PAID SEARCH ENGINES ARE DEAD ON ARRIVAL
            We got to taste an alternate reality and it was bitter.

At 6:06 PM today (June 1st, 2022) I recieve an email from vlad@kagi.com,
announcing that Kagi and Orion are now public beta. With great excitement
I open the email and get reading.

There's a link to a detailed explanation of the announcement,
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-orion-public-beta, but I skip over it for now. The
email is very quick to mention at this moment users can now sign up for
10$/month to use Kagi for unlimited searches. Free tier users get 50 searches.
Immediately I feel disappointment. Kagi is no where near a 10$/month value in
its current state.

A survey was put out a couple months before this announcement, asking users
what they'd pay. I said 7$/month considering the current proficiency of the
service. To read they went with 10$/month with no justification or reveal of the
results just makes me feel completely ignored... I reached out to Vlad as well
(because he said feel free to in one of their emails) but they never replied.
I asked about offering existing users maybe a loyalty discount for the
initial support and feedback to the service, because it still wasn't great.

The rest of the email is just links to Kagi and Orion, and that you can also
subscribe to Orion+ for 5$/month. No thanks. The hasty pace of the writing
invokes feelings of urgency, but I'll dismiss it as I may be misinterpreting
things.

I decide to open the announcement link and I become further disillusioned.


                            THE VEIL OF "PROTECTION"

The announcement is clearly virtue signaling. The narrative is twisted... It
repeatedly uses the words privacy, decency (such a nice word to connect "with
the people"), and tracking. People are disliking Google the most today because
of the search results. Everything else is secondary. The Google privacy story is
far from new. It's so far, that tools have come and gone from existence that
remove the problem. Then there's the motif of "think of the children" that Vlad
uses...?! Like what the hell? Now switching from Google is about protecting the
children?

  "This is especially pernicious with young kids, who are using these
   services with no controls."

  "I (Vladimir Prelovac, Founder) started this company when I saw my
   children starting using the web and realized how unsafe and bad
   an experience it was for them. All the ads and distractions were
   not only detrimental to their experience but also were influencing
   their behavior and habits from a very young age."

These are right out of the announcement. So you're telling me to believe that
you spent the last four years of your life to build an alternative search engine
to protect the world's children? Yet you allow two-finger shortcuts to Google
via !g... Sure, I'll believe you just so there's no argument, but in my heart
I feel this is bullshit. Sorry. Unless there's more transparency it's hard to
believe any of it.

It's a flawed statement because even if you stop ads on a search service,
your search service is funneling everyone to other privacy invading, ad-riddled
services. I can't help but think what's being said is just made up feel-good
writing.

At the end of the day Vlad it's hard to overlook you're running just another
Californian tech start-up. If Kagi had been a non-profit my thoughts would be
different.

Oh, and Orion might as well be malware if it's not open source. Releasing a
closed source paid-for ad-blocker-integrated web browser is so backwards. And
Orion? Onion? I think it's a little close to another privacy browser we know?...

                                 THE FLIP SIDE

I have to thank you too at the same time. Kagi has taught me it's not search
that's broken over the years, but the web. I feel like I messed up hard on this
one, ignoring those few who've repeated this for the past YEARS. They're
competely right and we should acknowledge them more.

My 4 months with Kagi has taught me most useful information is siloed to a bunch
of popular locations, regardless of the search engine you'll use. When it's not
siloed usually the information you're looking for will appear immediately, 
because of its uniqueness. Now that I've realized this, I have little reason
to pay for Kagi, and instead just directly navigate to the big silos using
the address bar's autocomplete. Google will work equally as good, if not better,
than Kagi.

Google itself is a rich data silo, so utilizing its search on its own data
sources usually gives great results too; the prime example being anything from
Google Maps. Kagi creating its own maps is a fruitless endeavor.

That's it. Maybe I'm being harsh, maybe I'm not seeing something, but I did
use this service every single day for the past 4 months and found myself still
needing to !g often (but less often than DuckDuckGo). I think overall though my
thoughts are reasonable...