Turns out Kagi does do advertising
They promote their search engine but their users don't get to see ads. I don't know what's wrong about that. Every company advertises with its products. I don't see what's reprehensible about that.

We did not say we maintain anonmity, but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.
They're right, anonymity and privacy are two different things. Since you have to pay to use Kagi, you're not anonymous. But they allegedly don't know what you as the user search for when using their search engine. So they're being honest here and how can honesty be bad here? Anyways, we're on [email protected], not [email protected] or whatever.

“AI is mentioned zero times”
While I still give you this one, they're technically correct. The word "AI" isn't there but they mention AI features, haha. It's a bit debatable since Vlad said "kagi.com" - which doesn't mention AI. Only when you go to the pricing page there are mentions of AI tools.

Blog post or article - whatever. The effect is the same: It's on the internet, people read it and get influenced. Just because I picked the wrong word doesn't kill my point. I'm sure you get what I said.

Just try it. You can always cancel your subscription if you don't like it (or just pay once without subscribing). I've been using it for half a year now and absolutely love it.

I get that but it's a dick move by the author of that article to publicly speak bad about a product and then don't even wanna listen to what that person who made that product has to say to defend it. Especially if there's some false information that get's spread by that article. I'm not saying anything written in that article is true or false - just explaining the situation from Vlad's view.

They allegedly don't know their user's search queries. That's how it's allegedly private.

To me it's understandable. Imagine you start a project like this that grows over the years and you even have some employees after a while. Now someone writes an article about your project with accusations that are wrong (at least in your mind). Wouldn't you be pissed either? At least I can't imagine anyone who could just ignore that.

They know the names of their customers but they don't know their search queries. There's the privacy. At least that's what they said. Since Kagi isn't Open Source it always comes down to trust.

Not even gonna name the source where you got that from? :P

Either they're okay with a switch and it's easy or they are not open for that and it's impossible to change their mind.

Pretty much nobody I know wants to switch to Signal or any other messaging app. So it's SMS communication with them because I definitely won't install WhatsApp.