Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

Kagi is "users pay". Yes, average users won't pay, but I don't see how that matters to me as a Kagi user.

Another important feature of Kagi that I'm paying close attention to is: they are currently privately bootstrapped as far as funding goes.

To me the fact that Kagi is not currently VC funded is huge for me as far as adoption. Every customer facing VC funded startup I've worked at inevitably starts to institute increasingly anti-user practices while grinning and talking about "customer first!"

I know it's a huge ask, but if Kagi remains privately funded/non-VC I'll happily pay the moment I can.

I've only been using the service for a short while now but have been enjoying it a lot. The ability to blacklist domains has already dramatically improved my search.

Yes, I noticed this too.

I'm afraid what happens to 1Password since they get big funding recently.

A paid search engine? Bold. I'd pay if it could do anything close to what the old google code search could do. I miss it every day.

It's free while they're in beta. There's a "waitlist" but put your email on it and you'll get an invite within a week. Give it a try.

I've been using it for a couple weeks now on my work laptop and for programming-related searches its been great so far. And the usual annoyances that show up at the top of google and DDG don't show up on Kagi (geeks4geeks, etc).

It's actually so good I plan to pay when they start charging.

Same. I switched to it for a day just to give it a try and I never switched back. Absolutely willing to pay if the quality stays the same.

I’ll do the same as well. Kagi has literally improved my life a significant degree.

It's really good in some ways, and very lacking (for me) in others. The search is fine. Good enough that I would switch. However, if I was out and about and quickly needed directions to Walmart, my normal flow with Google is

Pull out phone -> Safari -> type "Walmart" -> click on the map -> Maps app opens and starts guiding me

When I switched to Kagi, the flow went like

Pull out phone -> Safari -> type "Walmart" -> top result is Walmart.com... no address to nearest Walmart to be found -> Close Safari -> Open Maps app -> search for Walmart

And it got so annoying to have those extra steps. I know I can change my workflow and get used to it. But it wasn't just directions. It was other basic searches. Like if I needed a phone number for a local business. It drove me crazy. I really hope Kagi gets better at those sort of things. I want them to succeed. But it was just too much friction for me.

We found similar issues at https://you.com a while back. We just had to be good for more query families. Now we have both the walmart locations in a map app, eg https://you.com/search?q=walmart and coding related useful results, eg. https://you.com/search?q=how%20do%20I%20find%20all%20files%2...

or https://you.com/search?q=pyspark%20filter%20array%20element

Too bad you.com does not work in Firefox with the "beacon" function disabled (beacon.enabled set to false in about:config).

Hi Ennea, Can you help me understand why you make this particular change in the config?

To be perfectly honest, I cannot even remember making that change, but also couldn't find any info on whether Firefox or some extension may have done this. I will leave it disabled, however, because its purpose seems to be analytics, and opting out of (at least some of) them this way seems like a good idea.

Since disabling it this way removes the `sendBeacon` function from existence, you should just be prepared to properly handle its absence.

Is it always about analytics? Or is it ocassionaly also a useful API for other tasks?

I know little about front end JS dev, but the docs say it’s just a way to send an asynchronous request (no response) with a guarantee that the the request will be sent out, even if the page starts unloading. That’s apparently not a guarantee with the two other to send requests - XmlHttpRequest and fetch api.

The beacon api was created specifically to be a lightweight method for telemetry/logging

I never even tried you.com because I see nothing (I don't enable JS for sites I don't trust).

Kagi supports DDG bangs. So just type `Walmart !g` and you will get the google search output

I agree this disrupts my muscle memory, but if we're honest, that particular workflow isn't necessarily optimal. It's just what Google has trained us to do. If you're seeking directions to Walmart, the most efficient (and one might argue intuitive) method is to open your maps app directly, and type in "Walmart".

I am a Kagi beta user, and I intend to pay when they start charging. I have wanted a paid ad/tracker-free Google for a decade now. I want to be the customer, not the product

The cost per search query is incredibly small. You could probably have <1% premium users. If your search engine is used by a billion people a day, 10 million paying users are still enough to pay a few thousand people developing your product (depending on your location).

I believe products can work that way, offer premium service and features for the very few that need it and a basic service to anyone else. In the end, the free tier is cheaper than what you'd have to spend on marketing otherwise.

I guess it depends on whether you consider "The Next Google" to imply that it becomes a the dominant company in the space, used by every "average user", or if it's enough to be a niche solution for highly technical users who prefer it to Google.

So the question will be "Will the average user prefer to feed on free junk food when healthy food is ten bucks a month?"

Chances are there will be both.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com