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The whole internet loves Kagi, a lovely paid search engine that can find things! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the CEO is an unhinged narcissist who will harangue you in email (hackers.town)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It isn't in this post, but it's in the post this one is about. Kagi started as an AI company, pivoted to the search engine, and it's still trying to put AI into everything.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

They didn't pivot.

The search engine was just a side Idea What Needs Doing the CEO had, that just happened to make the startup famous because of being somewhat less bad than the enshittified crap other search engines have become, then they lost interest (to be fair they seem to be about fifteen to twenty-something people, plus whoever they've got in Germany making free T-shirts, only half of them working full time, so there's only so much they can focus on) and went back to their main thing (which is apparently very bad but very fast AI).

At this point they're probably just keeping the paid search engine to try and pay back the taxes they owe due to having apparently forgotten taxes were a thing, though it was operating at a loss even before the tax thing (and before they wasted a third of their investment cash on free T-shirts), so they'll be having to raise their prices...