Kagi search reached 20k paying members
blog.kagi.com
blog.kagi.com
Whereas Kagi reminds me of the 'old' google search. The results are meaningful and relevant, not diluted with pages of generic article results. They also offer a lot of great customisation options like being able to block or boost certain sites in results. They have some built in lists for common filler sites. I can't comment on the AI variation but I hear that's progressing well.
I wouldn't call myself a power user of Kagi, but even then I'm getting far better results than other search engines, definitely worth the price per month.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just thought I'd share my anecdotal experience.
Small Web: results that favor noncommercial domains and topics.
Stats are released about these as well so you can easily copy heavy used fiters [0].
This only works as long as Kagi is a niche. The moment any search engine becomes commonplace I think they will inevitably succumb to SEO. Otherwise, they would have to change their methodologies every once in a while to completely flip the ecosystem.
I wonder if kagi's going to have to charge for listings some day, instead of users paying in, if they intend to grow substantially.
I also hope that domains which get blocked by lots of people will get reviewed for global downranking, but I don't think that's happening yet?
With Kagi as I understand it, the customer is the user since it’s a premium product that isn’t selling ads. There’s really no good reason for them not to just nuke bad actors.
Thankfully when I come across a irrelevant domain in Kagi I can just remove it from any future search results completely. If enough people do that, it may show up on the "most commonly removed" list inviting others to also ax it.
I rarely ever have an issue with spam on Kagi just by largely using the standard filters, and I'm confident this will remain the case.
And unrelated but I really like that I can redirect all reddit urls in search results to old.reddit.com, twitter to nitter etc. very helpful in searching on mobile.
They are the biggest search engine; every SEO trick, every spam attack is spearheaded against them. But also being the biggest and the inevitable, they can afford to blunt their search tool somehow in order to show more lucrative sort-of-hits and sell more ads. A moral hazard to do such a thing is always present fr any market-dominating player.
Kagi, in comparison, is tiny, and almost nobody cares to attack their algorithms. Back in 1990s, when Macs were a small minority in the PC-dominated world, they were the safest desktop machines, because almost nobody cared to write malware for them. Now that Macs are a sizable segment of computers in hands of important people, they are targeted by malware all right.
Sure, but also they're ignoring extremely basic issues. "every SEO trick" is one thing, "just copy the SO content and still get ranked on the first page" is them not caring. We can worry about them dealing with the complex issues after they address the low hanging fruit.
Google isn't incentivized to be a good search engine.
They are incentivized to be just good enough that you don't go elsewhere while increasing the number of ads / paid results.
Once I actually grab a full time job again I wouldn't mind grabbing my own subscription here to try it out. I'm curious if 300 searches/month is truly enough for me, though. And what would happen if I go over that rate. Am I simply unable to search more for that month?
Still I ended up subscribing, and after properly testing, I can recommend. The service is good, the blacklist feature is essential to me now; is just that the free tier is shit.
Also you can enable browsing history and use bookmarks to autofill stuff without having to use a search engine.
On top of that, this is during a month without any job (where I'd search even more on the clock). I hear it's 1.5 cents per query over but I can imagine doing 600+ searches once I'm employed again.
Per month?
My current Kagi searches from 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches. For sure I'd do 300 searches in a week, and on a particularly hairy day I might do it in a day.
> 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches
1256 / 23 (days between today and Jan 3rd) = 54.6 searches on average per day.
Some days higher, some lower. Sometimes it can take a couple of tries to get the search right, so you do 5-10 searches in one minute maybe. Doesn't seem farfetched to me.
0. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
If I saw one of those shirts in the wild, and I hadn’t just read this post and seen the pictures of the shirts, I would have had no idea it was a Kagi shirt.
Shouldn't gifts and similar things come after the business is properly sustainable?
Sounds pretty sustainable already to me, unless they have a really large team and/or really inefficient infrastructure, neither which seem true to me.
Back of the envelope:
The Bing API costs about $0.015 per query at the most cost effective tier. Kagi's highest revenue per query pricing is $5/300 queries = $0.166 / query. That's pretty slim margins, and only made worse by the $10 tier.
Now, they can of course start doing exclusively their own crawling, indexing and ranking and avoid paying some larger search engine for API access. But for that to be cheaper, they need orders of magnitude more scale
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
I'll assert that even a back of the envelope calculation is more useful than your initial "they must be sustainable unless the infra is inefficient, and it feels like it isn't" statement. Do you have an actual number rather than feelings? Is that number significantly lower than this estimate?
Kagi is slightly different than other SV startups in how we approach things because of the freedom given by being (nearly) completely bootstrapped and built with sustainability in mind since day one. Some companies buy ads to attract new customers, we buy tshirts to show gratitude to existing. We also reinvest any savings we make into lowering the price and increasing the value of the product (check our product velocity in release notes [1]). Our customers propelled us to where we are through word of mouth, it makes sense to keep investing in nurturing that relationship. And having 20,000 doggos walk around the earth soon is fun.
Winning in search is a marathon, not a sprint. We might as well enjoy the run.
Cool. Didn't realise that.
That's really good news as it proves the "search engine people pay for" concept is workable, unlike what many people seemed to think. :)
Edit: apparently his favorite was from mongo: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2016/07/my-favorite-datab... which I have to agree with, that is a good shirt.
I think I might still like the Snowflake one (3) the best though. Although rereading the article he says there is writing on the back of the Snowflake one which makes me not like it as much. There are very few stylish shirts I enjoy that have writing on the back of them.
Having been to Dr. Pavlo's office - or at least, one of them - I can attest to there being multiple cardboard boxes filled with gifted shirts from different companies. One of my favorite designs was actually from CMU's DB group itself - it has a little "this database kills fascists" tag on it, with a skull motif :D
[0]: https://ottertune.com/blog/2022-databases-retrospective
While it sounds like they will print 20k no matter what, it doesn’t seem like they will randomly ship them out to users. They really can’t, as they don’t have the addresses of all their users.
I've got to say those t-shirts look great.
I don't really have an opinion about whether this is an effective advertising spend or not. I hope they follow up. I don't need another free T-shirt but I'll probably wear it, I like the doggo.
> When the merch store goes live in about 8 weeks
It may be a part of a bigger commitment / batch. They'll sell more in the future with some extra income, so that should even out anyway.
But Kagi is missing an opportunity for a huge brand awareness campaign from this.
People who are already really happy with Kagi would become brand ambassadors.
Why isn’t the name ‘Kagi’ found anywhere on the t-shirt design?
People who want to know where it’s from would have to go out of the way to ask the tee wearer.
I’d also be much more likely to wear a shirt without a URL on it. I’ve been gifted shirts with URLs before, I have never and will never wear them in public.
As to the search results, it's always as good or better as Google. Sometimes I checked Google results just to make sure.
I wish them their best with platform growth.
9264 users on the annual family plan at $3/user/month = 27792
10799 users on the annual starter plan at $4.50/user/month = 48595.5
Total: $76387.5
As one of the 20K paying members, I feel embarrassed that I hadn't noticed this until now. Because this article presented the idea of wearing a Kagi T-Shirt, I suddenly started to care about what the logo looked like. Also, yes, I am excited to rep Kagi search.
Google doesn't deserve all uses of the letter g, worldwide, in all media, in perpetuity, exclusively.
Huh what am I missing? I have no idea what this link is trying to say.
It's definitely confusing to call it a logo in talking about designing the logo (let's say icon) though.
Mind you before seeing that about the 'g' I thought the dog was their 'logo'. I'm surprised the designer didn't insist on some simplification, a stronger, single identity; not that I know anything about design or marketing.
I wonder what the breakdown is between people who make the association versus those who don't.
Wouldn't that be a k?
Google is capital G
Kagi is lower case g
But actually Kagi is quite good and definitely worth it. I have regained the expectation that when I search for something I will find the thing that I want, and I hadn't realized how much I had lost that with Google. It's hard to demonstrate this because I think it's an accumulation of many small improvements, so I encourage people to give it a try and see for themselves.
I do worry that this won't last forever -- for example, I think the AI features are being provided below-cost to gain market share, and it does worry me that they're spending so much money on these tshirts. But I can always switch away later so I don't worry about it that much.
Excited to get a few stickers and a shirt as a thank you!
For all the people gawking at the expense of the free t-shirts: AFAICT those of us who are receiving them are paying customers; it's not like the money is coming right off of the top of their venture funds.
It is not worth it to website operators to spend money/time trying to game Kagi’s algorithms.
Because of this, as a paying user, I hope they can find a sustainable business with a relatively small number of paid users, where they can make nice profits and have nice salaries for their employees based of selling a service to a relatively few people who value it.
To game Google, you do stuff on your website content ; try various keywords regularly with authenticated and unauthenticated requests and see how your actions on your website affects your position on the requests' results.
With Kagi, you can't do unauthenticated requests, so the results you'll get will be unique to your account. So what you'll see is not what another random user will get. I guess you can still create new raw account each time, and maybe use the free-tier, but it's going to be a lot of work on your side without any assurance that the results are going to be the same on most user's results.
Furthermore, now that the team learned their lessons about monitoring usage more closely[^1], it's going to be quite hard to play this game without being noticed.
Of course, there is a "Kagi algorithm" that takes the website's contents and ranks it according to the search. The algorithm, of course, takes into account user preferences, but there is a massive amount of commonality. Yes, that ranking algorithm probably can be games, just like Google's algorithm is gamed now with SEO spam.
However, because of the size, there is no real incentive to spend time/money gaming it, but it is misleading to suggest that there is no algorithm.
I still think the 20k shirts is a terrible waste of mine, and I'm unlikely to even claim mine because the designs/colors don't appeal (there's a reason why very few clothes are bright yellow) and I'd still have to pay for shipping.
whoof
whoof
whoof
whoof
whoof!
who knows about their overhead costs though
I’m so glad I signed up for Kagi - I tried DDG for a while but always felt it was missing huge swathes of results and invariably I’d find myself going back to the Goog to “fill in the blanks”.
Think I count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve done that though in the last few months now I’m on Kagi.
And, I have to say, as a tech geek I find it utterly glorious that my searches are Quora free!
The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can
import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship
them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a
back-end database. So, we basically ended up owning a merch production operation
end-to-end, just so that we could ensure premium quality of these t-shirts!"LA weather" gets you to Louisiana, "SF weather" gets you to Santa Fe. Californians in shambles.
The returned search results are very similar, but:
* With Kagi I can up/downrank sites. Never again will my search return a result on TikTok or Facebook.
* Kagi’s AI stuff is really useful: summarize a site, get GPT style answers by using the “!quick” bang etc.
I still find $10/month steep but I think I’ll keep paying it.
I suspect the 'problem' (for someone in my position trying to choose) will always be that a ChatGPT sub is ahead in breadth of what it offers - for example DALLE image generation at the moment would probably stop me from swapping.
That way you pay exactly what you use, nothing more.
- Vim keybindings to select search results.
- Quick bangs to use bang shortcuts without an exclamation mark. Example: search "mdn yield" to directly get search results for "yield" on MDN.
- Blocking sites. No more annoying Quora results.
Kagi team cares deeply about the product and it shows. They recently added Quick Peek [0] to search results and it's implemented using the `details` element.
Going to sign up now
Qwant is, from the beginning, a scam to grab public funding. They made tons of promises but actually never delivered on them. Worst, they even lied on what the product could do, pretending to provide results from their own index while returning results from Bing. If it wasn't enough, there's also stories of management misconduct on employees. Some stuff is public and partly told on the Wikipedia page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Controversies It's a classic "we'll make a French/European [X]" with [X] being Google, Facebook, AWS... There's at least one project like that every year for two decades now. Every time it's a failure from the outside, but the founders are quite successful in pocketing millions of public funding from France/Europe.
Meanwhile, Kagi is "let's make a search engine for power users willing to pay for it". They're not here to take on Google. They're not here to grab public funding. They're making a product for which people are willing to pay. They deliver on absolutely everything they say. Proof is in the pudding.
I'm a happy Kagi user/customer for a few months now, but what I find the most satisfying is not the website itself, it's how they are building it.
While every big company is falling for the _enshitification_ of their products, seeing Kagi doing the exact opposite, and yet being clear that their goal is to take our money each month, is honestly quite refreshing.
These shirts look great too. Looking forward to the store!
In this age of ongoing enshittification, seeing a company do something special for the customers who are cheering for its success, is actually heartwarming.
IMO, this will boost/cement customer loyalty.
Also, I often want to contribute (financially) to such projects, because I want them to succeed.
However, don't happen to have 3k USD to spare (kagi did a fundraiser via SAFE notes) -- I imagine that, now they've figured out the t-shirt logistics, they could offer other designs in future, as a way to contribute money (like buying merch at a band's concert). I'd buy a couple more doggo tees, if/when they made more designs.
Curious to know if kagi or any of its users have tried to quantify how much more quickly they get answers to search queries.
Even if it only saves 10 minutes a month, it could be worth switching.
Why would any customer care about a T-Shirt though? Probably best to put that money into the product, which the early adopters would appreciate more than some generic, likely ill-fitting T-Shirt.
Just want to chime in say that is not lacking. Check Kagi's release notes [1] and compare speed of development with any search engine (or internet product for that matter) in the world.
Most users do not use 50% of Kagi's capabilities and new ones are being added each week.
You can instantly see which domains/websites are hated by users (to be more accurate, by the technically-inclined users that use Kagi) and which ones are most valued.
I haven’t changed my iPhone back, but feel like I should do something there, as it’s a bit inconsistent.
I used Firefox for while, as it has support for adding any search engine possible, natively. But went back to Safari for whatever reason.
90% of the time I'm not looking for a website, I need the answer to a question. I can either spend 15 minutes sifting through clickbait sites until I finally find the answer, or I can spend 15 seconds asking a chatbot.
For the handful times a month I still need to find a webpage there's no point in paying for one..
The reason people like Kagi is that it doesn't show these (anywhere near as much), the top result has the answer
But my point is that they introduced it a little too late. I'd have loved to have something like this a few years ago but now most of my search engine activity is being displaced by LLMs.
And DuckDuckGo already meets my needs enough for when I do still need it (yes I know it's just a skinned version of Bing :) ). And I don't have to bother logging in to it on every computer and phone I own (I easily have 10 computers and 6 mobile devices in my home alone).
People really have their priorities wrong when it comes to spending small amounts of money per month...
https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-...
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
When what this change made and what does it do?
What's your self-hosted choice of the moment?
I do care about the search results and they got worse and are not deterministic anymore since they started using brave. Maybe it's omething else they changed in the code but I expect to at least see the first results of a previous search on the page when I search for it again a few days later. Especially when it was a helpful result. It's useless for me now.
As far as politics... for a lot of people not relying on a single particular global megacorp (who tend to extend the soft-power of a given state or economic bloc) for access to information is a semi-political choice. There is very much an inescapable concern of "who chooses what I get to see and what are their incentives" that can't really be reduced to "I don't care about politics". It cannot be separated from politics, which is why people have such strong feelings about it. I'm not sure that's what people really mean though, I think they talk past each other a lot on this topic. No disrespect meant to you and I appreciate your comments.
I really like the idea that they'd hedge and not give any single index overwhelming leverage over what Kagi users are fed, and conveniently for me (who does care a bit about the who of the thing) if they stick to that approach it should provide more diversity of contemporaneous political messaging... so it can also please the (I think somewhat tedious) "no politics" crowd at the same time. So that seems good?
Tradeoffs maybe, and give them some more time to figure it out, incorporate more indices?
I feel I've seen more AI Spam recently although when I do I've just ended up downvoting the site immediately, and that has generally fixed the issues as there seems to be a few repeat offenders. That could totally be up to the Kagi postprocessing being tweaked though.
[1]: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan...
The goal should be profitability and sustainability, not user count. It’s not a social media site where the number of users should matter.
The hardest hurdle is getting people to pay anything. Even 1 cent would be difficult, as it requires a sign up and adding payment information.
With the trend that the tech industry seems to be taking towards enshitification (I might be quite cynical...) Kagi proves that is possible to make profitable business differently!
Congrats!!
Back in 2022 they had this blog post on their economics: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan...
Their target was to break even around 25K paying customers. Would be interesting to hear if that is still the goal and where they currently stand but TFA doesn’t cover that topic.
the only thing i personally struggle with is deleting "google" as a substitute for "search for it on the internet" from my vocabulary. haven't used google search since then, feels weird… maybe it's because in german "kacki" is a childish saying for "shit". so "lass mich das kagin" ("let me kagi that") feels weird too :D but hey, wix (="wank" on german) made the best out of it :D
even if its only 10 searches a day, it needs something. I am never going to use it unless I can try it out for a while.
Reeks of buyer’s remorse. No one cares about your shirts. Imagine if they used that 200k to buy carbon offsets instead.