[input_sh]

> Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi

...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.

For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.

[freehorse]

> on a forum run by its investors

They are not VC funded afaik, and esp not YC funded.

> 250x the number of users

If you offer the service for free and serve ads in "privacy respecting way" sure you get more users. But anyway this is a mozilla's states goal too, so it would fit.

[input_sh]

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/

Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their (undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it makes no sense to do so like here?

[freehorse]

> How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it

Probably a bunch are users here, but

1. the amount of money (~2.5m) gathered in a 2-year period from 93 people seem peanuts in VC terms, if we are talking about YC itself rather than random users

2. their whole approach and strategy seems to aim towards a sustainable, long term development rather than quick profit (so far)

3. there does not seem to be any obvious link between them and YC itself in general

4. even if some of the 93 people are "pushing it" here, quite a few other users do the same without being investors (I have done/do it), and the former would probably do it without being investors anyway. There are bigger problems than some random people who invested in some company write once in a while supporting comments in some forum online.

I guess "forum run by its investors" can be interpreted as either the users of the forum are investors or the admins/owners are, so I tried to address both.

I think it is more like that users here are more prone to like kagi and want to pay for search (they spend more time online on a computer, they have jobs where web search is important to them etc), so you have people saying how great kagi is, but their experience does not necessarily extend to the general population as much because most people do not care as much about these things to think they are worth paying. Rather than most of them being actually kagi investors and trying to get people subscribe to kagi for their investment to grow. People can also just be satisfied with a product/service and talk about it.