Kagi raises $670k
I tested out Yagi's search results real quick and they are truly excellent. I was actually remarking to my girlfriend yesterday that I wish search engines would surface personal special interest blog posts and stuff like that when I search for things, because personal blogs usually have significantly better content then articles from major websites, and certainly better than the clearly AI generated SEO shit most of the search results on major search engines are clogged with, and sure enough, the example search results on Yagi's homepage are exactly what I wish search results were! Many of the top results in the python exceptions example search were personal blog articles from software engineers talking about the actual theory and practice of using exceptions in Python, and the rest were just links directly to relevant parts of Python's actual documentation or stack overflow. It was amazing, incredibly refreshing. It makes me really want to subscribe to them honestly. It seems like Yagi would give me access to the internet I wish I could spend all my time in, the one I thought was gone but maybe was just lurking under the surface this whole time, the internet where it's just a bunch of people writing about subjects they care about, stuff that makes them excited or whatever, just for their own enjoyment and the enrichment of others.<p>The problem is, I <i>really</i> don't want to be searching using an account that's linked to my credit card and thus my legal identity. That's a massive possible breach in privacy. And yeah, they say they don't log searches or link them to any account, but the thing is, even if I believe they don't right now, the fact that accounts are set up this way means that they very easily <i>could</i> start logging your searches to your legal identity in the future. It's like giving someone your social security number because they promise not to do anything nefarious with it. Maybe you trust them right now, but it's still a bad idea because of the opening it creates. Maybe they end up doing it to comply with some government regulation. Or maybe because it makes it easier to count searches. Or maybe because they start running ads.<p>Why would they start running ads? Well, because under capitalism, where everything is supposed to grow in profits and size every year so that the shareholders can get their money, just having a source of income outside of ads isn't enough to guarantee a company won't decide to <i>also</i> run ads, as a source of extra income. Why would any capitalist company every turn down an opportunity to make more profit, just because it already has another profit source? Obviously the constant need for growth creates an incentive to vacuum up every possible way to make profit, not an incentive to be satisfied with a stable, reliable source of income that's enough to keep the lights on and everyone employed. That isn't how capitalism works.