Kagi: A Premium Search Engine
kagi.com
kagi.com
We are still in closed beta (mostly to control cost and gradually improve user experience), with much more left to do. There are some examples of what Kagi can do in my twitter feed. [1]
Main idea of Kagi is to offer a paid search product, where user is also the customer and is central to everything that happens. Btw. Kagi is pronounced ka-gi (similar to yogi), I get asked that a lot so there it is...
If you want to beta test, feel free to sign up and we will do our best to send an invite within a week.
I usually wouldn't ask these kinds of questions but I think this is the one of the hardest problems to get right - to impact such a wide number of people. No-one has even come _close_ to taking a dent out of Google in the last 20 years.
The advantage Kagi has over Google is the different business model. Google would never for example introduce a "non-commercial" filter as it would go against their advertising-based business model. Kagi doesn't give a shit about ads and will do whatever that keeps its users paying and so has a non-commercial "lens" (as they call it). I'm not sure how good or accurate it is, but it's at least there which is already more than I can say about Google.
Kagi has a feature to prioritize or exclude some domains. Google doesn't have that despite their size, resources and decades of search experience. That makes it pretty clear to me that Google's weakness has nothing to do with experience or resources and thus a new entrant could potentially compete without either.
Let's say they manage to take just 1% of Google's daily search traffic, which based on a quick Google search (hah) would be about 35 MILLION search queries. If we do a very very rough ballpark estimate of 50 queries per user, per day, it would be about 700,000 unique users... or between 84,000,000 and 168,000,000 USD/year gross revenue.
Now, do I think it's reasonable to expect them to take 1% of Google's search traffic anytime soon? Probably not. I do however think that the sheer size of this market means there is a LOT of missed opportunity by the incumbents in the market that can be leveraged to create niche products that perform successfully by any other market's standards.
So, even if the HN bubble is small there are other bubbles out there. A LOT of other bubbles out there.
Public numbers are a decade old. You're off by an order of magnitude.
The fundamental premise that enables it is the focus on the user. It allows truly wonderful things to happen in the product (and we sometimes forget that search is still a product). Aligning the incentives between us and the user (which is also the customer) is really freeing from a product management perspective.
We are still users of Google products - we utilize the paid search API for results and GCP for infrastructure (hello Google!). We think there are some things that can be built with these truly amazing assets, that Google's business model simply does not permit, and we are thankful for the opportunity.
In the meantime we also built our own index which focuses only on noncommercial content and are going to invest more in this direction in the future. We call it "the more humane web".
Another thing is that we do not need to get _very_ far in the market. There is no shareholder pressure, just angry (or happy!) users. This is not, nor will ever be, a Google scale product.
This is a paid search product of premium quality (or so I'd like to believe it is shaping to be) for a tight number of individuals (and families!) who are a little different and want something different for their search experience. Few tens of thousands of subscribers will make Kagi sustainable and I hope we will have what it takes to get there. That is all I can wish for right now.
Thanks for considering!
In part I've been postponing this because I'm planning a bigger overhaul of rate limiting and access stuff, in part to get rid off cloudflare because I don't want a creepy MITM spying on my users if it isn't absolutely necessary.
When Google search came, they started their search engine by providing a clean search page with no ads, at a time when all the others had cluttered, ad-filled, shitty pages.
Users picked Google because it was the better experience back then. Today, if a search engine comes along that gives you great search results and privacy, it will become very popular quickly, because a lot of us are fed up with Google and want them to go away completely.
I usually have something in mind when I search, and Google doesn't offer any customization for me to put it in. Instead, it shows me what it prefers.
For example, I frequently need to switch languages and/or regions. You can't do that with Google (except maybe logging in and switching some settings but lmao, I need a switch). No matter what I do, Google reads my IP range and "decides" what results I should view. Very frequently, this means I literally can not find the thing I am looking for.
For many people - I assume anyone who isn't American - Google simply isn't working very well. We use it, yes. But DuckDuckGo has a Region switch that already makes it 10x more useful than Google and usually offers far superior results. A new search engine could expand on that, offering more customizations.
I'd go so far that for every human, except 350 million Americans who never switch language or region, Google is ALREADY the inferior search engine and people use it because it is what they know.
By hiding ads, you’re forcing everyone else to pay for your search. I’m glad I use DDG, and I?3 signed up for Kagi’s beta.
I've tested it since December.
What made them think they could do it I don't know but they already outclass Google by a wide margin.
The shortest and most precise explanation I can give is:
Kagi is to mainstream search engines today what Google was to mainstream search engines 20 years ago.
And that maybe settles your question too?
> No-one has even come _close_ to taking a dent out of Google in the last 20 years.
Unluckily for power users (and maybe ordinary users) and luckily for would-be Google competitors Google has rested on their laurels, told everyone the problem was webspam while their quality declined down the the levels of earlier search engines. Edit: Kagi shows the problem is not webspam but Googles insistence on 1.) not letting people block domains 2.) not respecting peoples queries.
Competing with Google a decade ago would be hard.
DDG still isn't anywhere near peak Google quality and yet they've seen (actual) exponential growth for years. That wouldn't have happened if Google still was leagues ahead.
Until December I started in DDG and used !g to see if Google had a different result that was better. Often it did not.
Since December I have used Google twice to verify something from Kagi or to look up something Kagi couldn't find (I'll try to get a bug report underway freediver, I just need to recreate using non personal data.)
Google gets the total of DDG's lifetime searches (over a decade's worth) in about half a week. "Exponential growth" is overselling it.
To me it looks literally exponential until half a year ago.
Seems I'm not alone in thinking it has been almost exponential for a good while and until recently.
At this point I don't think it would be that hard to provide a useful alternative, especially with a business model where the customer is the searcher and not the advertiser. I'm not sure that all of those engineers are having an additive affect on the UI. Quite the contrary, I imagine many are working toward improving the experience for advertisers, who are the customers.
I haven't changed search engines, and Bing won hands down when I did the Bing/Google challenge they promoted in 2012. But it is getting 'bad enough' and I need search results for projects enough where I'd try the beta if invited and would probably stick with it if it's a good experience.
Hell, if they gave me a few more Scopus-like tools for more precise queries on a version of Google scholar, I'd be sold.
There have been some speculation that it's down to SEO and google trying to make as much money as they can.
It's possible that a company which does not derive their income from search ADS could create a better search engine.
If someone can make a better search, I am all for it, even if its just for limited topics.
What a great thing that data leaks and power abuse don't ever happen. /s
> What makes you think you can do better than a company with over 20 years experience
The severe decline in quality? I've been using DDG for a while now; in about 2 years I've looked at Google results maybe 5 times and was disappointed every time. If you think Google is the best you can get right now you're missing out. Your argument is based on the assumption that a company with more experience cannot possibly be bested at what they're doing.
> google could implement site muting in an instant if they wanted
Google could do a lot of great things, but unused potential is worthless. Remember how Google got big precisely because they did what competitors could do but didn't?
If the answer is a) then Kagi or another disruptor could undoubtedly produce better search results, and probably in a short period of time, with a small number of decent engineers as there is now a vast body of research and praxis to build on that didn't exist when google was starting up. If the answer is some variant on b) then they're on a hiding to nothing.
Can you Guarantee the privacy of searches and that you will never sell search history data?
What do you mean with that?
> Can you Guarantee the privacy of searches and that you will never sell search history data?
I think that’s literally impossible to do?
FWIW, selling data would probably not be worth it, and ruin them. It’s supposed to be pretty expensive (early discussions are around $10-$20 a month) while only having a tiny amount of users (10s of thousands). At least for me, that aligns their incentives properly. And of course, they are bootstrapped without any VC money.
In regard to selling the data, I've seen businesses where they sell user info just as a side project to balance the sheets. It will b an issue only if one is caught. Somewhere there I looked around the website but I couldn't even find where is the HQ and under which jurisdiction they operate. The privacy policy had lots of technical details, but not legal one.
It would be interesting if like Signal they can validate an user but provenly cannot associate the account with any actions. This might be an issue for billing and tiered plans though.
Thanks for the explanation. I can only repeat that I don’t think this is solvable. Unlike Signal, which uses E2E this is not possible here, so whatever promises Kagi makes will always have to stay promises as they’ll need to know the content of your search and for what account it is (as your settings influence the results) to give the right reply. At least that’s how I understand it.
1st Allow users to share the token by which they are identified. 2nd Implement a 3rd party website that offers a 'free tier' via token roulette.
That will generate noise in search results, making it hard to pin a particular search on someone. Optimally users would be able to decide how much 'noise generating searches' they allow.
Off course that would only work if paying users would be volume / rate limited.
I think that a class of people, who ask kind of questions that need absolute guarantee of anonymity (I am thinking terrorists, drug dealers, traffickers etc) are:
- Looking for a different thing (because anonymity is not the same as privacy)
- Are probably looking at tools that cost much more than Kagi does
We are not even interested in serving that market.
Having said that:
- Kagi does not store search queries nor by definition it is then possible to associate something that does not exist with an account
- In general, Kagi does not store or mine user data in any way. Our privacy policy is pretty detailed, I recommend checking it out https://kagi.com/privacy
The strongest guarantee I can realistically give you that the above is true, is that our business model is simply not dependent on mining or selling user data. And the premise of our entire business would fall apart if the opposite turned out to be true. In other words the alignment of incentives here is as good as it gets.
We are not interested in your identity or searches, we are interested in providing the best search product for you, so we can keep you as a paying customer as long as we can. The moment either of the above is not true, you will walk away. It is wonderful to be in this position from a product/business perspective.
We are living in a world where it is more based in fact to assume that companies will help themselves to this kind of information under a variety of pretenses than that they won't. The only reason people will assume differently is if they trust the company, the product and the people behind it. The policy seems to be doing its part, but trust needs to be built by every conversation with a potential future customer. If the question that pops up is "how can I be anonymous if I pay you each month", the resulting argumentation should not be able to be construed as "we're sorry, but we're not going to help be your burner phone", which the comment I'm replying to is toeing dangerously close to.
People search for many things and it could detail their interests, their current location, their financial troubles. The commitment needs to be "we will never, never, never, ever, do anything like this", and not just "it doesn't make sense for us to do this". Because if someone wanted to build in that sort of tracking, it could "make sense" from a business standpoint to do this in that the data, if collected, has a lot of value on the market.
Even if the incentives are indeed aligned to keep the paying customer pleased, we also need to know that if we do walk away, that at that point there will not possibly be anything left as an artifact that a future buyer could do anything with. This assurance will be most effective if it's rooted in trust and values rather than in practical concerns; the practical concerns are valid, but only if they are restraints that have been applied in search of an objective by yourself, instead of "it is not currently in our business plan". (As an extreme example, consider a bank saying "we'd never pick items out of our customers' safe deposit boxes and sell them; it would simply be too much work".)
Basically, the facts seem reasonable enough. But you need to work on not coming off like the parent saying "well I'm sorry you want to hide things from me", which is what unprompted bringing up the covering up of criminal activity in response to questions of anonymity and privacy does. I understand that those concerns do come up in thinking responsibly about a product like this from all angles, but making it a part of a discussion with a potential customer disrespects and denigrates their fundamental needs enormously, the same needs that would make them attracted to the product in the first place.
My point is that none of "us" require anonymity in normal circumstances of using a search engine. But we all absolutely require our privacy respected (and many people still conflate privacy with anonymity).
Kagi is 100% privacy respecting by default, and examples I gave illustrate not only that, but that certain (almost total) level of anonymity can be obtained by Kagi too (because searches are not logged, so they can not be logged with an identity). In a paid service environment where you need to authenticate the user, help them restore their account etc, it is very difficult, I dare say impossible, to achieve total anonymity guarantee from a technical standpoint and I want to be transparent about it.
I think a better sort of guarantee is exactly the one that I gave - our business model does not incentivize and sort of privacy invasive behavior.
> The commitment needs to be "we will never, never, never, ever, do anything like this"
Perhaps you have not read our privacy policy, but this is exactly what is says there, and I took it for granted. This is probably my mistake and I should have assumed that people submitting inquiry will not have read it.
In my mind "there is no need for us to do it" is a much more powerful driving force than simply stating we won't. Stating something is easy but not substantial as witnessed by many big tech companies. The reality is that their business model forces them to twist reality away from privacy statements like those. Our business model does exactly the opposite, and has a positive feedback loop reinforcement in relation with the customer (we cheat you -> you take your wallet elsewhere).
Rereading this very answer I have a feeling it will not be the most satisfying again, so I hope that with your help, we can come to an answer that will satisfy your inquiry.
Or just plainly searching about legal or medical issues to learn/get informed can yield some very questionable queries taken out of context as well.
Do you currently log user search queries?
Would you mind telling us a little of the story about Kagi the company behind the product?
It’s really interesting to hear that you’re using Crystal. Where are you guys based and how have you bootstraped?
Good luck and keep at it, this is a really interesting project.
We are running on a tight budget, completely bootstrapped by funds from my previous exit. Trying to control cost and all that while establishing product-market fit, which is the reason the beta is closed for now.
Instead of starting with technology, I started by selecting people that I can work with and are crazy enough to accept working on such an ambitious idea. It turned out that they really liked Crystal and, so, here we are. I have over 30 years of dev experience, and in my previous startup I wrote a significant part of the code. But never wrote a line of code in Crystal before so it does make me feel a little uncomfortable. Its performance is truly amazing and that is what I care most about. Our front-end payload is HTML + vanilla JS (which btw is not needed, everything works in no-js), and probably about 100k on average, very lightweight.
I am based in SF Bay Area, and we are a fully remote team.
Thanks for your interest!
[0] I remember I had a cronjob calling a particular custom NextDNS URL regularly, through which I'd like to remember I was able to choose a specific profile
Crystal really is quite neat, I've got a few years experience with go and picking up Crystal has been easy and quick to get productive. Being able to call C so easily (especially when generated with crystal_lib) is pretty amazing and a big boost compared with go.
Thanks for the invite.
Please start monetizing : we want to support this effort ( I understand it is a difficult decision ). Would subscribe if reasonable.
Register a new HN handle here for comms about Kagi.
I see gimples of the future where my search engine behaves/looks differently depending if I am researching IT issues or looking for clothing.
Good luck.
I think one of the best things about HN is that there are few "corporate" accounts, and founders continue to communicate from their personal accounts.
I didn't mean to suggest 'register hi-kagi-ceo-here'. Maybe 'The Vlad' would work.
Sort of works. Apologies for the joke, it’s the Friday of the first week back.
Also feedback regarding your current website:
So there is merely one sentence: It says
"Premium search engine where everything on the page matters."
Yet, to the left and the right of this sentence are wiggling clouds that don't matter at all and distract the reader. Not ideal.
Define 'matters' and 'matters to who'.
May not matter to you, but if research shows that people interested in the reading about the product stay's around longer if the page is visually appealing - then it matters to someone.
Who's there?
To.
To who?
To whom!
What if it is intended to mean something like:
∀x ∃u: onpage(x) → matters(x, u)
This is not contradicted by this version of "anything doesn't matter":
∃z ∃v: onpage(z) ∧ ¬ matters(z, v)
But is contradicted by a different version of "anything doesn't matter" like:
∃z ∀v : onpage(x) ∧ ¬ matters(z, v)
If we restrict x to just the universe of users who are interested in at least one thing on the page (i.e. who are actual users), and we have somehow ascertained that everything on the page is covered by at least one user in that set, then the claim holds. You need to supply actual evidence that there is an item which no user ("person interested in at least one thing") is interested in; just you not being interested in something isn't it.
Personally I'd almost say I can live fine with not pleasing extreme nitpickers but I think they'll fix it.
The important point for me is unlike Google and DDG almost every result on Kagi does contain the thing you search for and if not you can report a bug and get a reply from a real human who will update the behavior. I've seen it multiple times after I joined their chat.
Question: I have a little "vanity website" of my oen. Is there a way to make sure it gets included (in full or maybe just some pages) in Kagi searches?
If it is possible can you share what is your tech stack specially your database ?
First, price point is 2-4x what I expected. Not saying I wouldn’t be a customer but at $5 unlimited it would be a no brainer for me.
Related: I would love to see family pricing. $12-13 price point is just right for me to share with my family with up to six people or some such.
Privacy is important. Is it possible to provide a payment system that is anonymous? Cash in the mail? BTC or similar? What is your policy on logging searches?
Will your results ever feature ads? Affiliate links? Will you ever attempt to create Kagi Plus social network?
What subscription models exist in the crypto world right now, i.e. to automatically charge me every month?
$10 a month is getting into the territory of streaming video services and those require a hell of a lot of bandwidth and infrastructure to maintain.
For business or corporate use though $10 a month / user seems totally applicable.
While I do like the project and wish you the best, producing a product that the market will not pay for is a business model doomed to fail.
k-ay-gi as in lady
k-aa-gi as in laggy
Which one is it?
There are multiple phonemes often represented by the letter a; the GP is asking which of those is correct.
Edit: all of these assume American English pronunciations.
But yes, that does assume American English pronunciation (and for what I know, various other Englishes too).
Did you get any angry letters and/or lawyery threats to stop crawling a specific site?
Support indexing internal stuff for enterprises. Let's say I have a kagi enterprise account and my company had integrations setup. When I search for something, I would get results from internal wiki, email , sharepoint, etc... along with internet results. One stop shop for search.
I hope you read this and give it serious consideration. You wanna kill google? This is how!
We don't want to kill Google :) Google serves a purpose in the world and it did help enable the modern society to exist, with all its marvels and flaws. Heck, it even enables Kagi to exist!
Think of Kagi as a small premium brand, providing a very different search experience.
Enterprise search is something that we are remotely thinking about, but frankly we want to focus on providing the best possible consumer experience first, so that individuals and families around the world can enjoy a user-centric, ad-free search experience.
Regional results (especially since the last update) feel as automatic as google. While I still hope they’ll add my suggestion of a bang for region switches, most queries I do don’t need one, and it properly switches between English and German.
All of the DDG bangs. Seriosuly, search without bangs is nothing I’d ever want to go back to.
Built-In Domain Blacklist. Goodbye Pinterest. Forever.
General results are great. More relevant results than either DDG or Google and a great presentation (like showing snippets from accepted or upvoted SO answers)
And I have not even played around with advanced filters like lenses (which people in their discord seem to love).
Negatives: So far, I’d say only that the widgets are less usable than DDGs.
I had low expectations, but I’m really very positively surprised.
DDG calls [0] them bangs, and as I have been using them in recent years, I use that term everywhere now.
#!Interestingly enough I haven't actually seen that much cross-language results (also DE/EN), even for ambiguous queries.
My only complaint is that occasionally I run a search and get zero results, like the page is literally blank (I try the search again and it is still blank). I then try the search on Google and get what I'm looking for. I guess this happens because Kagi's index is smaller, but I don't really know.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19961216050944/http://www.kagi.c...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160413151203/https://www.kagi....
[2] https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
Long time since I did shareware in any language, though. Something like £2k total takings, I wasn’t good at business.
What I have not seen so far being discussed anywhere, though, is the Willingness to Pay [3] for a search engine alternative, say like Kagi. What do you think is an acceptable monthly subscription price? What do you think is an expensive price? What do you think is a prohibitively expensive price?
Here is my take on those questions: 5$, 10$, 20$.
UPDATE: I'll summarize all answers and post the results here for reference.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782186
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136
For a full equivalent to Google's services including Maps, Docs, Drive, etc, I'd be happy to go much higher up to 50$.
So upper end might be higher for an "apple like" slice of the user base.
Although I hate dumb subscriptions for stuff that should be paid once and for all I have a history of not only saying I would pay for certain thing but also doing it.
And with Kagi, if they keep respecting my queries and have a sane price: it is a no brainer.
This also isn't a reflection of what I percieve the work in building a search engine to be but more my subconcious perception of what I'm getting.
edit: I guess even the range of answers here, compared to implied value of the service, is an indication how much people (me included) value their data.
[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much...
10-20$ a month for a meaningfully better search engine is pennies compared to the possible value it could provide (if it provides search results of sufficient quality). Every search I have to spend a couple minutes refining saved would make it worth it.
% Customers who find the price acceptable
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0$ 5$ 8$ 10$ 12$ 20$
Price per month
From the FAQ: "We plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, unlimited plan at around $20/mo as well as make bundles (to include Kagi email and other services), family plans and annual payment discounts available."
I have to say I support a lot of these initiatives, but I can't help but think altogether they're creating a division of the web into premium services the rich can afford, and low quality services for the masses. Most of the world doesn't have the silicon valley salaries where $10/month is considered low. I feel like there should be an ideological consideration as well to make better services accessible to as many people as possible. Just my 2 cents.
For me at least it saves me whole minutes and lots of stress on about half my queries which means at $20 it pays for itself in half a month and as a free bonus I get better results for the rest of the month as well, an ad free experience, no tracking and the opportunity to support a Google competitor.
Netflix charges almost double this and they have 100's of millions of subscribers worldwide; my guess is that a premium search engine only needs a small fraction of that number of users to become a worthwhile and profitable service.
Can't say if I would pay for it or not - haven't used it yet - but if that was the price of dumping google searches I for one would be OK with it.
When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight
Correct. But what Volvo invented (3 point safety belt and more) soon became standard in ordinary cars.
Say Kagi is a luxury product for some people: it will still open the road for others to see that it is possible to carve out a niche that isn't as crowded as ad-sponsored-idiotic-AI-manipulated-answers-for-everyone-and-noone-at-the-same-time.
Neeva is freemium.
I think you.com is freemium too.
Marginalia is free and at this point so good that it is sometimes a better fallback from DDG than Google is. (To be fair, Marginalia is a side project running on a single desktop pc in Sweden somewhere but Google is that bad these days that if DDG doesn't have you covered chanses are Google doesn't either. And then marginalia comes in with a delightfully different ranking, respecting my queries and allowing me to find things - if they exists in its index.)
Note I actually like the service and I signed up for the beta, but I understand the GPs point about building two "webs" one for the masses and one for the "well off" that can afford these tools. However as one other poster said, you have to bootstrap a service somehow and if it gets popular enough there could be the ability to reduce fees to give it mass appeal.
Average Joe would also not see any value as he doesn't know what a content farm is to begin with.
It's all about finding a niche (and selling out once you're on track to get traction, but alas).
One may pay Netflix because there are _specific_ shows that they can not get anywhere else, or simply because the quality and convenience is much higher than if they tried to watch those or other shows in different ways, including free.
In similar fashion, Kagi offers a completely different product/search experience to Google, with different results, different features and attention to detail like you would expect from a premium service obsessed with user experience. Saying that Google is offering same thing like Kagi but for free, is ignoring this nuance and is same as saying that all streamed video content is the same, or that every comedy show is the same.
> Hey! You're coming from Some country where this could be too expensive.
> I believe in Purchasing Parity Power, and I want to make this affordable.
> If you need it, use the code SOMECODE for an extra XX% off the regular price.
I'm fine with paying, but it should respect purchasing power in each country. And I'd even go that far and offer the service free in some really poor countries.
There was a small discussion on HN previously about Dracula theme and this exact aspect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29495524
The alternative is to have your search paid for by someone else, in which case all the incentives are aligned towards tracking and manipulating you for their benefit and away from providing decent search results for your benefit.
The marginal cost per user for a service like this is tiny, but there's a huge fixed cost to running the whole thing. If few people use it, it will cost a lot.
I agree that it's not good for things to split into premium paid services only affordable by the well off and rubbish free services for everyone else. However the solution isn't to abandon building services like this with funding models that correctly align incentives. It's for there to be a culture change towards understanding and valuing those well aligned incentives. This will bring more users, more services, more competition and much lower costs for users.
Are you assuming it or do you know for a fact? That's normally not how startups work.. as long there is an increasing paying demand for their product, I don't see why they are going to reduce their price, quite the opposite actually.
Note that I'm not saying this is what will happen. I replied to a comment that was more about how we should want things to turn out. I'm saying we shouldn't denounce customer-paid startups for charging what they need to succeed in traditionally ad-funded industries, even if that means they start out as premium services for those willing and able to pay. Rather, we should cheer them on and advocate for the benefits their funding model brings, in the hope that they will succeed, grow, become commoditised and benefit everyone for pennies.
The alternative is to stick with the ad-driven, dross-filled panopticon we already have.
Sure, I'm all for paying for something if they don't track me, if I can use their API as I need, etc.. the only thing that wasn't clear to me was the conclusion of "more people paying, cheaper it will get" because that probably isn't the case.
What do you mean? Like cars, houses, restaurants, groceries and almost literally everything else on the planet? :)
If I may, there is huge complexity at hand here. It is one thing to offer a meditation app for $2/mo, where its peak complexity is changing colors on the screen. It is entire different to be able to offer the entire internet searchable in less than 500ms in the palm of your hand. The ability to offer that at $20-30/mo with robust privacy protection is frankly a miracle.
Second factor, is that Kagi is bootstrapped and our priorities are quality of services offered, not the number of users. And knowing what I know, it is simply not economically viable to do this at a lower price point and hope for sustainability of the business.
Finally, the price is only one side of equation, the other is value. The question is will you be getting enough value for your money? For me, the ability for my children to use a search engine without being bombarded with ads from an early age has a lot of value. I already pay $15/mo for YouTube Premium for the same reason. I understand that not every parent is in this position to choose, but many are.
Having said all that I do not pretend that Kagi is designed to be for everyone, like Google is. It is a premium service for a reason - the cost of providing the quality that we provide is simply what it is, and we clearly said no to the ads from the get-go. Remember that the main reason most of the mainstream web is free are ads.
The ideological consideration you refer to is something I agree with, but that role is on governments to fullfill IMO. I do not think they will anytime soon so I am doing what I can. Access to information like access to water should be part of public infrastructure and we miss the latter in the modern society (as public libraries are not enough anymore). We can easily get into the realm of politics here so I choose to stop :)
In order to have a hope of becoming sustainable you need to make a calculation that with a certain number of users you can break even.
Huh, I thought I'd catch them out by disabling all javascript but they actually didn't use any for this webpage. Nice.
What an incredible one-liner, along multiple value axes.
just got my invite after a couple days of signing up, will be trying it out, but so far no stackoverflow/github issue clones, and they allow setting "preferred" and "muted" domains, I might pay whatever they ask
I'm keen to know their business plan however. Hope they don't get acquihired for the algorithms, never to offer these features again...
ie. google.*##.g:has(a[href*="realpython.com"])
duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(a[href*="realpython.com"])
The rest is a bit tongue-in-cheek but I also can't think of better explanations:
Maybe because letting people block useless sites automatically means useful sites end up on top and giving the best results on top would mean users only stay on Google for 2 seconds and don't come back for that particular query while showing a mix of useless and ad laden non sense is pure brilliance:
- user need to stay longer on front page to decide which result to click => more ad exposure
- user goes to ad laden site => more ad exposure
- user comes back to try another result => more ad exposure
- user tries another etc etc
The whole thing seems to be a balancing act of how extremely bad they can make this slot machine before people revolt.
That said I'm open to alternative explanations:
- maybe they aren't that greedy, everybody smart just left as kt became harder and harder for non-SJW and those who are left either don't have time or are unable to fix it and it currently happens to work extremely well economically in the short run so nobody looks into it?
- or maybe as someone mentioned the other day everyone's search results are adjusted by an end-to-end optimizing AI which gets a digital dopamine hit everything an ad is shown or clicked and all good Google engineers have been struggling for years to get it back under control without breaking the cash cow in rhe process?
Wait I know why, because somewhere they have retarded KPI that will go down if people stop clicking on ads from spam websites that only show ads. Who would imagine
Disclaimer : haven't done a deep project yet ( new software stack or deep bug fix for example ).
Would pay for a neutral search engine, right now ( and I have no subscriptions atm, not even NF ).
I absolutely hate those sites that scrape other well-known sites (like StackOverflow, Quora, Reddit) and add ads and SEO spam. They are increasingly better at being on the top of the search results, and I cannot get rid of them.
No thanks. I don't want that some hidden ToS change or future acquisition expose all my searches in the future, even if current search engine operates in a good fate.
I suppose it's the fault of online payment infrastructure more than them. Sure, they could do it the Mullvad way and accept envelopes with cash and an UID but that probably wouldnt scale.
The time I save by not having to sift through all the utter nonsense that Google, Bing and even DuckDuckGo showes in my face any given day will easily be worth $10 a month alone and on top it is sanity preserving, privacy respecting and has no ads.
Its kind of like a polished version of https://search.marginalia.nu just with a much larger index.
The best explanation I can give is maybe:
Kagi is to other search engines today what Google was to other search engines 20 years ago: Outstanding quality, better than anything else I have tried - and rapidly improving - no nonsense (again like old Google) and nifty extra features (again like old Google).
(Note: I haven't tested Neeva yet so I cannot say if Kagi is better than them. But compared to all the rest I have tried the last ten years it is in a differen league.)
Makes me feel old.
[1] https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0%BC%D0%...
https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
Since I haven’t seen the co-founder mention it, I hope he might make a little Easter egg or add it to the FAQ somewhere to pay homage to Kagi. That company made me my first money as a teenager with software.
I would really love to pay you for this service. Chomping at the bit. However, I and many others would be much more willing to do this if we don't have to rely on your privacy policy (i.e., pinky swear) to keep our data private.
I think the simplest thing for you to do would be to implement a an option that allows paying with cryptocurrency (ideally Monero), and which doesn't require an email address. Just generate a subscriber number or username, allow login with user + pass (+ TOTP/HOTP) and allow me to fill my account with crypto!
Someone below mentions a token-based scheme for injecting noise; that's more elegant in some ways but of course more complicated to implement.
thank you for your work!
Kagi pay for api access to both Google and Bing.
Kagi pays.
I think anyone can pay for access unless they live in Iran, Cuba or North Korea.
I don't have time now but try searching with your preferred search engine or ask someone else.
This is what Kagi says in the FAQ.
"Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers." [1]
Also wish for Orion browser to come to android aswell
Check out their Orion browser too, been playing around with it.
The logo is a g which is in the Google ballpark. why not K?
The designer insisted that Kagi logo is "anchored" in the letter "g" and we had to agree. Besides, can't let Google own letter "g" too, can we? ;)
hypocrisy lvl 10000
> Kagi includes data from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yelp, Wikipedia and others
come back after the reset Murica, this way of dealing with things is kinda outdated
is this yet another nonsense YC pump&dump thing?