Considering the responses you've been copying and pasting all day with minor variations whilst ignoring legitimate and relevant feedback from the people you claim to have made this "service" for, I highly recommend you reconsider this stance.
Do what's best for your business and, for the love of Zeus, let someone else handle PR.
I'd like to apologize for how I've been speaking to you. When I saw your product, I was filled with hope- more competition for the behemoth to deal with is always a good thing, especially if it's privacy-focused and at the very least non-adversarial towards users! Then when I gave it a try and saw that typing a query into the search box didn't lead me to results, merely to a page telling me to download an extension to make this my default search engine right away before even being allowed to try the service... well, I went to the comments to see if my experience was the norm- turns out, not only was my experience the norm, but the founder and ceo of the company was in the comments! Great! Being able to engage with founders and get a deeper understanding of what they're doing and what their struggles/goals/pain points/plans are is one of the things I love most about HN! I can engage with him and see what's going on! Then I see the CEO is replying defensively with things that made no sense, things that tried to make the commenter feel like they were being unreasonable for expecting to try something before jumping through hoops (and by "jumping through hoops", I'm not referring to how difficult/easy installing / uninstalling addons / changing defaults is, I'm referring to deliberate barriers being raised by dark patterns for reasons that do not benefit the user in any way!)... That's what really got my goat. It wasn't the technical inaccuracies in some of the replies, it wasn't the side-stepping while building strawmen when faced with legitimate concerns, it was this particular attitude more than anything that made me angry. It made me think if this is the way the company treats its users, how can they be trusted?
However.
I'm sorry I lashed out- sincerely, I am. I do hope you have great success and I honestly hope that You (and you!) become the next Google but without doing the whole "evil monopoly" thing they did. I wish you the best of luck.
Also, I'm sorry this apology isn't a great apology- pride is a bad habit that I'm still trying to work on.
Considering the responses you've been copying and pasting all day with minor variations whilst ignoring legitimate and relevant feedback from the people you claim to have made this "service" for, I highly recommend you reconsider this stance.
Do what's best for your business and, for the love of Zeus, let someone else handle PR.
Yap, I listen. The Chrome extension requirement is gone and we are fully open in all browsers now. Thanks for your feedback.
I'd like to apologize for how I've been speaking to you. When I saw your product, I was filled with hope- more competition for the behemoth to deal with is always a good thing, especially if it's privacy-focused and at the very least non-adversarial towards users! Then when I gave it a try and saw that typing a query into the search box didn't lead me to results, merely to a page telling me to download an extension to make this my default search engine right away before even being allowed to try the service... well, I went to the comments to see if my experience was the norm- turns out, not only was my experience the norm, but the founder and ceo of the company was in the comments! Great! Being able to engage with founders and get a deeper understanding of what they're doing and what their struggles/goals/pain points/plans are is one of the things I love most about HN! I can engage with him and see what's going on! Then I see the CEO is replying defensively with things that made no sense, things that tried to make the commenter feel like they were being unreasonable for expecting to try something before jumping through hoops (and by "jumping through hoops", I'm not referring to how difficult/easy installing / uninstalling addons / changing defaults is, I'm referring to deliberate barriers being raised by dark patterns for reasons that do not benefit the user in any way!)... That's what really got my goat. It wasn't the technical inaccuracies in some of the replies, it wasn't the side-stepping while building strawmen when faced with legitimate concerns, it was this particular attitude more than anything that made me angry. It made me think if this is the way the company treats its users, how can they be trusted?
However.
I'm sorry I lashed out- sincerely, I am. I do hope you have great success and I honestly hope that You (and you!) become the next Google but without doing the whole "evil monopoly" thing they did. I wish you the best of luck.
Also, I'm sorry this apology isn't a great apology- pride is a bad habit that I'm still trying to work on.