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Comment by MrVandemar | Hacker News Reader

The top-ranked sources really show Kagi's current demographic. It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals.

I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more diverse searching requirements, and if so, how they would be able to actually reach them.

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> It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals.

I would say this is a blessing as it allows us to focus on things that matter to tech-savvy users (Kagi founder here).

> I wonder if they are interested in attracting users with more diverse searching requirements,

Yes, we are :)

> if so, how they would be able to actually reach them

Through our family plan [1], most likely. This is how I got my family members on board a paid search product.

I might add that "Kagi for Kids" is the first true attempt at having a search engine made specifically for kids, with a host of parent controls, which was never a thing in the last 25 years for some reason.

We are also seeing more and more users who are not techies (but are tech-savvy) becoming members. This may be followed by non-tech savvy users in the future. I do see the first signs of the age of ad-supported, "free" search, coming to an end [2].

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/family-plan

[2] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

I was hesitant to configure my partner’s devices (family plan) to set as default engine but eventually convinced them and they haven’t even brought it up once since. I assume no news is good news! I would be less hesitant to recommend to other non-tech friends/family if it were easier to configure as default on Safari. Heck, I’d even entertain gifting subscriptions. The quality of results for me has been incredibly reliable. Enjoyable, even. And, I didn’t even take the time to start configuring these kinds of rules. Love this. Great product. Wishing long, lasting success.

Thank you very much for the kind words.

Unfortunately we can not influence the choices that Safari makes, but we did pull an effort to build an entire browser [1] to replace it because of that :)

[1] https://browser.kagi.com

Any progress on a Linux version?

We haven't begun work on the Linux version of the browser yet. We will need to significantly expand our team before undertaking the development of a browser for a new platform.

Please make a browser for Linux too. And please make it based on Firefox preferably.

Thank you. Lots of love to Kagi, though I'm not a paying user yet but I do love what you folks are doing and want to f*ck Google.

Why Firefox? What’s wrong with the WebKit they’re using already?

> And please make it based on Firefox preferably.

The macOS browser is based on WebKit. If the team can’t justify the Linux version yet, changing it to a whole different engine (and one which is notoriously hard to embed, by admission of Mozilla itself) is even less likely.

There's an alternative [1], so you can use any search engine. Although i always wonder about whether my privacy is at risk when using this app...

[1] xSearch for Safari: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-safari/id157990206...

The work you all are doing is incredible. Thank you, and I’ll be a paying customer as long as you keep the show going. I’m notoriously stingy about paying subscriptions for tech services, but the money I pay for Kagi directly impacts my productivity. It feels like a distant nightmare when I think back about the days when I spent time sitting through blogspam results on Google :p

Hi. Thanks for the great service!

Any chance you would consider adding cryptocurrency payments as an option? You would load up the account with these prepaid credits, and then use whatever plan you want until the credits run out. This is how I pay for Mullvad and works well for me.

I think would be nice as I see kagi is aiming to be privacy-forward. And it’s nice knowing that such a payment is a one-off and won’t forever keep renewing.

We have a discussion on our forum [1] about this. Input welcome!

[1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/493-enable-anonymous-payments-ala...

Yikes, that thread reflects so badly on Kagi to me. Over a year of people explaining why Monero is needed if you actually cared about user privacy, with no results. Weird claims that it is difficult to implement. Can only conclude that the company doesn't actually care about user privacy

Or, more likely, they didn't want to take on the additional burden of transacting in funny money of dubious worth.

Hope you enjoy linking all your search queries to your credit card, really. This attitude is unbelievable to me.

And pray tell, how does one acquire this Monero that you're defending with religious fervor? By linking your credit card to some "currency" exchange that may or may not already be under investigation for fraud?

Even if it were a process as invasive and painful as getting a bank account, it would remain the only technology that enables users to get a search account privately (since Kagi says cash is not scalable for them). Given the level of snark and off-topicness, I presume you don't actually expect me to answer the question with dozens of different methods.

This is a company that claims over and over that they are privacy-respecting, but are running a service that unnecessarily collects your real ID via credit card, otherwise you can't do searches. After seeing what happened to Google, I am shocked that people like you are so dismissive toward me for trying to hold them to account and caring about this issue. Yes I react with religious fervor at this issue - privacy. This is an age where companies are handing over information to convict people for seeking abortions even in the US.

If you have another solution then please share it.

> Given the level of snark and off-topicness, I presume you don't actually expect me to answer the question with dozens of different methods.

Dozens of different methods to ... buy crypto? You can keep them.

I would trust something like Kagi more than any crypto exchange to keep my privacy.

You are right that it may not be a good idea to have all your searches tied to your identity, but mixing crypto into that won't help.

I dont understand anything you wrote here

you have to trust not just kagi: the server hosts kagi uses, kagi security policies, all kagi employees, the country kagi operates in, and kagi as a business in perpetuity (not getting bought or drastically changing just to survive).

I can't trust that forever. So it's really just simple that they should have a way to dissociate accounts with searches and payments properly

If you use your credit card with an exchange to buy Monero, then use that Monero (from a non-custodial/self operated wallet) to pay for Kagi search (or Mullvad or anything else) you’re not linking the ID tied to the credit card to your searches and other activity. That’s the point.

That just means there is one more step in the chain to try and identify me, not that it’s impossible.

It's a step that is, if not impossible, at least statistically infeasible…

Please don’t waste time on this! You’re all doing such good work and I’d much rather not see it wasted on indulging some techno-anarchist nerds

There is a lot of value currently tied up in crypto around the world, with increasing difficulty in using it on products and services. Offering a way to use this value would open additional revenue streams for Kagi. The challenge is in conversion, as many banks do not support the practise, and laws are becoming tougher with regards to crypto payments.

So it would be useless to Kagi…

That doesn't sound particularly valuable to me. If it's that valuable, why don't you convert it to USD and pay Kagi with that?

Anonymity?

This sounds an awful lot like you're saying "it's too hard for me and others to convert our crypto into cash, so I'd like Kagi to do it for me."

Those all sound like solid arguments not to do it?

One thing that I don't quite get about your family plans: why is the smaller plan ($14 for 1.5k queries) cheaper per query than the larger one ($20 for 2k queries)? Not that it's a big difference, but it feels off somehow.

Product prices are determined by the willingness for consumers to pay for them. Families (especially kids) have different priorities and search habits to IT professionals, for example, which appears to be a common persona for them. It is likely that they bet that the four extra users and child friendly options are what families care about, rather than a high number of searches. It's also likely that families simply don't need that many searches, and in limiting them to 2,000, they discourage abuse (six professionals purchasing one family plan).

> We are also seeing more and more users who are not techies (but are tech-savvy) becoming members.

I’ve seen quite a few marketing people and researchers in (their discord channel) #introduce-yourself

> parent controls, which was never a thing in the last 25 years for some reason.

IE tried to setup a rating scheme for websites to adopt for this purpose but it never got any traction. Someone wrote an interesting post about it once but I can’t find it.

Hi. Would there be any chance of you releasing the index of how many trackers websites have publicly? I remember reading about that somewhere on your site, but you eventually took that offline.

Sure, we can make this a public API. We were already thinking about this but other things got in the way.

Would you mind posting this as a feature suggestion on kagifeedback.org ? (this is how most ideas for Kagi come to life)

I feel that programmers are the main audience that knows life can be better in software. A typical programmer might be so offended by Pinterest's awfulness that they'll look for any way to prevent it, knowing it can be done. Some might go for an extension like uBlacklist, others might be so furious that they want to pay money to stop this somehow.

But seriously, I do think that unless you work with software, it's hard to even imagine alternatives to the big players could exist.

It shows the demographic of those who would customize their search results. Any search engine that provided this feature would probably skew this way if you looked at who used the feature.

Though since they offer it and others don't, your point still applies.

> The top-ranked sources really show Kagi's current demographic. It obviously is attractive to programmers and IT professionals.

And specifically, American programmers and IT professionals.

As a European IT professional and a Kagi subscriber, I get my information from and contribute my knowledge to the same sources as you do. I don't know why I would bother to look something up in my native language when there is much more information available in English, the lingua franca of the (Western) world. I don't even read Wikipedia in my own language, unless the subject is better covered.

I’m also European and subscribe to Kagi. One feature I really like is that I can specifically make a local search by adding a bang with the country, like !fr or !es.

Specifically, American web programmers. MDN is the second-most-pinned website.

Why does MDN suggest nationality?

Why American programmers? I don't see anything on that list indicative of that, and many of the top blocked sites are gTLDs.

Mainly the foxnews.com and breitbart.com being in the top 15 (top 10 if you count all the Pinterest domains as one) in the Block list. As a non-American, I hardly ever see these in my search results, and wouldn't have felt a need for a Block filter for them.

And while there's some British news presence (Guardian and Daily Mail), and what seems to be a Chinese one (kknews.cc), American news media is the one with the heaviest presence (CNN, NY Post, NY Times, etc.).

It's gotta be better than the SEO garbage on Google

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