Kagi/Orion status update: First three months
blog.kagi.com
blog.kagi.com
Orion: Finally a non-chrome based web browser that can compete with the likes of Brave and Arc. It works much better on Mac than the alternatives, with the same engine as Safari it also benefits from deeper system integration such as native Sign-in with Apple and password management. Also, like Brave, comes with powerful ad and tracker blocker so you don't need a separate extension. I also love its built-in tree-style tabs implementation.
Kagi: It is Google without all the bad parts. It is user centric like some other alternatives, without the poor index and search results.
Props to the team, I am looking forward to what's to come. It is mind blowing how a single small company can make one of the best desktop browser AND search engine AND mobile browser on the market. Hope they are not spreading themselves too thin and can fund the development of all these for a long time!
My only complaints are the slow performance of Orion on iOS, and its poor handling of app urls. Latter caused some issues when I had Orion set as the default browser on my iPhone and some payment flow that used app redirects between my banking app and the store app got stuck. I was lucky and I could manually launch the app by pasting the app link in Safari, but I hope it can handle these cases as well as Mobile Safari in the future.
If Orion is based on webkit, what other advantages does it offer over Safari that you found?
Orion is absolutely amazing.
I'm happy for them, but is this an accurate measure of active users?
>This measures only users who have enabled auto-updates (Orion is zero-telemetry by default so auto-updates are disabled by default). It may not be an accurate portrayal but is the best we got.
- Search result quality is at least equal to Google for most queries and far superior for queries involving discussions or technical topics. Sadly, it is inferior for queries in my area of expertise (Swiss law).
- Kagi is the only alternative to Google that I know of (and I have tried many) which is able to produce good regional results and mix them - when appropriate - with international results. Most privacy focused search engines are very US centric.
- Blog spam and copy cats are not completely gone but the situation is at least bearable, especially after continuosly filtering them and boosting credible sites instead.
- Customization options, filtering options, speed and site layout are also far superior when compared to Google.
Apart from the lower quality results from queries involving my area of expertise, the only thing that still keeps me using Google Search are the reviews from Google Maps.
All in all, I recommend supporting this product.
For developer-related queries I`m pleased with the results!
I was struck by their pricing page [0] which says that "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches" and that "at USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use". I don't think they're going to be right that beta testers will do more searches than average users, and I think that they'll attract heavy searchers (the ones most noticing and disliking Google's quality). I would be surprised if I search less than 50 times a day, and that's probably just during work. If I was a paid Kagi user they'd be losing money on me. They say their price might have to go up, I don't see how they're going to avoid that.
I dunno, "if you're not paying, you're the product", but how does that fit if you are paying, but what your paying isn't actually enough? Whats the other product?
Hope they do well.
- Half the price of my fiber subscription
- Double the price of my VPS subscription
- Same price as my mobile subscription
Given how impressed I am with Kagi search maybe it is time to check out Orion.
Kagi allows you to remove all that trash and actually find what you need.
-- Aside - why dont we have a keyboard key to switch an entire line from ALL CAPS to all caps or to All Caps... (This would be a great key)
-
Is there a way something like Kagi can also search google and ddg and ad results to a search then rank the relevant ones based on which ones users click in the results in addition to whatever/wherever Kagi indexes from? (or is that how it works - because the goog crawler is massive and hard to replicate is it not?)
Serious questions, as I do not know...
They don’t connect any searches/clicks to user accounts. But you can rank sites yourself like this: https://i.imgur.com/Po7mG7Q.png
One of the first things I tried with them. I have the option to down-rank websites I don't like. I can block or lower their ranking.
I'm not sure it's a $10/mo killer feature, though.
Hated what g! was becoming, so I started using ddg, liked it at first but had to often modify my queries with a g! but I still used it, the experiance was't great, but it somehow worked, then the controversies around ddg started to come out. At the end of the day you gotta keep the lights on, if your users are not your customers then someone else is going to have to help you pay the bills.
Used kagi since it was recommended here on hn. Used it for a week(-ish) and instantly fell in love with it, the lenses feature, the ability to rank search results meant I could block out websites I hated seeing on my search results and boosting the ones I cared about. Now I am a paying customer.
Oh yeh, one more thing, for the past few months I don't remember a single instance of me modifying my queries with !g. Now I promote them every chance I get, I even got called a paid shill on reddit a few weeks back :D .
It starts with a cause we all can get behind, sometimes its "think of the children", another time it's regulating information from people supporting orcs, and who knows, how do I know things I care about might get suppressed in the future? Stop the nonsese, let me be the judge of what I consume.
The other instance I remember was the whole ms tracking situation[2], if your whole selling point is "Privacy simplified" then do just that without all the nonsese. There were a few others (#duckduckgone) before I stopped using them.
[1]https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 [2]https://twitter.com/thezedwards/status/1528808759027331072
It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines. You may also use the list with uBlacklist.
However, this seems a little disingenuous to me:
> We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design. This is a software architecture decision (we simply don’t need this) and there is no simple switch one can flip to enable this in case of a court order.
I have no reason to doubt this that their software is like that currently. But I also know that you don't need to change your software architecture to log user queries.
Having said that I congratulate Vlad and his team. Competition and innovation, in browsers and web search, is indeed needed. We welcome, and are willing to support, all new challengers making genuine efforts.
I am just so happy with Kagi I can't explain. I am not a huge fan of subscriptions and I carefully curate what I pay for monthly. I love paying for Kagi! I wish them only the very best!
This could definitely change, but today, it looks like a genuine attempt to break out of the terrible local maximum (ad-supported Internet) we're stuck in.
Getting the compute costs down will probably be a major obstacle to growth, since they'll have to keep prices high (19 USD/month) to pay for their infrastructure.
So costs per user will go down with the number of users as this fixed cost is shared between more requests/users.
AFAIK some websites actively or passively block everyone except Google.
You can try them at https://www.teclis.com/ and https://tinygem.org/.
Anyway, at $10/mo I’m not quite prepared to put my money where my mouth is. $5/mo would be much more attractive, and I would guess they'd have better profit at that price. How much does each user cost them?
Edit: Thanks everyone for the pricing info! I guess in a world where we expect search engines to be free, we don't realize how expensive they actually are to run (at least at smaller scales like Kagi).
Intuitively I would have expected the expensive part to be building the index and for each query to cost fractions of a cent. I am extremely surprised to learn that each query apparently costs them $0.125.
$12.50 × (900 ÷ 1000) = $11.25/month/user
There's more info in their FAQ https://kagi.com/faq#cost
I really hope that their high costs are due to some inefficiencies (e.g. with their current scale) they haven't been able to work out yet, otherwise that does not bode well for the concept of a paid search engine... or maybe I'm just an extreme outlier? I pretty much only ever search for documentation and things like that while I'm working, but I apparently do that a lot lol.
The price they're using seems to be $0.0125/query. I'm assuming that includes business expenses, like dev/admin/salary costs, and not just the raw costs of executing a query.
I guess a price hike to ~$15/mo would cover my particular usage, and I might be willing to pay that much, although I don't think many others would. $10 is already more than a lot of people are willing to pay just for search. Maybe if they bundled some other services into the subscription it would be more appealing? People expect search to be free, but are willing to pay for other services that are probably much cheaper to operate (VPN, password manager, cloud storage, etc)
It actually does not, it covers infrastructure, but not salaries. Salaries for Orion/Kagi devs are currently paid by Vlad out of pocket, he mentioned that on Discord.
I’d say with 1200 you are slightly above average from what people shared on discord (I only hit $10 in costs in August for the first time).
When the post was discussed on discord, I mentioned that $19/mo would be too much for me, on the other hand I could do $12/mo with a 2-year pre-pay (not that I have to, thanks to the grandfathering)
Month Searches Cost
Jun 2022 875 $10.94
Jul 2022 773 $9.66
Aug 2022 842 $10.52
Sep 2022 10 $0.12
Your total payments: $30.00
Your total usage: $31.25
Your payments to usage balance: -$1.25 [Tip the difference] sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*/places.sqlite "select strftime('%Y/%m', last_visit_date/1000000, 'unixepoch') as yearmonth, substr(p.url,9,14) as search_backend,count(1) as hits from moz_places p where (p.url like 'https://duckduckgo%' or p.url like 'https://www.google.%/search%' or p.url like 'https://www.qwant%') group by search_backend,yearmonth order by yearmonth asc,hits desc;"
Starbucks coffee fallacy :) I.e. it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffe so it must be cheap enough.
Have you given Brave Search a try? I honestly didn't expect to switch, but after trying it out for a while I ended up making it my default and haven't looked back. Brave is mostly using its own index (in my case, for 87% of my search results).
Not really. Between free and paid users, TFA says they average roughly 27 searches per user per day; 1000 searches costs them $12.50. If each user (TFA says roughly 10% of searches come from the free tier) is averaging 810 searches in a month, that puts their bare cost at close to $10.13 per user per month, not including salaries and other operating costs.
I'm one of roughly 2.6k paid users at the moment; they estimate the need for 25k users to be sustainable. There's so much about google and most of its current alternatives that legitimately disgusts me- voting with my wallet is the only option I really have.
You're saying it costs then 1⅛ cents per search excluding wages and other operating costs.
That seems like they must be vastly over-paying for something? What does that money pay for and who is paying the wages+operational costs?
Edit: this comment [0] indicates every search is actually 3 searches, two at commercial resale rates (Google, Bing) and one against their own index; that probably explains it.
All I can do is relate what the article says :).
> That seems like they must be vastly over-paying for something? What does that money pay for and who is paying the wages+operational costs?
Well, they use a couple of paid APIs for their queries (as you noted in the edit of your comment). They say in TFA that they're currently breaking even on bare search costs and that the founders are picking up the tab for most of the rest of the expenses.
Hm not sure what you mean, because that amount is currently zero [1]? Kagi is kind of anti-thesis to digital advertising.
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#marke...
I guess most people don't query as much as I do, but seems like it would need quite a number of people underquerying to make up for users who would be similar to me?
$10/mo could work (I think many people would go for it for $5/mo, though I understand that may not work for Kagi). More than that it starts to be very niche I think.
A family plan is interesting, and I would pay for a Kagi for Kids that works and filters out garbage without dumbing everything down to a "kiddie" level (like Google does). My young kids have a great deal of scientific curiosity and I'd like them to be able to explore freely and learn interesting stuff that might go way over their head at first but isn't "kiddish", without worrying about them stumbling into a cesspool (and I don't mean just a "safe search" porn blocker, but just all the horrible stuff out there you don't want them to stumble on).
Over time I have managed to block most of the websites which annoy me the most from the results. For example I have blocked w3schools and boosted MDN or the annoying ads disguised as blogs or websites which pollute the search results by mere SEO enhancements.
This was raised in a flagged comment, so I still felt it was worth highlighting. I don't find analogies work well for technical decisions. I usually prefer that a company tell me what is and is not private and anonymous so that I can made a decision on if I should use an application and on how I will use it. There is no need to justify the decision you made and in some respects lecture us on why the decision was justified. Just be transparent about what is and is not and that's enough.
Only feedback I have is, if someone on the team gets some free cycles, please make the calculator a little more user friendly. Mostly looking for the ability to Kagi search an equation, and then tack on additional operations to the equation in the results page. Right now I have to reach for the mouse, click the small text field and type ans*. Would be nice if it just inferred that I want to use the previous answer.
I guess I will be part of the 70% that will drop. Back to DuckDuckGo it is. Great product, enjoyed using it, but $10/mo for searches was tough to swallow, there's no way I can double that. I was really enjoying it but their cost per search is waaaaaaaaay to high and they need to seriously look at which APIs are costing them so much, and just drop those. I don't necessarily need infoboxes with my search. I'd be happy with just the indexing.
> If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it.
Well, that would be bing and google. And combining those results is a good part of the magic. Currently, the searches are actually paid for by subscribers, but the founder is paying everyone’s salary out of his own money, so that’s a bit of an issue ;)
Google finances a lot of Firefox, for example, so there is not a monopoly in browsers. One could argue that means Firefox is beholden to Google but in an ideal world it would not be. Mozilla probably gets lots of other donors too. Kagi may be able to do something similar or at minimum get some big donations / endowments from wealthy people who support the cause.
Anyways, great service, I hope they figure it out, but I really think they need to get the cost per search down.
The results are excellent. Definitely better than Google and DuckDuckGo in my experience. I’ve been telling people to use it, but it’s kind of hard to convince them that $10/mo is worth it. A family/group plan would probably help get more people on board.
Also I completely forgot Orion was a thing until this post. I went to check it out, but unfortunately it’s Mac only. A port to Linux would be awesome.
This is a very surprising choice. I'm also leaning towards the side of irresponsible. Web browsers are probably the biggest attack surfaces users have. They are running untrusted code thousands of times a day. That isn't even counting all of the other attack surfaces such as HTML rendering, media decoding and playing, WebGPU type stuff and more. The stream of vulnerabilities has been constant so far and there is no evidence that the stream is over.
If this was my product I would disable everything but auto-updates, and make a clear policy about what data I track on update downloads.
Trading security for privacy likely results in less privacy once you get pwned.
> The way we measure this is through auto-update “pings” to our updates server.
> This measures only users who have enabled auto-updates
> auto-updates are disabled by default
This seems to say that they won't do auto-update checks by default. But I guess they are doing auto-update checks but not tracking the checks, just a "ping" (whatever that means if it isn't an update check).
I believe that it's not too surprising if you know that most of their users are from HN.
The HN comments on every telemetry-related post that I've seen have been violently, overwhelmingly, religiously against telemetry (not tracking - telemetry proper) in any form.
Even if those comments aren't representative of the views of the readers as a whole, if you're building a company and those comments are your biggest insight into your users' feelings - you're going to do stuff like this.
(and yes, it shouldn't have to be said that this inhibits security, but then again most of the anti-telemetry HN commentators are fine with that)
The end result of security at all costs is zero user agency so this is not at all surprising. Like anything, auto updates are a tradeoff that is neither without cost nor provides 100% protection.
Also there is a question of the real risk. WebKit and macOS are generally very secure. We had to intervene only once in the last 4 years with a (medium) security related WebKit update (and we shipped it a week sooner than Apple did with Safari).
We believe that the two facts highlighted above minimize any security risk.
On the other hand every telemetry, including auto-update pings, sends personal information (at the very least user's IP address) to the browser vendor. Almost every other browser on the market is ad-supported (directly or indirectly). Telemetry and ad-supported businesses can be a problem.
We do believe that browsers do not have the right to do this (at least if they want to call themselves privacy-respecting). In our view it should be on users to decide if they want to trust the browser (browsers are "user agent" after all) and every telemetry, including this, should be opt-in.
Simply put, if a browser is not zero-telemetry it can not be called privacy respecting, and any browser using telemetry by default should at least disclose it to users on the first run.
Does Orion work yet with 1Password, or are there any workarounds yet?
Edit: found the thread on the 1Password forums and sounds like Orion has tried to reach out but are getting completely ignored by 1Password.
(P.S. Let me also recommend BitWarden - password manager UX is highly subjective topic, but it worked well for me, and it does not require subscription).
But now that 1Password is Electron and doesn't seem to work with Orion, I will give BitWarden a try again since the 1Password advantages were wiped out.
From the Anonymity section: "For example your parents can know everything about you and still fully respect your privacy."
Ok, but if anyone thinks I trust a company the way I trust my parents they are sorely mistaken, and I certainly wouldn't want my parents to have an easily searchable record of everything I've ever searched for online, the same way a search engine provider does.
The complexity of accepting crypto payments is totally understandable. If that's the reason Kagi does not prioritize anonymity then that is understandable, but the justification that "you don't really want privacy anyway" is unnecessary.
"We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design. This is a software architecture decision (we simply don’t need this) and there is no simple switch one can flip to enable this in case of a court order."
"Software architecture decision" is meaningless. The only guarantee that data will not be collected and stored is a technological, probably cryptographic one.
If an organization is in a position to gain intimate knowledge of your life and habits, they have the ability to influence your life and that of others. Pinky swearing not to do so is a lot like following someone around with a camera while repeating "it's just for a video". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R5WjfL2ZAg
I don't expect Kagi to accept crypto, and I'll keep paying just because I'll jump at an opportunity to pay with my money rather than with my data. However, given that they decouple their service from the need to track users, I would have expected them to prioritize anonymity wherever possible as the next logical step.
If the justification was technological it would be understandable, but their reassurance that there is nothing to be concerned about is itself concerning.
Thought; Just periodically rotate your account, and use a new cc number. There is no bonus to me for keeping a particular account over the long term, as there is no history etc. However, I love the service and want to pay.
This is the first item on their FAQ:
"Our goal is amplify the web of human knowledge, creativity and self-expression and provide the user tools to fight against the web of greed, ad-tech and user tracking."
To pretend that company policy is the best way to achieve that goal is insulting. We will never have an ad-tech and tracking-free future without technological measures. Offering a service on the basis of "Pay with your money, not your data" is a fantastic step in the right direction, but obviously not enough.
It is also not immediately clear how can anonymity be guaranteed from a technical implementation standpoint? Happy to understand more about what the ask is.
We do say that our business model is the best guarantee - we make money from our users not third parties; our volume is too small to be interesting to anyone and will always remain small because of the paid nature of the product (in fact we are actively making decisions like increasing prices that are making it even smaller); if we ever sold a byte of data and that was found out, it would immediately kill the entire business; and we do not log searches because we have no use of them, they would only be an uneeded cost and liability. The motive simply isn't there.
We understand that you have to believe that, but so you would need to believe any other claim including the full anonymity one. Nothing in the world can 100% guarantee that.
As it is we carry the full burden of lack of trust in online technology, that we are not responsible for creating (and have actually founded to be an anti-thesis to).
Thanks for supporting Kagi, and we ask for a bit of patience with this, we just started.
https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
• vertical/nested tabs
• sharing tabs between desktop/mobile
My daily driver has been Brave for the last few years, but the lack of TST has me looking for alternatives. If I'm not able to find a decent TST solution, I'll be migrating more of my browsing to Orion.
I am not on MacOS so I have no opinion on Orion but Kagi + Firefox is a great combo.
Almost doubling the price per month already honestly seems like this product doesn't have long left to live. And the price is already expensive enough where only privacy enthusiasts would be considering it.
And for anyone saying free plan, 50 searches a month is just too low. If I have one issue I'm trying to resolve, it's very possible I use half of them right there, and who wants to worry about how many searches they have left.
Well, early-adopters seem to be grandfathered in. But, if this model stops them from running out of money and helps them actually reach sustainability, I'm fine with it! I think that if they can't find 10,000 users who want to pay $20/mo for a really excellent search engine, there's a bigger problem here. There are surely 10,000 privacy conscious people who would pay, right?
The $9.99/mo pricing model is kind of a meme, because no matter what the service is, people seem willing to charge the exact same cost. At least Kagi is being up-front and saying "hey, our service costs more to operate and we aren't making enough money yet".
People willingly pay Superhuman $30/mo for an alternative interface to Gmail. If that niche exists, surely a paid search at $20/mo niche exists?
Their plan is actually to compete on quality. Just for privacy, I was happy enough with DDG for free.
Here's to hoping it gains more traction! I love the competition in the search space.
I am worried though, due to their high query cost, are they doing the full pipeline with external sources for simple queries too? Like I am accustomed to using google instead of my brain for literally the tiniest and pettiest of things, from just googling website name just to open it, spell check, conversion of anything into anything etcetcetc.
Kagi Unlimited - $19/mo or $180/year ($15/mo) or $288/biennial ($12/mo) - Original Kagi experience, with unlimited searches
I don't know where you live but for me it's 10 USD per month.
Says Premium | USD $10 /per month | Unlimited ad-free, private search.
On their /pricing page.
It mentions on the blog post that they'll grandfather in existing customers.
Been trying to get Workona plugin to work with it (both the Chrome and Firefox versions) on every Orion beta update, but nothing, it just doesn't work.
I'm starting to wonder if it's Orion that doesn't support some API call, or if I misconfigured something, but, there's no documentation that shows either.
In this day and age a search engine is one of the most important tools we have, and the price is rather cheap for not having to deal with Google and DDG ignoring my actual queries and including tons of results that doesn't match my query at all.
My time is worth something and having to deal with false positives takes actual time. Also it is mentally exhausting and the better I get at detecting fake results the bigger the chance is that I skip an actual hit.
But maybe most of all the arrogance of Google and DDG and Bing is tiring. When I ask for "something very specific" and every time they include a number of results that doesn't match, it is like they don't think I am an actual grown up who can decide for myself.
I have been very happy with it and how clean/fast it is to find what I want.
Anyway, exciting stuff and I wish the team best of luck!
The $10/month price is a pain point that will test my desire to keep using it long term. The $5-7 range feels much more ideal. Obviously they have costs to cover, but I can't see a large adoption rate unless they can bring the price down, which would be a bummer if they couldn't because the product is great.
If I could ask for one thing, though I don't think it is up to Kagi. I use my Android phone with the Microsoft Launcher and Edge and I for the life of me cannot figure out how to make it Kagi the default search engine.
Besides that, it has been a great service and well worth it! I wish the Kagi team well and I look forward to buying a shirt or hoodie in the future! :)
I particularly like the ability to lower and raise domains. I don't have many in my list, but the ones that are there are there for a reason.
Reading their pricing page, it says it costs them about one dollar for a single search query. Holy moly, that seems wildly expensive. I would really be interested in knowing why a single search query is so pricey.
I use Orion on my phone because it's the easiest way to get Kagi as your default search engine. It also sidesteps my two problems with Orion on the Mac: 1Password support (and Chrome extensions generally) and my years and years and years of muscle memory built up around Developer Tools. I've tried Safari's tools and they're just too different. (Once the Chrome extension support is fully-baked, I'll probably force myself to get used to the Safari tools. Until then, Brave it is.)
I am surprised at the mention of Crystal here. I wasn't expecting Crystal to be used for crawler!
> 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.
That seems a weird topic to highlight, quite far on the long tail of what is important for a functional web search engine.
But YMMV so don't let me discourage you from trying them.
But they are like: super expensive.
Unacceptable expensive. More than netflix, spotify and friends.
I wish they invest more into bringing down their own operating costs so that the premium package could be more affordable.
The issue here isn't whether you log searches, but whether you log payment transactions and it is almost a guarantee that they do and is probably by law. SimpleLogin or PrivacyHQ offers no guarantees of anonymity when it comes to government agencies. In fact, you can almost guarantee that virtual debit card providers are logging your transactions and from experience usually require you link a bank account.
So even if pay with a virtual debit card and use an email relay, it can still be tied back to your search history if for some reason you are suspected of searching for something that may be investigation worthy. I don't think it is fair to simply trust a company that claims they don't log things, when history has shown that they do in fact even when they say they don't.
So why would they even try to market themselves as more private or anonymous? If you want privacy or anonymity then you'll use a free search engine that doesn't want payment; and you'll search from behind a reliable VPN or via Tor.
We don't log payment transactions. We receive notifications from Stripe to our webhook which updates the billing state.
> So even if pay with a virtual debit card and use an email relay, it can still be tied back to your search history
That is why we make the point of not having any search history. Think about it - what would we use it for? It would just be a liability for us.
So then you have a Stripe account with the transaction information. It is ridiculous to think that you have no information about payments coming to you, not even a transaction ID or reference number.
> That is why we make the point of not having any search history. Think about it - what would we use it for? It would just be a liability for us.
"Trust us bro, we don't log."
Yeah, no thanks... I don't trust you because you told me to, and I've seen other companies saying the same thing that did in fact comply and keep logs but had agreements with agencies that made it "okay" to lie.
1. You don't know what privacy is. "We believe that Kagi has the most user-friendly privacy policy of any search engine out there. However, privacy and anonymity are not the same things. For example your parents can know everything about you and still fully respect your privacy." Ask any kid if privacy is their parents knowing everything. You're using it as a marketing term.
2. This is illegal public solicitation and an SEC violation: "anyone passionate about Kagi and our vision for the web will have the opportunity to invest as little as $5,000 USD and join the ride with us. It would be structured as a SAFE note and we would use the funds to expand the team and accelerate our product vision."
3. Stop abusing HN to shill your paid search engine. "We are pleased to see that Kagi is propagating fast through Hacker News, Reddit and Twitter with word of mouth from existing users." Kagi shills hijack every single Hn discussion thread about search. You is just as bad. Just. Stop.
I appreciate that you're watching out for the quality of the site, but you broke the site guidelines here, which is no doubt why users flagged your post.
Beyond that, your points would be much more persuasive if you made them more neutrally, without this kind of attack.
Fwiw this was the source of the self-promotion.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/887-comment-on-hn-discussion-of-k...
The kagifeedback thread you posted was also by another (imo too enthusiastic) user of kagi with no relation to the devs.
1. Attention was brought to us for the unfortunate phrasing of that sentence and it was edited in the post
2. I am curious what rules are violated by mentioning plans for an investment round?
3. While I am glad this discussion happened, it was not submitted or solicited by any Kagi team member. We published a blog post this morning and our users (I assume) took it from there, as these things tend to happen.
Finally the post you linked to in your second post was from a clearly excited user (not Kagi team member) on our public forum.