Podcast Notes: Vlad Prelovac on “The Talk Show”

Vlad Prelovac is the CEO of Kagi: a search engine you have to pay for.

He’s on episode 416 of John Gruber’s The Talk Show to discuss why he thinks we should be paying for search.

Hearing his point of view is compelling. I quite enjoyed the entire podcast. So much, in fact, that I took notes.

If any of the bullet points below catch your attention, you should go listen too.

• We as a society haven’t been respectful of how the information we consume influences us.
  • They talk at length about the parallel between how much we’ve learned about how important it is to be mindful of what food you put into your body. In the 70’s nobody cared as much. Maybe people will look back at us and say, “Can you believe the information they used to put into their minds? Lol!”
• The whole point of advertising is to influence your behavior — and we’ve wedged advertising between us and information.
• People ask, “Why would you pay for search?” The right question is, “Why would you tolerate advertising in your search for information?” Can you imagine, for example, going to a library and having to watch an ad to find the call number for a book?
• Google’s customer is not the user, it is the advertiser. And if the customer wants something, you give it to them. Why? Because you’re a public company, and public companies are optimized to generate a profit. And who gives you profit? Your customer!
• If you put all of the smartest designers, engineers, product people, etc. in a room and asked them to design the best search experience for users, if you recommended what Google looks like today they would kick you out of the room.
• Kagi downranks websites with lots of ads/trackers/etc. Why? They’ve found quantity of ad technology correlates to lower quality content (spam, affiliate crap, etc.)
  • In other words, the more ads and trackers there are, the more you can assume the purpose of that site is not to educate you (the user) but to monetize clicks to low quality, high quantity content.
• Vlad Prelovac on AI: “I want AI to be a hammer in my hand, not a replacement for my mind.”
• Why did Kagi make the Orion browser? It’s about creating an ecosystem of tools that are aligned from a philosophical perspective. At the end of the day, Safari is still an ad-driven browser (although indirectly) because it is monetized by Google’s default search engine deal (and other “traffic acquisition” deals, which is why you can’t change your default search engine to anything in Safari).
  • Even Safari and Firefox are not aligned philosophically with the idea of advertising-free information search.
• Orion is built on Webkit, but differs from Safari because it ships with Webkit whereas Safari only supports whatever version ships with macOS. Therefore Orion can, for example, support the latest features and security patches of Webkit on older versions of macOS like Mojave.