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I was one of the users that went and reported this issue on Discord. I love Kagi but I was a bit disappointed to see that their status page showed everything wa

I was one of the users that went and reported this issue on Discord. I love Kagi but I was a bit disappointed to see that their status page showed everything was up and running. I think that made me a bit uneasy and it shows their status pages are not given priority during incidents that are affecting real users. I hope in the future the status page is accurately updated. In the past, services I heavily rely on (e.g. Github), have updated their status pages immediately and this allows me to rest assured that people are aware of the issue and it's not an issue with my devices. When this happened with Kagi, I was looking up the nearest grocery stores open since we were getting snow later that day so it was almost like I got let down b/c I had to go to Google for this. I will continue using Kagi b/c 99.9% of the other time I've used it, it has been better than Google but I hope the authors of the post-mortem do mean it when they say they'll be moving their status page code to a different service/platform. And thanks again Zac for being transparent and writing this up. This is part of good engineering!

Terretta 3y ago
> In the past, services I heavily rely on (e.g. Github), have updated their status pages immediately Also in the past, other times GitHub has not updated its status page immediately.
Neikius 3y ago
Microsoft is notorious for their lax status page updates...
- wiml 3y ago
  Is there anyone who isn't?
lambdaba 3y ago
I'm only replying to the praise here - I too, although I haven't fully switched, had a very enticing moment with Kagi when it returned a result that couldn't even be found on Google at any page in the results. This really sold me on Kagi and I've been going back and forth with some queries, but I have to say that between LLMs, Perplexity, and Google often answering my queries right on the search page, I just don't have that many queries left for Kagi. If Kagi would somehow merge with Perplexity, now that would be something.
- spdif899 3y ago
  Kagi does offer AI features in their higher subscription tier, including summary, research assistance, and a couple others. Plus I think they have basically a frontend for GPT-4 that uses their search engine for browsing, and they just added vision support to it today. I don't subscribe to those features or any AI tool yet, just pointing out there could be a version of Kagi that is able to replace your Chatgpt sub and save you money
  - lambdaba 3y ago
    Is it as good as Perplexity though? I use ChatGPT for different purposes, I just thought that if Kagi would ally with Perplexity and benefit from its index (I'm not sure what Perplexity uses), it could get really good. I've only recently tried using Perplexity and I get more use out of it than I would with Kagi, it doesn't just do summarization, but I haven't seen what Kagi does with research assistance.
    - jci 3y ago
      It's been a while since I've used Perplexity, but I've been finding the Kagi Assistant super useful. I'm on the ultimate plan, so I get access to the `Expert` assistant. It's been pretty great. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
herpdyderp 3y ago
I envy your experiences with other services. I've never seen any service's status page show downtime when or even soon after I start experiencing it. Often they simply never show it at all.
NetOpWibby 3y ago
It's worth noting that the status page software they use doesn't auto-update automatically. > Please note that with all that cState can do, it cannot do automatic monitoring out of the box. https://github.com/cstate/cstate https://github.com/cstate/cstate
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  I guess a status page that doesn't auto-update is good for PR, but it's not very useful to show... you know... the status.
  - NetOpWibby 3y ago
    Yeah I thought that was weird. An auto-updating page is worth the constant pings to the infra IMHO.
phyzome 3y ago
As an engineer on call, I have been in this conversation so many times: "Hey, should we go red?" "I don't know, are we sure it's an outage, or just a metrics issue?" "How many users are affected again?" "I can check, but I'm trying to read stack traces right now." "Look, can we just report the issue?" "Not sure which services to list in the outage" ...and so on. Basically, putting anything up on the status page is a conversation, and the conversation consumes engineer time and attention, and that's more time before the incident is resolved. You have to balance communication and actually fixing the damn thing, and it's not always clear what the right balance is. If you have enough people, you can have a Technical Incident Manager handle the comms and you can throw additional engineers at the communications side of it, but that's not always possible. (Some systems are niche, underdocumented, underinstrumented, etc.) My personal preference? Throw up a big vague "we're investigating a possible problem" at the first sign of trouble, and then fill in details (or retract it) at leisure. But none of the companies I've worked at like that idea, so... [shrug]
- virtue3 3y ago
  I think your bit at the end is the most important. ANY communication is better than no communication "everything is fine, it must be you" is the worst feeling in these cases. Especially if your business is reliant on said service and you can't figure out why you are borked (eg the github ones).
  - taneq 3y ago
    Once an ISP support person insisted that I drive down to the shop and buy a phone handset so I could confirm presence of a dial tone on a line that my vdsl modem had line sync on before they’d tell me their upstream provider had an outage. I was… unimpressed.
  - throwaway167 3y ago
    Your point highlights thinking about what's being designed. everything is fine is different from nothing has been reported. A green is misleading, there should be no green as green is unknown, there should be nothing with a note that there's nothing, and that's not the same as a green light.

Terretta 3y ago

> In the past, services I heavily rely on (e.g. Github), have updated their status pages immediately Also in the past, other times GitHub has not updated its status page immediately.

Neikius 3y ago

Microsoft is notorious for their lax status page updates...

wiml 3y ago
Is there anyone who isn't?

lambdaba 3y ago

I'm only replying to the praise here - I too, although I haven't fully switched, had a very enticing moment with Kagi when it returned a result that couldn't even be found on Google at any page in the results. This really sold me on Kagi and I've been going back and forth with some queries, but I have to say that between LLMs, Perplexity, and Google often answering my queries right on the search page, I just don't have that many queries left for Kagi. If Kagi would somehow merge with Perplexity, now that would be something.

spdif899 3y ago
Kagi does offer AI features in their higher subscription tier, including summary, research assistance, and a couple others. Plus I think they have basically a frontend for GPT-4 that uses their search engine for browsing, and they just added vision support to it today. I don't subscribe to those features or any AI tool yet, just pointing out there could be a version of Kagi that is able to replace your Chatgpt sub and save you money
- lambdaba 3y ago
  Is it as good as Perplexity though? I use ChatGPT for different purposes, I just thought that if Kagi would ally with Perplexity and benefit from its index (I'm not sure what Perplexity uses), it could get really good. I've only recently tried using Perplexity and I get more use out of it than I would with Kagi, it doesn't just do summarization, but I haven't seen what Kagi does with research assistance.
  - jci 3y ago
    It's been a while since I've used Perplexity, but I've been finding the Kagi Assistant super useful. I'm on the ultimate plan, so I get access to the `Expert` assistant. It's been pretty great. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html

herpdyderp 3y ago

I envy your experiences with other services. I've never seen any service's status page show downtime when or even soon after I start experiencing it. Often they simply never show it at all.

NetOpWibby 3y ago

It's worth noting that the status page software they use doesn't auto-update automatically. > Please note that with all that cState can do, it cannot do automatic monitoring out of the box. https://github.com/cstate/cstate https://github.com/cstate/cstate

ParetoOptimal 3y ago
I guess a status page that doesn't auto-update is good for PR, but it's not very useful to show... you know... the status.
- NetOpWibby 3y ago
  Yeah I thought that was weird. An auto-updating page is worth the constant pings to the infra IMHO.

phyzome 3y ago

As an engineer on call, I have been in this conversation so many times: "Hey, should we go red?" "I don't know, are we sure it's an outage, or just a metrics issue?" "How many users are affected again?" "I can check, but I'm trying to read stack traces right now." "Look, can we just report the issue?" "Not sure which services to list in the outage" ...and so on. Basically, putting anything up on the status page is a conversation, and the conversation consumes engineer time and attention, and that's more time before the incident is resolved. You have to balance communication and actually fixing the damn thing, and it's not always clear what the right balance is. If you have enough people, you can have a Technical Incident Manager handle the comms and you can throw additional engineers at the communications side of it, but that's not always possible. (Some systems are niche, underdocumented, underinstrumented, etc.) My personal preference? Throw up a big vague "we're investigating a possible problem" at the first sign of trouble, and then fill in details (or retract it) at leisure. But none of the companies I've worked at like that idea, so... [shrug]

virtue3 3y ago
I think your bit at the end is the most important. ANY communication is better than no communication "everything is fine, it must be you" is the worst feeling in these cases. Especially if your business is reliant on said service and you can't figure out why you are borked (eg the github ones).
- taneq 3y ago
  Once an ISP support person insisted that I drive down to the shop and buy a phone handset so I could confirm presence of a dial tone on a line that my vdsl modem had line sync on before they’d tell me their upstream provider had an outage. I was… unimpressed.
- throwaway167 3y ago
  Your point highlights thinking about what's being designed. everything is fine is different from nothing has been reported. A green is misleading, there should be no green as green is unknown, there should be nothing with a note that there's nothing, and that's not the same as a green light.