter San Francisco.

I was giving them the benefit of the doubt up until this. Wtf? I’d be happy to wear a brand t-shirt “Kagi” and that’s it.

What an own goal. I’m sure it made sense to them but I’m worried they don’t truly understand their customer base.

A shirt that looks less like an ad is one I’d actually wear.

I agree with a lot of your sentiments, but we’re just in peak ai I think.

I can't speak to the t-shirts. I was on duckduckgo before Kagi and also can't imagine returning there. I don't know what they're doing there but it's not improving. And yeah I am so with you on 2).

It seems like (again, t-shirts aside) Kagi is throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I hope they're having fun because I sure am.

I agree, but not necessarily that AI will make results better. Search engines already rely heavily on heuristics, and I really doubt that LLMs or vector databases are going to improve results in any combination. At best, they will overfit results to the lowest common denominator.

What I want is a search engine that supports full-text queries with exact matches. This quite literally no longer exists anywhere, and maybe that's because it just doesn't scale. Nevertheless, I would find a lot more value in a search engine that returns exact matches. Someone will probably reply saying that Kagi, DDG, or The Google do exact matches with quotes, but this is not true. When it works, you've just gotten lucky. At best, it will filter out inexact matches, but that doesn't mean it will actually return every exact match in the index.

Agreed, I want that + the page ranking that Kagi has, and literally don't care about any other features.

Yeah, the page ranking is great. Same with lenses. Though I wish they would improve the lenses. They're pretty basic.

I agree pretty much verbatim. I don't see how anyone could criticize them for getting into the AI game as well or at least using a 3rd party AI software for some results. That would just be silly these days. I like Orion browser but to be honest firefox does what I need.