143

I'm incredibly disappointed in Kagi's partnership with Brave search. Brave, as you know, is led by Brendan Eich. Mr. Eich is infamous for his unrepentant financial support of California's Prop 8, aka California's gay marriage ban. Mr. Eich's homophobia is so disgusting that he was forced to resign as the leader of Mozilla after a massive outcry from their employees and community members. Since then, Mr. Eich has only defended his homophobia, and has gone on to spread misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.

I refuse to financially support any organization that partners with an organization that tolerates such hate and ignorance. It's a shame, too. Kagi seemed like the right answer for the internet. But your success cannot come at the expense of continued attacks on the LGBTQ+ community and scientific literacy from people like Eich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CEO_and_resignation
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-eich-covid-19.html

As of right now, Kagi is yet another organization that puts money ahead of people, just like Google. If it's too late to back out of your Brave partnership, then please set a date when the partnership will end and refuse to renew it. Then, apologize to the LGBTQ+ community for partnering with an open and notorious homophobe.

  • chris_20017 and Vlad replied to this.

    • Vlad

    • Best Answerset by Vlad

    (edit: This post has been edited to clarify the situation and our position.)

    On Dec 26, Kagi started including search results from Brave search index, after we previously added Mojeek and Yandex earlier in the year. Brave has a public search api and we currently implemented it for about 10% of queries as a first test (same as any other API we use, there is no mutual development or anything of the sorts). This was announced in our Dec 28 public changelog. Approximately a week later on Jan 5 after several posts on social media about ‘Brave partnership’ the situation escalated.

    I understand that this has affected many of you in a negative way, creating a sense of betrayal that's against the very ethos of Kagi. I want to address this and be crystal-clear: any semblance of support for discrimination is completely against our principles. The rationale behind our choice was purely based on technological merits and business strategy, including the quality and cost-effectiveness of the service, as well as a critical need for redundancy and diversification in our data sources. The decision was treated the same as getting results from Google or Yandex (to which different groups of users in our userbase object to for various different reasons).

    Kagi is currently not in the position to be fully independent. Searching the web is incredibly hard and Microsoft spent 20 years and billions of dollars building Bing, and it is still, let's say, suboptimal. Definitely not at the level people would pay for it. It is very hard for a small startup with many orders of magnitude less resources to crawl/index/rank the entire web and for it to be so good that people would pay for.

    So we have to rely on technologies other companies have built, and then leverage them to push our mission with a completely new business model for search that aligns incentives. We are constantly thinking about ways that could make expanding our capabilities and growing our independence possible in light of new technology that is becoming available.

    One thing we are doing is building our own index for the part of the web that is people’s personal sites (which also advances our mission to humanize the web by surfacing them in our results), and this is what we are doing through Kagi Small Web initiative. https://kagi.com/smallweb

    Today Kagi uses the best technologies available, our own index to increase the quality of the results, innovative search experience and a business model that aligns incentives. We are doing the best with the cards we have been dealt and resources we have available, and are still the only company out there crazy enough to attempt to do this. Chances are stacked against us already to begin with and reducing reliance on any single search source is a big deal for us. This is part of the reason we included these search results - now we have 4 search indexes to work with and are much more resilient to any one killing the relationship on a whim. This also allows us to optimize cost as we can use different indexes for different queries, which is another important consideration for us as Kagi is not profitable yet.

    I do understand the concerns of our users and that to you it is about the degree of control where your subscription money is going to. On the other hand, if we stopped using all search providers that our users are asking us to, there would be none left, as there is no search provider out there that is liked by everyone. So we are currently between a hammer and an anvil here. And so while there are some negative implications, I believe that the benefits of the product and technology we are building greatly outweigh them.

    We want to clarify the relationship between Kagi and its users:

    Kagi exists to empower its users with all the information in the world, and one user's path of life in one hemisphere of the world may be very different from that of another Kagi user.

    Choosing to focus on our mission to provide the best search results in the world is the only practical position we can have. This is not because we are ignorant to issues impacting societies across the globe, but because it is impractical for us to deal with them all. We cannot solve all of the world’s problems, human rights issues, conflicts and wars, but we have instead devoted our passion and energy to solving one problem that we believe is within our grasp, and that is the problem of web search, which is what Kagi is known and loved for. We intend to do that to the best of our ability.

    We are still evaluating all the feedback we have gotten, and we'll need some time to consider options that are faithful to all our customers & the sustainability of the business. I extend an open invitation for a conversation if you wish to discuss this issue further or if you have suggestions on how we can do better and stay true to our shared values. Please reach out to me directly at vlad@kagi.com

    Before the partnership, I found the result quality to be excellent. Brave results will not be missed should Kagi terminate its Brave contract.

    ilikekagi As of right now, Kagi is yet another organization that puts money ahead of people, just like Google. If it's too late to back out of your Brave partnership, then please set a date when the partnership will end and refuse to renew it. Then, apologize to the LGBTQ+ community for partnering with an open and notorious homophobe.

    For me, it all seems a bit exaggerated regarding what Kagi is doing and what Kagi should do.

      To be clear, I'm not associated with Kagi at all...whatsoever. But, with regards to the word "partnership" are you referring to the _addition_ of the Brave search API as another source of results, or something else?

        ilikekagi Our goal is to provide best web results in the world. That means including as many sources of search results we can get (even if may not like them personally) and this increases our resilience and lowers dependence on any single one.

        We believe that Kagi users deserve to have the best search results in the world, from a wide range of diverse sources. This ensures that if you can not find something on Kagi, you can not find it anywhere else.

        We evaluated APIs only on the basis of merit in the context of providing superior search engine results. Considering company x founder personal political views was not a factor in this evaluation for this or any any provider we added (for betteor or worse) and merit of technology was the main factor. Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reasons we do not have innovation any more (edit: a lot of people quoted this sentence as offputting. That line was unfortunate and added in the heat of the debate. It had nothing to do with Brave and was a reflection of how I personally felt answering 100s of messages simultaneously.)

        We are primarly in the business of search and we'd like to stay focused on that.

          I find this ethical question very interesting. I question what is considered a valid threshold to morally object to a search API. Are Google and Microsoft exempt from the scrutiny that Brave is because their sheer size makes them a faceless and blameless object?

          I don’t think there’s any question the beliefs of Brendan Eich are objectionable but does that actually have any bearing on Kagi’s mission to humanize the web? Maybe it does.

          As a very happy Kagi user I am very curious to read the replies here.

          @ilikekagi perhaps you have more insight to share for what alternatives exist to help Kagi
          improve the search experience for their customers that don’t rely on products from companies led by reprehensible individuals. Something reasonable, constructive and actionable is always welcomed by the Kagi team in my experience.

          Heya,

          I completely sympathise with your concern. I want to clarify that Brave is a provider to Kagi, the same as Google or Microsoft and many other organisations that surely also have acted sometimes against the interest of their users, or wider communities. We respect the technical work they've done, and pay for their services accordingly. While you may not see today an improvement in your service, I'm sure you can understand that reducing our dependencies on any single provider is of critical importance to be able to stay truly independent, and will in the long run enable cost-savings that we have historically passed onto our users. Our social responsibility is to ensure as large a population as possible has access to up-to-date, well sourced information ranked according to their quality.

          This is why Kagi's mission is to provide the best search/browser/assistant.

          However, we don't live in a vacuum, and we have to understand that sometimes, we'll have dependencies on organisations that we do not agree with (eg. oil & gas companies, which we rely on transitively). We can't rebuild the world from scratch, alone. What we can do, and are doing, is ensure that there is a way to access the internet that's not gate-kept by companies that do not have your best interest in mind, so that you (and everybody else) has a chance to form better social and political opinions - and express them when they vote. Kagi's choice of providers won't impact California law, people's votes will.

          That said, I welcome the scrutiny from the community. Please continue to keep us honest, and force us to challenge our decisions and convictions. Even if we do end up disagreeing, we'll do it better informed and understanding of community issues we may not have had on our radar.

            There's nothing wrong with being against gay marriage. Obama ran for president and acted as president while opposed to gay marriage.

            It's political opinion and everybody has the right to theirs.

            I don't think this thread has anything at all to do with neither Kagi, Brave, nor internet search. Instead it is just about smearing and cancelling an individual as part of political activism.

              carl I don't think this thread has anything at all to do with neither Kagi, Brave, nor internet search.

              If you were trying to advocate for keeping politics out of the discussion, I think you failed miserably.

                  TisButMe
                  You have to draw the line somewhere though. Is it okay to use a search engine built by nazis for nazis as long as the results are good? Braves ceo was also ceo of Mozilla and his vocal anti gay views were enough of an issue for Mozilla to get rid of him. As someone who identifies as queer I want no part in supporting a company ran by a bigot but that's just me.

                    Holger Are you replying to the wrong post? I don't see what your reply has to do with my comment.

                      Please, @Vlad, remain focused on search and do not allow cancel culture to creep into Kagi.

                      Eich is the creator of Javascript, an early employee of Netscape, and a founder of Mozilla. When appointed to lead Firefox in 2014, he was poised to be a landmark leader, applying the clear thinking that was so sorely needed, as demonstrated by Firefox's subsequent collapse in users and demotion to being little more than a vessel for Google ads.

                      Instead, a small handful of employee activists in non-engineering roles waged a vicious campaign against Eich. His sin was to have privately donated $1,000 in 2008 to the opposition to the Californian referendum to legalize gay marriage. This was his right as an American and a Californian. His right to have a political opinion was protected by the first amendment. He did not publicly campaign, he merely made an entirely legal private donation.

                      Eich was not against gay relationships and civil partnerships. He has never expressed any homophobic sentiments. As a Catholic, in common with the world's 1.4 billion other catholics (and, indeed, 2 billions Muslims and countless other religious humans) he believed, in 2008, that the sacrament of marriage should remain between a man and a woman. This was a mainstream opinion at that time, shared by pretty much all democrats including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. All of them publicly opposed gay marriage.

                      Again, this was 2008. Pretty much everyone, including most prominent gays, opposed gay marriage. It was a ridiculously niche issue and considered a distraction from issues that actually mattered to gays.

                      The 2014 cancelation campaign, six years later, was never anything more than hypocrisy, a powerplay by low-level employees at Firefox. No one actually believed that Eich was a danger to gays. Their narcissism shot Firefox in the face and deeply damaged the Open Software movement.

                      Now, a full decade later, you have a similar creature slithering into your forums and, in their one and only post here, demanding Kagi impair its service to comply with his demands. You also have another brand new member chiming in to say that Eich's $1,000 donation makes him "a Nazi". This ignorance of history perfectly illustrates why this manufactured hysteria does not belong on this forum. This thread should be deleted so that we can focus on issues that are actually relevant to the service that Kagi provides.

                      Seriously, why not simply declare this forum a politics-free zone? There is absolutely nothing good that can come from entertaining this bullshit. The next thing will be that you cannot use an API provided by an Israeli company, or your image search results don't include enough "people of color" etc. Just make a decision now to focus this forum on your actual service and don't give any oxygen to this destructive form of mental illness.

                      As an actual Kagi user, I applaud your use of any available API, from any source, to improve the service you provide to me.

                      Please watch the language and refrain from using inflammatory remarks as I'd be forced to lock this discussion (it is already going way off the rails).

                      I do not see any attempts of cancel culture. I see our users using their legitimate right to express their concerns. We are here for them, and we will listen and discuss, becuse we run a customer-centric company and this is why this forum exists. We personally addressed every single of 2,500 posts on this forum and we will do the same here.

                      I would strongly suggest keeping things on topic - does inclusion of Brave results make the quality of overall Kagi search results worse or it does opposite? And when I say customer-centric this is what I mean, because providing the best search in the world is what people pay us to do.

                      Everything else, especially politics, is something I am afraid I wll not be engaging with in my professional capacity. This is the only principled position that I can see, as everything else would lead down the rabbit hole which would inevitably lead Kagi to undesired place in the future. We are and want to be strictly only in the business of search.

                      Therefore I see this as a uniquely worded bug report and I am trying to figure out is it valid or not in the context of search service that we provide.

                        does inclusion of Brave results make the quality of overall Kagi search results worse or it does opposite?

                        I think that's something that only the people working for Kagi can know, unless users are given tools to compare.

                          carl Well we included those results few days ago when it iwas announced. Users should be able to feel if their results improved or went worse.

                            Vlad Regarding result quality, Brave's search is optimized against Google search results. Ever since its Cliqz ancestry, documented on the Cliqz blog, it optimizes its ranking algorithm to match Google ranking as closely as possible. Brave's search discovery project uses clicks on Google's results in the Brave browser to discover new sites. In other words, it's not sufficiently different from Google to really diversify the search results.

                            Using Google, Bing, or Yandex results is practically necessary when making a general purpose English-language search engine palatable to most people. This isn't necessary, nor does it have a sufficiently high impact on quality when Google is already a source.