[tomoyoirl]

> What do they care how many employees Kagi has or how much they spend on t-shirts.

Spending a third of your round on t-shirt manufacturing equipment is possibly not the best sign of the focused leadership that will bring your company success in a difficult market.

[yreg]

True, but what do I as a customer care? It's not like I'm building some business on their APIs or anything.

If they go down, I will switch to another search engine… no need to do so preemptively from my PoV.

[mbStavola]

Because "going down" doesn't necessarily mean _shutting_ down-- it could be a sale as well. Considering the stated attitude towards privacy, that should worry you if privacy is your concern.

[JohnFen]

All search engines are problematic in terms of privacy.

[mbStavola]

One of the main selling points of Kagi is privacy. It's featured on the main landing page, they have a page dedicated to it, and it's mentioned in pretty much every sales pitch they will make. Kagi's audience is also comprised of people who have that value as paying for a search engine means divesting from adtech surveillance.

So, it does not matter that "all search engines are problematic in terms of privacy"-- this one is marketed to not be. That's why people have concerns about how serious they're taking that committment and why people would hold them to a higher standard. It's also why a sale to a company which does not respect privacy is potentially a major issue, especially if current customer data isn't being handled in the manner they had expected.

[JohnFen]

Sure, I get that. I'm one of the more privacy-sensitive people you're likely to meet.

The complaint is about the marketing for sure. But that's not so different from the other "privacy-oriented" engines I'm aware of.

I'm not saying Kagi is (or is not, I don't know) being a good actor here. I'm just saying that if you want to use a search engine at all, you're effectively having to choose the lesser of evils.

Kagi may not be a saint, but since there aren't better options, I'm willing to settle with a search engine that actually gives me useful search results and isn't totally egregious on privacy issues.

[laborcontract]

It you want to know when Evernote went downhill, it’s precisely the moment they started selling backpacks.

[HWR_14]

Every tech company I've ever seen has had free t-shirts to give out at some point. While I don't think it was a smart use of limited funds, it's certainly not a major pivot to physical products like Evernote.