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Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

A more intriguing fact is that Google's search result page will often run 2-2.5MB in size (!). And sub 500ms results are a thing of (distant) past. More often than comfortable, user will wait between 1.5s and 2 seconds for results to load. [1]

This has gotten out of the hand for a company with so much resources, that literally depends on page speed for revenue. It is incomprehensible that the size (which is probably the main reason for latency) can not be reduced.

At Kagi Search [2] (I'm founder) our home page (for logged in users, not the marketing landing page) is mere 68kb, everything works even without javascript, and 90th percentile result pages load in <1s with SERP page being on average 100-200kb total.

[1] https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.googl...

[2] https://kagi.com

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Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search page I'm not gonna use it.

Assuming that people don't clear their cookies is wrong nowadays. Even when your website is a little snowflake, the rest of the web isn't.

I honestly would recommend a Web Extension that adds your search as a search provider, or something like an Open Search Description.

Also: the landing page of GitHub annoys the shit out of me. Every damn time. I don't wanna register with three clicks if I already have an account.

Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups...otherwise those regular users won't be happy. Any company should focus on keeping the regular users happy (UX wise) and not focus on one time trial registrations that will be a burden on infrastructure.

I don't even mind logging in, but it does seem weird to force it before letting potential customers interact with the product. Why not just prompt for registration when personalization features are used?

What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher")

That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage.

In my opinion, the price for this kind of product should be more in the realm of $50/year. I'm thinking a price closer to what password managers charge.

This price also will need to be adjusted for global customers if that is the eventual intention. Spotify in India costs less than $1.50 a month.

The goal of Kagi is not to be a mass market product, but a premium search engine, offering best in class search product experience with top privacy guarantee (as the business model does not require fiddling with your data in bad ways). Search is arguably one of the most important activities we do every day both in personal and work setting. Unique Kagi features should be well worth the cost.

It is also an independent company, bootstrapped by the founder, without a ton of VC money to subsidize the cost. And at $10/mo per user it would be barely breaking even, if at all. So there are a lot of factors of play, and I completely understand why $10/mo may sound excessive given all the free alternatives out there. It is just one of the many uphill battles we are fighting ;)

I definitely understand where you're coming from. One can make the argument that a search engine is used with an incredible amount of frequency for most people – dozens of times per day. It should be worth a lot.

One thing that's great about search engines in terms of entrepreneurship fundamentals is that is is such a massive market. You only need a fraction of a percent to be a viable business, I'm sure.

I can also understand how underpricing a product can be a big mistake. Somebody who wants this kind of product has already made the conscious decision to pay. Pricing a product too low can be a signal that it's not a good product.

Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. People are mostly not willing to pay for it, even businesses don't want to anymore. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SaaS products with very low levels of complexity pulling in a lot more than $0.

If it's truly barely breaking even at $10/month, that fascinates me. It must mean that search engines have to do a lot of computing.

In any event, I wish you the best, because the features do look cool. I like the idea of being able to set site preferences (e.g., when I search for a movie I might like to see Wikipedia over IMDB).

> Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free.

Spot on. Not that long ago we used to pay for OS, even beta versions of OS. Nowadays, most complex software products imaginable, like OS, browser, search engine, social networking... - are all free, and over the years we as a society have been slowly drawn into an expectation of these to be free. Of course someone or something is paying for it, as all these also "magically" generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And when someone shows up with an idea to actually sell such product and tries to create a business where user is also the customer, and incentives between the user and the business are aligned, they are usually looked at with a raised eyebrow.

I am personally of the opinion that you always get what you pay for and that one should not shy away from paying and supporting products they love. I hope we are building one such product, that some people (and admittedly you need to be a little different to use and pay for Kagi) will fall in love with.

The more expensive it is the better it will have to be relative to free alternatives though.

Is it that you're doing a large amount of compute per search which yields better results but higher cost per search?

If it really starts to take off I think you should consider lowering the price. Initially I understand a higher price is required to be able to cover expenses. A price that is low enough to not matter would lure more customers into the fold (if the products deliver on its promise).

tbh what your saying doesn't make sense to me vis. breaking even, unless there is some signifcant manual element to your search indexing. If this isn't the case, the revenue received from new customers should far outpace the marginal cost of supporting new customers unless you have signifcant fixed costs for some reason. I am interested in your product and will sign up for the beta and if it is quality would even be willing to pay the price if it was flawless quality, but i'd suggest doing some analysis vis. how many users you would need to reduce the price closer to somehting like $5 a month, which is far more palatable to me.

Right now you're charging nearly as much as something like Netflix, so your product has to be nearly a Netflix' worth's more value than DuckDuckGo (rather than Google as it's closer to your value proposition) for me to rationally justify the price.

Have you considered adding business or enterprise subscriptions[0]? B2B users are a lot less price sensitive[1] than consumers especially when you're competing against a free product.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781133

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13843743

Not really in a serious way, partly because I do not have an idea where would I start. Any ideas?

> Not really in a serious way, partly because I do not have an idea where would I start. Any ideas?

On premise search. Businesses have lots of resources on their internal websites, but no easy way to search them in one place. Addition of role based search, when I'm logged and search only shows me resources I have access to.

It’s unfair to compare pricing between two totally different products, especially when one of them is owned by one of the biggest companies in the world with millions of paying customers and a vast suite of products.

> What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher")

$10 a month is less than one lost hour of work.

I hope they price it around there somewhere so that many will use it but even at $20 it is a no-brainer for me.

The results are in another league compared to what I get elsewhere and by now it also feels like an insult every time I realize Google has altered my query: do you guys really think I don't know what I am doing?

Google probably works better for illiterate people these days, but in the process they have alienated me. I have lost too many hours searching for things I knew used to be there only to be ignored and corrected by their AI. It is rather patronizing at this point.

For people who cannot afford the $10, I can unironically suggest bing. It actually responds to long queries much better than google.

You should still use the website's search function first. Github issues/SO search often turns up results that google will ignore.

> $10 a month is less than one lost hour of work.

This is a pretty feeble argument for something, especially for a product where the user perception is that it should be free, and there exist multiple free options already.

While "one hour of work" might not seem a lot, a different way of looking at that is that for most people there are 160 hours of work in a month, and so this thing needs to be worth 1/160th of their life.

It's not so hard to make that choice for a couple of things that are of obvious value, but when they start adding up in your life for basic things, people will question the value of it to them, and I'd argue for most people, search just isn't worth that much to them when there are so many good free options.

>That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage.

Offtopic: That must be one of the best deals on online storage Excluding Google's enterprise unlimited storage option which always felt like they could pull the rug under you any day.

> Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search page I'm not gonna use it.

Curious how would you handle authenticating for a paid product on the web today?

Not the person being asked, but unless it’s for work I just don’t use it. There’s more content online than I can ever consume and if it’s a tool I need for a side project I might as well build it myself since I work on side projects solely to keep my tech skills up

Edit: I do authenticate on several paid products, but I was always introduced to them in some hassle free manner, and only got to the point of paying and dealing with adding another app to deal with maintaining after I’ve grown to like the service

You’re authenticated here? What’s the difference?

Did it after years of lurking and finally feeling like it’s worth it. This was in response to the application in question requiring authentication from the get go.

Ultimately it’s laziness, but dealing with authentication is annoying and I can’t be assed to do it for something I’m not already valuing

Not just laziness but increased attack surface for compromised credentials. Just like physical things weigh us down (spring clean or donating old stuff is liberating) so too is having another login somewhere. I wish I knew all the sites I have logins too but I dont and its frustrating, risky and worrying.

That and data being sold, haveibeenpwned gives me a larger list as the years go on from all the “secure” services who werent.

I feel bad for people making new services now who have to deal with this, but the internet isn’t new and they have to overcome our experience with all the bad behavior of shysters who operated like these apps and ended up lying about the service

I have two periods in my life. Before password manager and after password manager.

After I made the password manager a part of my routine that I trust absolutely that I never skip, all of that anxiety went away. I still have logins from the before times that I wish I could round up, but for the last ten or so years I can guarantee I know every site that I’ve signed up for.

If I had to be logged in to view HN the very first time I arrived here, I wouldn’t have bothered.

(I'm not the person being asked.)

As of now, I log in only when needed, and usually to a single account at a time, at most two.

I am willing to try new models for web search if the provider does not log any information. I'll prefer it to be stateless (other than account settings and payments).

> the landing page of GitHub annoys the shit out of me. Every damn time. I don't wanna register with three clicks if I already have an account.

If you're not signed in, `Sign in` is available on literally every page in the upper right and one click takes you to the sign in box. If one click is too many just bookmark github.com/login.

If you don't want to sign in the search box is also in the upper right on every page to take you wherever you want to go.

It is expected that if you are logged in you stay logged in. Only a minority of users clear all their cookies at the end of every session. Sorry but that is true. Thus the landing page is optimised for the most common visitor, that is the one with no account yet, not the loudest complainer on a tech geek forum.

> just bookmark github.com/login

This will make me be detected as a bot and I see captchas everywhere afterwards. I was using that for a while.

A better alternative would be content identity through URLs.

If your marketing page is at github.com/index.html, then make something like github.com/dashboard.html for logged in users, and redirect them to /login.html when they are required to be logged in.

This way users can easily bookmark the page that they actually want to see.

Github already has my public ssh key so I can push/pull/clone without typing a password. Why the heck don't they support ssl client authentication so the same thing works when I use a browser? SSL client certs are an actual thing yet no web site I have ever seen uses them. Why?

I get the impression that startups get something like a 10x multiplier in kudos, stock options, chances for a next round, (pick your reward) etc for signing up a new user than for a repeat visitor logging in. The former means growth; the latter doesn't. Hence it's always easier to find the signup button than the login button.

Fucked up incentive structures like this are why we cannot have nice things.

Having users that want to return is objectively good. We've just taken this to the wrong conclusions.

I strongly suspect that this has to do with attribution and shallow "data driven" choices - there is a heavy bias towards things that are easier to measure. Especially in startups with limited resources.

Measuring retained users regardless of anonymous/known state is very hard and lossy. So the nearest easy to measure analog that is often picked is logged-in users and we start the fucked up cycle you mention.

Similar things happen around all metrics that have to do with retention. We know that a better experience through higher performance and better UX is likely to create happier users that return... but we cannot prove it (easily) so we focus on optimizing other things.

The minute something becomes a KPI it is no longer a useful KPI.

I've been in more product meetings that have uttered a phrase like "we will work out what to do with all these users later" than I care to count. It really is a startup goal to sign-up as many users as possible. In most cases it is literally a metric for the next funding round ("Last quarter we had 100k signups!" Is a very attractive soundbite at the round table)

That's how extreme shortsightedness looks like.

The number of users you lose by doing that is smaller than the number you gain as long as you don't have enough users (and spends enough on publicity). This is also the one thing that limits the number of users a company will ever have on most cases.

Whitelist github.com from Auto cookie clearing. Takes less time than a rant on SO. I had a guy at work ask me to store the entire state of an internal web site in the URL. He went so far to go and get his change request approved by management, resources and time allocated. When it was passed to me to implement and I dug into why he wanted this, turned out he was auto clearing his cookies. I told him to whitelist our internal website from his cookie clearing Paranoia and stop wasting my time and company money.

Wow, this guy must have some pull in the company for this to happen

Using google search without being logged in and clearing cookies regularly will constantly harass you with a very intrusive "cookie banner". Quotes because it's much more than that.

The sole purpose of these is to get you to globally log into google and stay logged in.

So I don't think it really makes much of a difference.

The sole result for me has been a pretty insistent reminder that I should not be using this service.

Agree. The routine of opting out of that every day is very important. It is a constant reminder that I absolutely need to further reduce the use of google services.

That's true in Europe but not in the US, I believe. It is indeed one of the more obnoxious cookie consent banners I've seen.

It‘s annoying as fuck but tbh I got used to it, it‘s second nature to me now.

"I don't care about cookies" + "Cookie Autodelete" add-ons solve that problem easily for me.

> Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups...

This. I suppose it's become so prevalent due to A/B tests finding it more efficient to optimize for new users, but at some point in a company's growth it would make sense to put the focus on user retention. Then again, it wouldn't be that hard to make both signing up and logging in easy and attractive.

> Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups...otherwise those regular users won't be happy.

This is one of the first "asshole design" moves that I recognize, that unfortunately most sites use. If the "Sign up" button (which will be used once by each user) is highlighted more than the "Sign in" button (which will be used hundreds of times), I know that your company doesn't really care about its users.

I'm surprised how common it is.

I've tried Kagi the last two or three weeks and the page speed is a nice bonus but the real advantage it has over DDG and Google is that it does find the pages I look for, rank them reasonably well and doesn't mix in pages that doesn't contain my search terms.

It is just like being back in 2007 or something when Google worked this way and it is wonderful.

I've used DDG for the past few years and I still hope they too will succeed, but with DDG the quality is the same or (slightly) lower than Google and the bang operator comes in handy many times a week.

With Kagi I only think I have used the bang operator once (yes, they have it). It is that good: when I look at the results I know immediately that there is no way Google or DDG can do it better except by pure luck and also my results are already there on first or second try so why bother shopping around?

Bonuses:

- bangs work like in DDG (I think, I don't use them anymore)

- doublequotes actually work unlike in Google and DDG

- even without doublequotes it doesn't stray very far from my query

- I can add lenses (?) or something (I have not bothered yet, the defaults are good enough)

Yep, I'm a walking billboard now, but I'm not paid in anyway and don't know any of the people behind kagi, it just happens to be the biggest improvement I have seen since Google replaced everything else sometime around twenty years ago.

Edit: yes, it is a paid product but it is free during beta and so good that I would consider Kagi gift cards for friends in tech if it was paid, just like I'd consider gifting WhatsApp subscriptions before Facebook bought and subverted it (yes, I was considering worse words).

Edit 2: I'll do this for your product too if I love it. I did for WhatsApp and Google+ and in real life for the insurance company I have used the last few years.

> - doublequotes actually work unlike in Google and DDG

This drives me nuts. If you're going to have a competitor to Google (ddg) at least give me proper functionality to refine my searches

Yep! How this passes QA is and why everyone else who knew old Google isn't crying out loudly is beyond my understanding.

I'm having great results with Kagi as well. I actually forgot I signed up for beta a few weeks back until I saw this post; and started testing it out this morning. Thus far, I'm quite impressed - similar sentiments to what you have outlined.

This testimonial is the best Christmas gift the team could have hoped for. Thank you very much!

Good to hear!

Lets be clear that this goes both ways, Kagi is a really nice Christmas present: so far this is the biggest software improvement I've seen in a number of years: on the same scale as when generics was introduced to Java (and this was a big deal for me) or in fact even on the same scale as when I was introduced to Google. I'll have to keep using it for a few months to see exactly how big it is but feels like a really bif deal so far :-)

Wishing you a merry Christmas whenever you celebrate it (we are celebrating tonight).

Don’t you think they have run tests that trade off search speed for additional features and determined the features increase engagement / revenue?

There is a lot more going on than 10 blue links these days, including continual scroll on mobile. Perf versus features is always a matter of trade offs.

I suppose you are right. I can only guess that RPU is the primary KPI and somehow more scripts allow for more revenue extraction even if the performance is lower.

Or maybe just give it away to ppl and see if they like using it to find stuff?

Where did the love go....

I think you’re overthinking this.

You’re looking at cold start download sizes, but that’s not what people actual see after everything is cached follow the first load.

Google pages load plenty fast on every device I’ve used recently, including some very old android tablets. Most page loads don’t transfer much data at all due to caching. Combined with the high speeds of both browsers and devices today, there wouldn’t be much real change in a highly stripped down Google page relative to what they’re serving up today.

But it is not just a cold start problem. Check your network tab on a "warm" search.

Here is what I get:

https://imgur.com/a/Dl2B5Zo

2 seconds to load and 1.12MB transferred, all on "warm" start.

Using Chrome Dev Tools I'm seeing around 150-200KB actually transferred on each search page result (2MB resources, though most are cached).

I'm also seeing content loaded happen in under 1 second.

And the top half of the results is all ads! I don’t know how people stand Google.

Can't tell from your UI screenshot, but quite often loading a page with devtools open will disable the cache. I forget if this is the default behavior or not.

I am sure that is the case, but I am not sure it is good for the user: Google ads a lot of ads and behavior tracking that probably is for their benefit, not yours.

I think its more that they have a monopoly on search in the current zeitgeist. So no, I don't think they've done that, and if they did, there's no pressure for them to optimise for speed, so they'd optimize for something bloated that helps someone get a promotion. This is why, for example, everything Microsoft Office does is a bloated trash fire, and how Apple gets away with telling a whole generation of phone purchasers that they were holding it wrong.

Even with a monopoly, they make more money the more often it’s used.

> and how Apple gets away with telling a whole generation of phone purchasers that they were holding it wrong.

Okay. I'll bite. What does this mean?

I hold my iPhone 13 the exact same way I held a Nokia brick in 2003. What did Apple tell us?

iPhone 4 had a bad antennae design. Jobs blamed the users. It was hilarious.

:facepalm: of course!

11 years ago, if your finger bridged the two antennae together on an iPhone 4, you lost signal strength. Half a percent of iPhone users complained about it, Apple offered a free cover to anyone affected.

They were HIT WITH 18 LAWSUITS about it OMG.

They settled all the lawsuits by ... offering a free cover or $15 refund.[1]

Depending on your viewpoint this is either one of many blips along the way of manufacturing tens of billions of products over a dozen generations, or a way for "mactards [to] realize Steve Jobs are out to milk their clueless a$$es with his oh so clever marketing gimmicks" (Yahoo News comment).

Bonus points if you can find anywhere Apple said "you're holding it wrong" or blamed users. Steve Jobs wrote "Just avoid holding it (the iPhone] in that way." which is somewhat pragmatic, and rather what you'd expect someone to say if they weren't filtered by a PR firm. Probably what I would say. Apple haters can't face this.

Macworld.co.uk said:

> "We don't really think there was anything substantial to the problem, and the iPhone 4 sold tremendously well. Customers didn't seem to notice, let alone mind, and Apple repeatedly pointed out that other mobile phones suffered the same effect."

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/settlement-reached-in-iphone-4-ant...

[2] https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/antennagate-11-biggest-ap...

Jesus relax man your favourite trillion dollar company can survive someone remembering the shitty stuff they do. I'm sure they appreciate your help though.

If you're going to get hurt feelings and need to turn to swearing and ad-homs when your comments are put in context with citations, maybe don't post them?

Apple aren't my favourite trillion dollar company and just because they have money doesn't mean everything they do is bad; or that the fundamental attribution error applies differently (similar applies to other companies, groups, organisations)

No, they have money and they use it to be do bad with it, that's what makes them bad.

Gmail has a fucking loading screen now. Have I switched? Not yet, but the reason I switched to gmail in the first place was for the minimal, fast interface.

Gmail was the original heavy webmail interface. All its competitors at the time were basic html (and providing only 5mb of space). Heavy js to provide a smooth interface was what made gmail such a big deal other than high storage limits.

Gmail always had a loading screen.

> determined the features increase engagement / revenue?

This. Nothing else matters.

> Google's search result page will often run 2-2.5MB in size

While it is true, for almost all of the users most of it is cached. For me it is using 2.5 MB resources with 77kB transferred.

That's important of course, but the cached code will have to be refreshed when there's a change (could be done partially with code splitting), so how long the cached data lasts depends on how often the Search page is updated. For Google that probably isn't happening daily, but it could be very often. Hopefully Google have split out the hot code that changes a lot in to a small bundle so the rest can sit in the cache for a while.

That cached code (presumably) needs to be executed by your computer so it’s still wasteful, slower and somewhat mind boggling as to why that pages needs 2.5mb worth of html/css/js.

That's a lovely landing page and a nice domain you have there.

I really like the idea of a premium search engine too, I'll give it a go for sure.

I'm a little uncomfortable with having to be logged in though... Ideally if I'm going to pay for a search engine I would like to do that as anonymously as possible.

Best of luck with the project, I'd love to see some competition in search again. Google has been getting worse for years and they have no real incentive to improve given their dominance and lack of disruption in the space.

At least Google gets you a search page, rather than a sign-up prompt.

I can't try kagi before signing up.

I'm not sure that I want to sign up and give you data when your premise is to not mine the data. Is that your premise? How long do you retain knowledge of what had been searched?

The personalise features put me off. The level of personalisation I want is course location... I.e. online shops in my country, or if I search for something in Liverpool pick the right Liverpool in the world... Both of these are relative to where I am and an IP geo lookup is roughly good enough with an override in the worst case.

I'm not sure precisely what your differentiation is (again, can't find it without signing up)... But I want to be very sure before I sign up to anything that you treat user data as a radioactive resource. Thankfully given that GDPR exists and everything done on search is related to a user profile I'm assuming that you're petrified of storing and using data... But I don't know as the site didn't reassure on that front and I didn't see the privacy policy at the foot of the home page.

I want to like what you're doing so much... But you've designed it to have friction to that discovery.

> I'm not sure precisely what your differentiation is (again, can't find it without signing up)...

I'd echo this. I actually even went to the site to see what was so good about your search, then realised I can't even test with a single query without signing up, and lost interest.

> I can't try kagi before signing up.

Perhaps it is not obvious that Kagi has not launched yet. We are in closed beta, and email is used to invite people who want to be beta testers, nothing else. Once we officially launch, everyone will have the ability to try it.

>I'm not sure precisely what your differentiation is (again, can't find it without signing up).

The FAQ has a lot of information you may find useful https://kagi.com/faq

I was enjoying trying out kagi but it served me a page to the effect of "you exceeded your number of searches" and that immediately turned me off of the product. Will that limitation be lifted at some point?

My other feature request is that I still like google maps, and OSM is just not a good replacement. The important feature for me here is: google a place name, click the map square that shows up in the Answer for that place to open it in gmaps. Both kagi and brave search use OSM which is not clickable, this really breaks my UX and alone is enough to make me want to go back to google search. Using !m sometimes seems to work but I think ideal would be a "which maps provider would you like" feature which just lets a user choose.

Yep sorry for that. We introduced query limit to prevent abuse and control cost during (free) beta but initially set it very low for our target userbase (50 queries/day). We increased it since to 200/day after receiving similar feedback and of course once we launch there will be no limit.

Kagi Maps is still work in progress (beta like everything else) and we just didn't get to shipping this feature. We are not using OSM only though, and many users have complimented the map to be better than Google maps already (for features that we have shipped).

I looked at it, and I'm uncomfortable with the fact I have to be logged in, so you know all my search results, know my exact identity (through the credit card) and can analyze them and store forever (you can say you don't do that, but you cannot prove it). At least with Google I can delete cookies, disable fingerprinting and use a VPN, and hope they don't have my search history. Furthermore, you are in US jurisdiction, so the government can request access to your data and you can never tell anybody about that.

What about a version of that where I pay a few cents for each search, using Lightning Network, for example?

I'd give your project a shot but the signup funnel for your beta is a little funny -- you should let people choose to leave the textbox-based questions blank and still get an invite.

If you just made those parts drop-downs with the most popular answers and had an 'Other' option that makes a text-field option, you would probably get much more valuable data and more of it. I would not be surprised if you had some amount of dropoff in your beta signup funnel due to questions that make potential users feel like theyre being 'put on the spot'

Just did a search and it took 550ms. 1.5s and 2 seconds sounds like an exaggeration

I hope you won't be requiring logins in the future. Big deal breaker for me.

I don't care much page speed when I want to search some deep information. Sadly Google getting significantly worse for indexing.

Interesting business but I can't help but be a bit worried. You promise not to monetize usage data and such but as a paid search engine, you are in the perfect position to do so. Even more so than Google or DDG since neither of those have my name and other PII. You would have my payment information AND valuable insight into my interests.

Yes, and zero incentives to misuse that information, as the entire business literally depends on the trust between us and the user, and is entirely supported by user subscriptions. Incentives are perfectly aligned too - we have to constantly keep improving the product or you will jump to a (free) alternative.

I admit I might be more paranoid than the average person. This could work if we knew each other IRL or something like that but as it stands what you said is a nicely worded version of "Source: dude trust me."

Accepting crypto payments could be a solution but I'd totally get why'd you want to avoid that.

There is nothing else we can possibly tangibly offer, and you are right to have high standards. Note that also we never say a version of "dude trust me", but lay down the facts how the business operates, what the vision is and why are we doing it.

The best we can do really is have a business model that aligns incentives with the users and weirdly enough, this is already an innovation in this market. Then, create the best possible product that users will love. Gaining trust is a process that can not be skipped.

> that literally depends on page speed for revenue.

I don't think that's an accurate view of the business model of Google. For them consumers are mostly locked in and their business model is in tracking users and mining as much information as possible from every facet of the experience.

Unless you are using an ad blocker or have disabled it in the settings chrome precaches so for the majority of the people there probably is no 1.5-2 second load time. But I expect majority of the people browsing hacker news would have it disabled so would have the slower loadtime

Looks really nice. If I had any suggestions it would be to use a different search for each example, now Magic the gathering is used twice. I can imagine potential customers will love to see what the final product looks like before purchasing.

Best of luck, looks really ambitious!

> a company with so much resources

That is the problem: resources show up in abundance, not in scarcity. Only small or poor creators usually can do the latter.

Conways law at work, I guess.

I don't see how your paid service is any different from Google beyond interface and lack of ability to use it for free/no signup to compare.

Or I can use duckduckgo without needing to sign up and get your promised security with 1-2 second searches for free. Maybe you'll have enough takers to get off the ground but I'll rely on other tools.

Kagi looks interesting, can I have an invite?

I registered for the beta, I must say I have low expectations, but I'm ready to be positively surprised ;)

Google isn't as bad as you are saying. Doing a search of "test" the result page is about 130 KiB. This is an order of magnitude smaller than what you claim. It also loads in between 900ms and 1 second the majority of the time.

When i code in python or react, I get proud of my 900kb spa web pages. I respect your site so much in fact, I would like to apply to work at your company. Where do I apply?

> 100% free of ads and tracking.

> forces you to login

Don’t really want to login to search.

how can you search 'with privacy' / anonymously if it is tied to an account.

Privacy and anonymity are not the same. We do not claim anonymity although if you read our privacy policy you will see that it is very close to it (as we do not log searches at all, so it it not possible to tie them to a user).

literally depends on page speed for revenue.

Turns out, this might not be true at all.

Please don't spam your paid walled garden.

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