Hacker News Reader

Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

I still pay for Kagi for its search but this has kind of been the problem from the beginning with their org.

- Search has been a breath of fresh air, I wish they dedicated more time to it.

- Orion...is ok? I use it off and on and it is fine but would rather have better search. The premise of the browser is nice but it feels like this could probably be a whole separate company or a purely open source endeavor. It has always been kind of clunky and not something I want to pay for.

- AI tools, I get the multiple pivots and I do believe that more recent advancements in ML/AI will make search a better experience but I do wish they had a little more focus.

- The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in their org. The way I look at it is instead of making their products better, they flushed a bunch of money down the drain for t-shirts and its offensive to paying customers who are paying because they enjoy the product and want it to become better, they don't want a t-shirt.

- I don't care about email, I don't care about other tools, make a great search experience first. Release all of the AI enhancements that you think will make sense, focus, focus, focus.

Edit: As I was adding my comment this post flagged and marked dead. Sometimes HN is weird.

View on HN

> The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in their org. The way I look at it is instead of making their products better, they flushed a bunch of money down the drain for t-shirts and its offensive to paying customers who are paying because they enjoy the product and want it to become better, they don't want a t-shirt.

Kagi founder here and I want to clarify the train of thoughts around Kagi printing and giving away 20,000 t-shirts for its users.

- Kagi is not a typical VC funded startup.

- It is company I bootstrapped by going all in (meaning I put millions of dollars of my money into it).

- After all these years building it, we are lucky to have such incredibly passionate user community.

- That community is 100% responsible for Kagi's growth as a business through word of mouth (Kagi does no paid advertising).

- We are also famously taking a firm stance against ad-tech, so conventional advertising is not something I want to do.

- To do something as crazy as to start a company that builds a paid search engine and browser you obviously need to be thinking out of the box.

So combine all of this together and I thought that sending a t-shirt to all the people who supported us along the journey made a lot of sense.

The only thing I did not count on is how difficult will be to pull this off as I did not want to settle with less than premium quality for these t-shirts. As a result they will be delayed (my best guess is July/August) and I apologize for that to our users. In hindsight, we probably should have opted out for something easier to pull off (someone mentioned a billboard on 101, that would certainly be much easier).

This did not jeopardize Kagi's finances in any way at any point, nor I would do anything like that ever (as I said I am all in and have everything to lose, so I run a fiscally responsible business). In fact, Kagi has turned profitable recently.

This has also not impacted our ability to hire (we went from 10 people twelve months ago to 25+ now) and it did not impact our ability to ship a great product (check Kagi and Orion changelogs). I would venture to say that most Kagi users agree that Kagi is getting better and better every week with great speed.

So would I do it again? Well let's wait and see what we have in store for hitting 50,000 members mark :)

I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. Your gut got you this far, but to be a profitable company you are going to need to consider the advice and concerns of your stakeholders. Based on your current description, you have two stakeholders (yourself + customers).

If the venture fails, you will ask yourself if you listened enough. Be proactive, address concerns, do not put yourself in a defensive position. Embrace change, be agile, and most importantly listen to your feedback.

Wish Kagi nothing but success, I would very much like a disruptor in this space. Best of luck to you and your team.

That reminds me of the faster horses quote I'm afraid.

Or you know, that all cell phones had to have a physical keyboard. Until they suddenly didn't.

[Never tried Kagi, but let the man do his thing.]

Maybe customers were wary of having 1 ton of steel barreling down the street. And there's no ergonomics in phones. Their prime quality is portability. Ergonomics has been sacrificed to convenience.

Iirc it was said that speeds over 30 km/h will kill you too.

A ton of steel bearing down at those speeds will do so handily.

worldwide over 1 million deaths a year...

How many of those were wearing seatbelts?

very few pedestrians involved in accidents with cars are wearing seatbelts

It's interesting to see the change in discourse given the opposition to seatbelts from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39977058

This is a forum where people respond well to practical explanations from thoughtful founders.

I don't know if the OP got what they needed from this reply, but I assume I'm not alone in being impressed by the humility and candor of the response and developed much greater affinity for Kagi from some of the specifics of what were said.

I want more companies to have communicative, principled management that invites a sustainable base of like-minded customers/partners and fewer companies that pretend they can please 7B people by radically changing their product every 3 months.

Interesting take. It is valid and don't take my alternative interpretation as suggesting otherwise.

I owned a business for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was my primary source of income. I valued feedback, tried my hardest to solicit as much of it as possible, and always took it to heart (though I had to always try and glean statistics from the sum of all feedback so that I was never spending resources on minority opinions).

What I read from the user was that the company created an optics problem. It wasn't whether the company was losing money or not, it was just that the user is choosing to support that company because they want a really good search engine, and the optics of divesting the company's resources into multiple projects makes it appear as if it could be the case that not enough focus is being spent on what really matters to that user.

What I read from the founder was that the optics issue went completely over his head and a complete dismissal of the user's concerns and feedback, along with a doubling down of the decisions made.

It's not a good look in my opinion. Even though the founder was polite and didn't say anything inappropriate, I would NEVER have responded to a customer of mine like that.

You sound like a very good businessman, and a reasonably astute interrogator of user feedback. I wish there were more businesses with people having those traits at the helm!

I get OP's take, but freediver is essentially saying that Orion and their other ventures are a part of the vision. To OP and others, it may seem like a side-mission or a waste of resources, but I trust the guy bootstrapping the company with his own money.

Hell, Orion is the first Webkit browser where FireFox and Chrome plug-ins work on iOS. If may seem like a misstep, but I see it as calculated. If Kagi search hopes to ever take on Google and Chrome, they need their own champion.

It's a stretch to justify paying for search, but I do it. To find out I actually pay for a bunch of stuff I don't care about when search is still a work in progress, naw bro, I'm good. I don't go to a restaurant that has a partial menu to fund a race team. Cool that was your reason for opening the place, you sunk a ton of money into something you think it super cool, but I'm actually here for the food and ignored you don't have fryers yet when I thought that me eating here was supporting them coming, not something else.

You are both right. Freediver laid out the vision, and some users are saying the vision isn't what the paying users are paying for. As someone who ran a business like this, GS is telling Freediver this should probably be something to give extra attention to and consciously decide is it the company the vision or the search product people are paying for?

How is this different from Hershey funding a school for orphans from its profit, or Microsoft funding Internet Explorer with some of the price you paid for Windows (theoretically), or any business that uses income from its stable products to fund new products? The only thing I can think is that you are not actually satisfied with the product (search results for a month) and so in your mind you are funding R&D of the product you would like (better search results for a month). In which case, getting upset is understandable, but assuming my analysis is correct, the mismatch is that you aren't buying for the product they are actually selling.

I think GP's point was that Kagi's not a stable product, yet.

If this if your reaction, you may not know how a bunch of companies work.

...such a weird response given freedivers announcement of "thinking out of the box".

The vision of a company shouldn't be much of a concern to paying customers of an existing product.

> It's a stretch to justify paying for search, but I do it.

I think therein lies the problem for many people. If you're already at a stretch to justify paying for search, any deviation from your assumption of the correct decisions from the company will be magnified.

> pretend they can please 7B people

I think the most positive aspect of freediver's response is the implied dismissal of the above. - that their stubborness is genuine, not a more robotic, seemingly hollow, response of concern. As a marketing approach, I'm wondering if maybe that would give you less reach and more impact in general.

.. and then the founder decided to harangue the author in email. Guy can't seem to stop stepping on his own dick.

https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

Yeah.. I can understand where the author's coming from not wanting to be on a call or get emailed by the founder, but this is such an immediate assumption of bad "fatih" on their part, and a tactless way of communicating that, that I don't consider it a great look for the author.

I'm not even arguing people should assume good faith until proven otherwise (I don't think we should, generally). Just that being so steadfast in one's assumption of bad faith is unwarranted.

Surely, many of us maintain a blog where we publish personal reflections, often discussing new technologies we test or try to use. It would truly be a nightmare to personally engage with every business owner, developer, or investor.

If this were an occasional occurrence, I would agree with you, but it seems to happen systematically. Perhaps it's an exaggerated and counterproductive way of reacting.

People have the right to hold different opinions without feeling compelled to try to convince others of their own views or to be persuaded by others' opinions. Accepting that people can have differing viewpoints demonstrates respect for diversity of opinion and individual freedom of thought.

The concept of accepting different opinions without trying to convince each other implies respect for intellectual autonomy and freedom of thought for each individual, while still encouraging open dialogue and constructive engagement __when appropriate__.

This was difficult to read. Not a hint of empathy on that thread.

It really does call into question everything in the origt blog post. The emails from the CEO are such a breath of fresh air. Even the typos are endearing. It reads like an immediate, frank, unfiltered reaction, giving an honest expression of his values. and he didn't lose his cool while being repeatedly taunted by the blog author who only wanted a one-way attack amd the last word without listening to a rebuttal.

I think you can read that thread in multiple ways depending on your previous experience.

As a woman who’s had bad experiences with men before, this kind of “no you owe me your time” behaviour usually triggers a “get away from this guy; fast” kind of response.

This doesn’t mean Kagi is necessarily bad or that this was what Vlad intended, but it does for sure reduce my faith in the project. Not enough to stop paying for Kagi, but I’ve definitely gone to the “raise shields, power phasers” stage.

That's fair I guess. That's not meant flippantly, but I don't have that experience so I can only guess. However isn't it best to assume good faith in a non threatening situation?

If this is a regular "trigger point" in real life, I can understand that as a knee jerk, but there's no danger or need for immediate reaction via email, so why judge through that lens once you've identified you're doing so?

IMO the author did himself no favors publishing this email thread.

> I work in CX, you should listen to your customers.

...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.

> ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.

I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here. I assume many people are on the same boat, so I wouldn't be so sure about that.

FWIW I'm a customer and had never read about it on HN until this post. I learned about it from a private Discord programmer community.

Same shit, really.

> I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here.

Perhaps I should have said "target customers" where I said "customers", I don't know. But it should not be surprising that "being an HN user" correlates strongly with "finds out about things on HN".

Kagi does zero advertising, only word of mouth (or from social news sites).

I would strongly bet their primary source of customers came via a HN referral.

We are literally their Target Customers.

In fact, HN is the only place I’ve heard anything about Kagi. I’ve done my best to evangelize to non-HN friends though :)

If anything, I’m interested in what the evolution will look like as their customer base expands beyond HN types…

Kagi has always explicitly gone after Hacker News readers as their target customer.

I think that statement is generally true for any random company, but I think for a company like Kagi, HN users are actually a lot more representative of their user base.

>I work in CX, you should listen to your customers.

The only way a customer speaks is with money. If people like what you sell, you'll have more customers speaking with their wallet. If they don't then they tell you so by not purchasing what you sell. Internet commenters (such as myself) do not represent all customers or even a majority. People who are happy with a product usually see no reason to give feedback – especially when it's a small purchase. Likewise, people who hate your product wouldn't purchase it in the first place.

This sounds like a great argument for not listening to anyone, or improving your product or messaging at all. Make the obvious observation that the complainers are a minority (ignoring that vocal non-complainers are also a minority), that their public complaints don't represent the opinions of one or two orders of magnitude of people who won't ever complain (just silently drop), are not ever influential, and that the silent majority support every decision you've made.

The cool part is that as people start leaving your product, complainers will become an even smaller minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself. Maybe blame it on bullying?

What people say they want is usually something completely different to their purchasing behaviour, and as a business you should listen little to what people say they want and listen much to how they spend their money.

For just about any business, if they were to ask their customers or the public at large what they want, the answer is usually "We want free stuff!". Cool to do if you're a politician, but bad business practice.

There's an old expression saying "the customer is always right", meaning that you can never blame the customers for how they spend or don't spend their money. If paying customers show a certain preference you better give it to them.

People who don't complain but silently drop are speaking with their wallets and that has to be listened to, as I said in my previous post. A business has to listen to customer spending behaviour and not listen too much to complainers. Normal people will give hotels awful reviews if it was raining on their vacation and great reviews if the weather was good and they had fun with their friends. Complaining is a past time to release some stress for many, and a pathological problem for a few. But when it comes to actually spending money is where the truth comes out.

Most people will not like your product and not buy your product, that's the large majority. That's why most normal businesses do not have the same reach as for example Apple or Toyota.

> The cool part is that as people start leaving your product, complainers will become an even smaller minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself.

You can be sure that nobody second guesses themselves more than business leaders – especially if sales drop or stagnate. That doesn't mean that every complainer is right in their complaints.

As for Kagi there seems to be very many commenters online and in their feedback forums who believe that the main selling point of the service is privacy or extensive customisation. But I believe that the main selling point is search results quality and that everything else comes second. At least if they want to widen their customer base beyond computer hackers.

If you take a look at the Kagi feedback forums, there's almost every week somebody starting a thread where they demand that Kagi implements a very niche feature and then threatens to unsubscribe if they don't do it. Or demands a niche feature or they won't sign up. You can't listen too much to these people, you have to follow your own vision and if people agree with your decisions you'll see it in sales. If not, then you were wrong in your vision.

>and as a business you should listen little to what people say they want and listen much to how they spend their money.

yeah well if I never pay money for kagi and never speak about anything how the hell is kagi supposed to know what they could do to get me to pay for them?

Casting a wide net and see what they catch, like most businesses who are not making bespoke solutions for their clients. Probably there is nothing they could do that would make you specifically pay for them.

Terrible take. A complaint is worth twice a compliment because complaints are actionable. And both are worth more than silence.

That doesn’t mean a business needs to acquiesce to every little demand. But “just listen to the money” is a horrible path for product improvement.

> because complaints are actionable

plenty of actionable complaints are just wild goose chases to nowhere.

Sure. A complaint of “why did you give us t-shirts?” isn’t very actionable aside from perhaps being more verbose as to why. But something like “Why are you guys starting an e-mail service? Most of us just want a good search engine with perhaps a simple LLM attached to it for base things like summarization” is definitely actionable.

I would like a Gmail competitor with solid email search, so that wouldn't be a strange side show for me, if anything they'd be copying Google's evolution in possibly a pro-user way that might be game changing in similar ways Gmail was game changing when it came out.

The problem is, there are many customers. You should listen, but that doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything or submit to every demand. I for one find Orion useful and it would be a bummer if it was scrapped because of a single comment on HN. Also, “I lost faith in a company because it made T-shirts” sounds a bit hyperbolic to take seriously IMO.

"Kagi does no paid advertising"

I remember Daniel King's PowerPlayChess channel recently started promoting Kagi, doesn't this count as paid advertising or is this deal something else?

You are right, we started doing that last week so technically we are doing marketing now.

It really does seem like you’re being a bit too unfocused Vlad.

Delivering high-quality search over the entire Internet, higher quality than Google, is something so complex that even if you were literally the worlds smartest person and all the other Kagi employees were number 2 to number 26, there would still likely be stumbles at least once a year on something.

Because there’s like a million gotchas hidden along the path to just reliably matching Google search quality circa 2010 in the 2024 environment. Let alone delivering a high-quality browser, AI tools, etc., on top.

I'm not convinced it's actually that complicated.

Google search has been bad for a long time. It's clear they serve their customers (advertisers) quite well, but as a user of their search, they're not particularly impressive.

The biggest problem is a problem of scale: being the biggest search provider means Google are targeted by SEO, so it's harder for Google to sift out the AI-generated garbage--Kagi just isn't involved in the arms race that Google is. But as a user that's not my problem; I'm not going to tolerate bad search results out of some sense of "fairness" to a corporation. And Kagi is delivering real user-centered features which are, frankly, obvious, i.e. Google should be embarrassed that they don't let you filter/prioritize domains or search within lenses like Kagi does.

I could see Kagi being able to sidestep maybe 95% of the 'arms race'.

But even the remainder will trip them up every now and then.

If these periods last only a few minutes it probably won't matter but if it lasts a few days or more then it's very likely to impact customer retention.

Serving optimally performing ads to billions of global users is a radically different problem than serving optimal search results and accessory features to a self-selected 50,000 or 500,000 customers.

Hence why I specifically said search quality without mentioning a large userbase...

Did you not see the last part on your end?

Plus, if anything a small userbase makes it more difficult for quality search because the long tail is still effectively infinitely large, relative to the competencies of a single decision maker, but now there is only have one user searching for any random super niche topic maybe once a month, in total.

So they can't even a/b test or rely on customers reporting in on the real situation because it is too sparse.

The point is that search quality is subjective, not objective, and the two companies are each structured to approach it very differently.

In pursuing billions of global users across all demographics and trying to maximally monetize them through ads, Google is pursuing an entirely different measure of "search quality" than Kagi.

Google delivers their version of search quality when a rice farmer in Thailand and financier in the Bay Area both reach for Google when they want to find something online and then get distracted by an ad.

Meanwhile, Kagi gets their version right when they have a profitable base of happy customers. They can make different and more aggressive assumptions about the needs of their users, solicit and digest direct feedback about those assumptions, and optimize a product that delivers superb search quality for their niche.

They're completely different technical problems that only occasionally intersect. Their engineering teams aren't competing with each other.

Even if the entire customer base was limited to only HN users with karma exceeding X amount there will still be thousands of searches per day in obscure niches, just each one in a different niche.

So I don't see how Kagi can avoid having to deliver quality search results in millions of niches. Just at a very low frequency compared to Google.

Or are you suggesting to not bother with search quality past a certain lower threshold?

> Because there’s like a million gotchas hidden along the path to just reliably matching Google search quality

I don’t know about you, but the reason I’m paying for Kagi is because their search results are reliably better than Google.

That may be because all the spam optimizes for Google, but noneless they’ve already done the thing you say they should focus on.

As long as the search quality isn’t compromised it doesn’t matter to me what they do with my money.

> Kagi does no paid advertising

Because of adverse selection?

Users that are users because of marketing are somehow different?

I meant digital advertising, like ads in search engines and websites - stuff that has gone out of control and we are actively fighting against. I would consider a billboard or sponsoring a podcast for example.

Billboards on inbound roads to major US tech hubs, beyond just SF/NYC targeting bedroom communities with families, seem worthwhile.

As does some sponsorship a la the VPN ads my kids see constantly in content heavy educational videos.

Billboards are ethically and morally disgusting.

It is trying at all cost to make drivers lose focus of the road to see your advert, putting themselves and the people around them at risk of a road crash.

Sounds like a cool place to work. I'll check back for an opening in TypeScript / Rust backend.

Keep going! Kagi is great. Years ago nobody thought Google could be challenged and that nobody would pay for search, yet here you are.

do they have a decent subscriber base? i thought it was still very niche

Somewhere between 20,000 (number of t-shirts sent out) and 50,000 (their stated next target). Not too bad for a startup but a drop in the proverbial ocean of search.

They have a live tracker of subscribers, 25,785 at time of posting comment.

https://kagi.com/stats

how one can run search engine on 2-3M annual budget(with assumption avg subscription is $10/m)?..

Honestly I'm astonished there are only that many.

How? For the vast, vast majority of people, paying for search is insane. And that includes the people who pay for other services.

Judging from how often Kagi comes up here (HN), I actually thought they were far bigger than they are.

The percentage of HN users in their customer base is very probably far higher than the percentage of HN users in the general population. Many orders of magnitude ;)

Why don't you read the post you're commenting on? The answer is in there.

cause commenter was making claim that was not grounded in reality so i thought i missed something

I prefer internet ads to Billboards. Billboards are disgusting.

I agree there should be less billboards in this world.

I prefer billboards, but I think that’s probably because they are exotic for me. We don’t really have them in Germany (or at least where I am), so when I see them in South Africa, they are always this cool and interesting thing.

As a south african, you get desensitized and I dislike them deeply. They always take my focus off the road or sometimes are lit up like the sun..

Please please please take Hacker News' opinions with a very large grain of salt. Many of Hacker News' users work at garbage AdTech companies and there are often people posting here who say things like "I for one enjoy targeted ads" (that's an actual quote). This place is not representative of your customer base.

I love what you're doing and will continue to support you at your Professional tier as long as you continue doing what you're doing.

If HN is not representative of the customer base for a paid search engine, then what is?

That's a difficult question, but I think we can pretty clearly say that a user base with a high concentration of AdTech workers is probably a bit biased against a company that is pretty clearly anti-AdTech.

The number of times I've heard people extol the virtues of targeted ads on this site is absurd. I've even heard folks here say that Google ads are more helpful than the search results as if that's a good thing. And these are far more common comments here than comments in favor of actually returning good search results or aligning your income with user interests.

I would think people in AdTech would be first in line to pay for a search engine that avoids AdTech. They understand how the sausage is made. They want the rest of us to use the AdTech products but they themselves are going to avoid them where possible.

How often do you think the CEO pf Delta Airlines flies in first class versus on a private jet? My guess is only often enough to gin up a little PR.

Sure, but that doesn't translate into people telling the truth online.

And to be clear, I'm not even talking about being intentionally dishonest. AdTech workers likely believe the pro-ad propaganda they spout because they have to in order to live with themselves.

For my own business (epaper calendars), HN has been a great source of feedback from potential customers. People here are both direct and kind with their feedback.

The thing you have to keep in mind is that HN is a very specific niche of the Internet. But for a slightly nerdy, not mass-market, product like mine (or Kagi) this niche is a great place to grow.

You just have to be mindful to see the feedback through the lens of the fact that you're talking to a niche audience and keep an eye on what a broader market might be looking for if that's where you're planning to go

I agree. My look about HN for privacy-focused topics changed after YouTube's blocker war. I realized there are many privacy-truder-tech workers here, and their comments were largely structured smartly to lighten how awful those "tech industries" are.

HN is probably more representative of the customer base than your preconceived notions and hostility. I imagine a large base of the current 20+k users are via HN.

Is there an estimate of HN's userbase?

> there are often people posting here who say things like "I for one enjoy targeted ads"

You can find some people on HN who will say anything. That's the nature of a large distributed community.

But I also think the fact that there are people who would say that is a good thing. I despise ads, ad-tracking/privacy invasion, etc with a passion. I won't use anything that has ads. I won't even install most apps, even paid/premium, if they collect personal information. So you know my biases.

Their argument is a whole lot more nuanced (and better) than you are presenting it. The main point is that they find (or consider) ads to be useful for helping people find new products they might be interested in. And that does quite obviously happen sometimes (how often is very much up for debate though(. For them, the privacy tradeoff is worth it. I would guess that a portion of people who agree with that would fall into the "what do I have to hide if I'm not doing anythign wrong" camp. I think they're nuts, but it is an interesting viewpoint to consider that is a lot more nuanced and contextual then just "I enjoy targeted ads."

Thanks for your response!

Honestly I get the T-shirt part this way. You got to Doo crazy stuff as a start-up. I also get that you try ai stuff. As long as you keep up de search.

However what scares me is the apparent lack of knowledge about privacy, gdpr and what is PII in a product that, to me, is all about privacy. Have one person in the company be an expert in privacy and GDPR etc and use their insights, since it is critical for your right of existence.

I got the same impression - the lack of understanding of the basics of GDPR makes them look as amateurs, not professionals trying to raise the bar for privacy. I was considering using Kagi, but this is a massive turn off.

They'll likely discover that GDPR is not that optional as soon as a customer (or a competitor with a grudge!) reports them to their relevant national privacy/personal data protection authority, after which they'll get to have a very uncomfortable conversation where they will not be able to use those arguments

Kagi is a US company. GDPR is not a US law.

Does not really matter as long as they offer it in EU countries.

Even so, it doesn't matter unless the CEO ever sets foot in the EU, I suppose.

(Do you regularly check to make sure you're obeying laws in countries you don't ever intend to visit? No? Then why should Kagi?)

This should matter if Kagi ever intends to do business in the EU.

I suppose a serious breach of regulations, and if Kagi decided to ignore fines, apart from a bad reputation, could ultimately lead to things like judicial decisions of blocking access to the website or blocking payments for EU customers.

I think this is an interesting topic.

The scope of GDPR is clearly including businesses operating from the US, but has any company registered only in the US ever been fined by EU?

To your point: From the original post it was mentioned they created an entity in Germany (for the T-shirts).

This means they're exposed to GDPR not only indirectly by serving EU citizens but also directly by operating within the EU.

It’s very simple to just not have all that much PII or customer data. At that point you can more or less ignore GDRP.

Instead of giving away t-shirts, can't you make the AI tools open source? They are clearly not up to the task yet so you might as well build a nice AI community first.

We are not developing LLM models.

AI tools that Kagi uses like vector database search and LLM connectors are already open source.

You can find these in our Github:

https://github.com/kagisearch/

Very interesting!

Quick (but difficult) question: do you foresee there arising a reasonably reliable way to filter out the coming wave of ai spam? I’m told that half of Twitter is bots talking to each other at this point, and I’m sure this is coming to other media as well. Eg, massive, massive waves of content marketing, sock puppets, etc.

Is there reason to be optimistic that you or other actors will be able to sift through it?

Yes, significant part of our effort is to build technology that detects LLM spam. We have a working model that detects LLM generated text with 90% accuracy currently. The plan is to integrate in search results and make available as an API.

And just out of interest: what is the rate for false positives? An accuracy of 90% sounds very decent, as long as it doesn’t also filter out 10% of legitimate content.

10% of infinity is infinity.

That's as good as 0% accuracy.

And AI text will keep changing.

Appreciate the response. I hope while some of it, including mine might come off as critical or uninformed, it truly comes from a place of love for the search product.

I still don't agree with the shirts and I think the overarching point is the shirts seem like a common theme of trying to do too much. I hope my thinking is not true and I wish the best success because I love Kagi.

Yesterday I realized I had 75 tabs open on my mobile web browser and decided to do some trimming. Anything I was confident would come up again and didn’t need to be held onto got closed, including a tab for Kagi. And now I find Kagi has come up again, and I really liked reading this message so now I’m opening the tab again and almost certainly subscribing

This is a very weird answer. People who are paying for your service want you to succeed, they want an alternative to Google search. Many of them (like the article above) explicitly say they don't want a t-shirt, they just want a better search product from you.

After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, money and energy you spent on those t-shirts. Your customers are complaining because they want you to succeed. If they didn't care about you, they'd just cancel the subscription and move on. And your response to it is "nah, what we did was right" and not "yeah, maybe we shouldn't have spent all that resources on a stupid t-shirt that nobody wanted"?

I just don't get it. And what are you gonna do when you hit 50K members? Are you planning to send an entire wardrobe (from undies to a suit) to all your 50K customers (assuming IF you ever hit that many customers)?

I don't think it's that weird at all. Nor did they say the "customer" needs to think outside the box (what a great misrepresentation). They were just explaining their thinking process.

I never said they said the customer needs to think outside the box. They claimed that they had to think outside the box (as if no company had sent promotional t-shirts before and as if promotional t-shirts is some kind of groundbreaking idea). I did not misrepresent anything

Yeah, I love that "free t-shirts" is classified outside the box thinking.

Oh, and nitpick: It's outside the box, not out of the box...

I am a little lost here. So correct me.

The Founder of the company decided to pour in his own money worth of millions ( assuming that is true ) into the company. He bootstrapped it.

They were on track to becoming profitable. And now, as the replies shows they are now profitable.

He decided to spend some money to buy everyone a t-shirt as a gift.

And all I see is not thank you but anger and frustrations. Pointing to waste of time as if the product is going downhill or not iterating fast enough. But in fact according to changelog they are doing pretty well.

Spending my own money to say thank you in my own way and all I got was, all these negativity.

I just don't get it.

Kagi is playing against the likes of Google and Microsoft, who have infinite resources. Search is not a fight one can win casually. Every dollar, minute that is wasted on dumb stuff like t-shirts is an opportunity wasted on improving their core product.

Read the article, the author clearly lays out how Kagi is scattering their attention, money and energy on things that do not matter one bit.

He decided to spend some money to buy everyone a t-shirt as a gift.

A gift that nobody asked for, a gift that has zero impact, a gift that took their attention, time and money away from their core product.

Let me repeat - people are complaining because they care, because they want Kagi to succeed. Google search has gotten so bad that people are desperate for an alternative. Instead of taking it as "people are mean to us", perhaps Kagi should take it as "let us listen to our customers, they really do want us to succeed". If you see it from the perspective of a Kagi fan/customer, your opinion might change

I wonder if the t-shirts could be considered 'marketing'?

cause for their guys, search results and things related to search experience is basically everything, some stupid gift like a t-shirts just let people support them think they spend money at somewhere they just dont give a damn, despite kagi is get better now, but this behavior just bother us computer hacker :)

I'm not a user, but you must have found a great market because your users are anxious about the company failing. The fact that they spinned the fact that you were able to create a company and a whole t -shirt operation on a marketing budget as a bad thing is telling. You're doing great. The t-shirt op is a great investment an will return a great value.

I really appreciate that the $200,000 free t-shirts are delayed. Icing on the cake in my opinion.

Hi, Vlad. We've met before, I'm the person whose 70-year-old mother is using Kagi. I also have actively been trying to move people to Kagi for some time - even paying for their accounts. The biggest block I face is not brand recognition. It's a lack of An Android app.

To move my mother to Kagi, I had to install Brave Browser on her android cell phone, make it the default browser on Android, change Brave's default search engine and create a desktop shortcut to it.

Android is ubiquitous in Brazil. I won't be able to move much people to Kagi with a process this involved.

Happy to chat further about this topic if you wish, privately or publicly.

I'm a deep technical nerd, but I approach Kagi from a basic user perspective.

Things I love and can't live without:

- When I search for something, I don't have to deal with weeks of whatever I searched for coming up in ads on every web page I visit.

- I don't feel like "the man" is snooping on me in some sort of weird dark social credit score thing. (I literally got a call from Google once offering me a job based on what I'd been searching for. Flattering, but totally freaked me out)

- The quality is good for non-local things

- I'm the customer, not the product

- That makes things like blocking or enhancing sites possible

What I'd like to see improve:

- I don't want AI. I don't want summaries, I don't want hallucinations, I don't want assistants. I don't want it.

- Local results and map integration. When I click on a local result, actually having the map go to the result I clicked on. Currently this doesn't work well.

- Hours for local businesses.

I find myself still going to google for these things, and while it doesn't seem like a lot, aside from work stuff those kinds of searches are probably 80% of what I need. Where can we go for dinner tonight that's near by and still open? Who has all-you-can-eat deals near by? Where can I find some floating shelves to put in my office near by?

Those are all examples of things that Google does really well, and I don't have much luck with on Kagi.

I agree with the author that I'd rather see the quality there improve before AI features.

Personally I love the AI tools. The summary tool is what got me converted from the trial to a paying user.

Quality is there for the most part, IME, but I definitely agree that their local features need a LOT of work.

> I wish they dedicated more time to it.

What changes you have in mind to search functionality? I feel like the core search is rock solid as is, but they address search quality reports on their feedback forums all the time.

To me, the AI features (and specifically how they are only used when you opt in per query) are enhancing search, and the time they have been allocating to those features has continuously improved Kagis utility to me.

Note: I subscribe to Kagi Ultimate, so I use some AI features that are not available in the base plans.

Search quality requires maintenance and continual tuning. It's not a one and done "add more functionality" kind of product.

Fair. I was trying to make the point that they are already dedicating time to continuously tuning based on feedback on their forums.

I mean they could focus on actually building out their own search engine as an example? (i.e. moving further away from using Google and Bing APIs)

It's just a matter of focus with a team of that size.

I love Kagi, I'm an early paying subscriber, but I think the quality of their results is overstated. Anytime you get past result #5 or so, the results just get _weird_. If you have to do deep research on something, you'll often get pages that seemingly have nothing to do with the query, or these class of pages that seem to be poor answers to common queries aggregated together.

I hope not to sound like I'm blaming you, but do you actually use the features that are unique to Kagi? Over time my manually configured block/lower/raise/pin list has continuously grown, quickly leading to higher and higher quality search results. I also have integrated custom lenses and bangs into my workflow more and more over time. I often end up searching seemingly very generic things and getting exactly what I'm looking for in the first or second result. Maybe my results after the first couple are weird too, but it doesn't really matter to me because I don't actually get very deep into results most of the time.

DDG is like that. If it can't find any more matches it seems to spam random results.

I tried Kagi and really enjoyed it but the pricing tier doesn't sit right with me, it's not that much better than DDG for my purposes. All these monthly subs start to add up. I'd be happier if there was a lifetime tier.

How much would you drop for a lifetime license of a product like this?

A lifetime subscription on a service for a one-time fee has so many perverse incentives I wouldn't trust a company offering this.

> DDG is like that.

DDG and Kagi both use Bing data. That could be the reason

Ok, maybe it’s not that the quality of Kagi results is so high, it’s more that the quality of Google results is so poor. Just not having to deal with all the spam is a winner to me.

Google results were rather like this in the golden age of Google searches. But the bad results can give you an idea of how to tweak your search to get what you're actually looking for.

The modern, more polished Google search can make it literally impossible to find things that exist, because Google tries too hard to provide what it thinks you're looking for.

- Localized search is not a great experience

- Business listing search via maps is not a great experience. Maps and searching on maps are a more important endeavor than browser and email when thinking about the ecosystem.

- AI is definitely important but so far none of those features (afaik) have trickled down to non-ultimate users. From what I have seen, features have been removed from the regular plans.

- Remove reliance on using bing/google searches.

- Search is not a one and done operation.

> I feel like the core search is rock solid as is

Certainly not. I still get a decent amount of AI-generated blogspam in my results. Yes, it's great that Kagi offers me the option to manually block sites I don't want in results, but that's a workaround, not a solution, to the AI-generated spam problem.

I don't know if it's possible to detect this sort of crap automatically, but IMO this is the biggest threat to web search today.

> What changes you have in mind to search functionality?

Reverting the changes from around December that made it next to impossible to search for language-agnostic or English terms in another language.

Also reverting the changes over time that brought them closer to google or DDG and ignoring search terms unless you use verbatim or quote everything.

Kagi used to be about being explicit, but it’s slowly turning into the same "we know what you want to search for, so STFU" that all the other search engines are.

User since December 2021.

I paid for the 1 year plan, because I was excited about a company that was only for search, and provided good search by nature of people paying for it (so no ads and fair ranking)

I have noticed the search has gotten worse in the ~7 months I've been using it, I started using Google more and more, and I was not planning to renew. I still use it, but after reading this article I'm definitely not going to use it again after my 1 year ends.

They aren't prioritizing the only feature I care about.

The search quality tanked massively about two months ago, and is now almost as bad as Google.

Re the t-shirts: last time I checked the were private equity not VC and priced their product for profitability not growth.

Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?

So if I understand your comment, you are suggesting that they went and raised money to make t-shirts?

Not upset in the slightest, I love Kagi search and want to see it continue. Merch is a solved problem and there was no reason to bring it in-house and make such a big announcement around it.

Maybe they wanted to make T shirts. Who knows. I don't get why people are up in arms about it.

I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations.

The difference they don't tell you about their internal accounting so you don't join the dots.

Start ups burn money on silly things like offices way too nice for what they need all the time. That's much closer to unethical than a company with no real duty to outsiders throwing away money.

I don’t see any claims that they are unethical. “Losing faith” seems to be being used more like losing hope or something. People are worried that they are doing things that seem a bit wasteful because they don’t want them to fail.

> I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations.

Bradford Shellhammer (fab.com) wanting to speed run getting his United Global Services (invite only, elite tier, qualification criteria believed to be $50K annual base fare spend or 150K miles/year) so would fly back and forth between New York and Frankfurt every week, first class, while laying off employees left right and center.

No one is saying self-owned companies aren't allowed to do things like that.

But we are still allowed to criticize moves that we think are counter-productive or a waste.

I think the difference being that the niche customer based with Kagi is what will keep the lights on going forward. People share these feelings because they love the product and want to see it continue. Instead of taking it as hostile, it really comes from a place of love and wanting to see success. Very little to do with how you see it.

> Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?

Yes.

Would you be upset if they just paid themselves a higher salary?

Do you think they charge too much?

Do they charge more than you think it's worth?

Depends on if those higher salaries actually motivated higher productivity, commensurate with the increase.

Or, at the bottom end, if their previous salaries were barely ramen-style living wages, I would be glad that they have become able to pay themselves enough to be comfortable.

False dichotomy. They should be plowing that money into more R&D, or, absent the current ability to do that, saving it for a rainy day.

As a paying customer, I want Kagi to succeed. I want Kagi's search offering to keep improving. Spending a couple hundred thousand of the company's money on t-shirts (one that I would receive, as I was a fairly early customer) sounds foolish to me, regardless of how much the founder is personally invested in the company, and regardless of whether or not he'll invest more of his own money to keep the company growing in the future, if needed.

I'm still bullish on Kagi's future, but things like this (and things mentioned in the linked article as a whole) make me a little worried.

> Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?

Probably! When I was at Twilio, we participated in GitHub's charity dodgeball tournament a few times (early last decade, I think). The cost of admission was $3000 per team, and would go to charity. After a couple years doing it, finance started getting uncomfortable with it. We were a private, unprofitable company (now Twilio is, of course, a public, unprofitable company), giving away money that our VCs had invested in us.

Initially I rolled my eyes, "just the bean-counters doing what they do best: whining about every bit of spend". But later, looking back, I realized they had a point. While $3000 wasn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of the company, what benefit was spending it actually providing the company? Ok, so 12 or so employees got to go and have a fun day at a rec center, boosting morale for them. We got our logo on the website for the tournament, which was maybe a little visibility/marketing. But was that really worth $3000 of our VC money? Maybe it was, but I don't think it's an obvious "yes".

> Edit: As I was adding my comment this post flagged and marked dead. Sometimes HN is weird.

I'm a full Kagi shill. But I also want the stuff I like to remain stuff I like and reasonable criticism is the path there.

orion is the only browser i use on ios as it supports uBlockOrigin and a bunch of other extensions.

i’m glad they spent the time and effort on it.

Orion is my daily driver and I hope they don't crush that. It has bugs, but it works.

As a "hard-core" Kagi user:

1) I legit can't fathom going back to Google or any other search engine. I don't know what I'll do if they go under.

2) Investing in integrating AI into their search is absolutely vital and I like a lot of what they're doing there

3) Everything else, including the insanity of the t-shirts thing, is a complete waste of time and money. I don't understand what their strategy is if it isn't to set money on fire.

I considered investing a small amount in them when they were raising a round from customers since I loved the search product so much. I too can't imagine going back to anything else, especially now that I have prioritized and blocked domains set up perfectly and added lenses, and this stuff works across desktop and mobile!

I've been mildly regretting not investing up until 5 minute ago when I read about spending 1/3 of that on the t-shirt factory.

The claim that's made in this blog - that Kagi 'owns a t-shirt factory' seems disingenuous, or lazy at best. Kagi's own blog says that instead of going with a major branded merch manufacturer/distributor, they chose to work with a small print shop instead. Nothing about blowing funds on an actual factory/print shop. "Owning a merch operation end to end" just means they're not paying some manufacturer to do production, warehousing, order fulfillment/drop shipping, etc.

I do not understand this distinction. Either they "own" the merch operation "end to end", or they don't. You can't have it both ways.

You can contract facilities or output percentage. You don't have to only "own it end to end" or not.

If you contract facilities then you don't "own" the merch operation "end to end".

Kagi's post says further down that they

> allocate[d] nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts

Though it sounds like they don't actually own "a t-shirt factory", but rather a t-shirt distributor.

Totally agree on all points. I don't believe I have the technical capability for it but both the fear of losing great search and the lack of direction has made me think about what it would take to replicate the search experience.

Investing in better search is absolutely vital, and AI may be the right tool there, but I don't care about the AI. I pay Kagi to be a better search and informational retrieval tool, not to do AI.

It's not like they've gone all-in on AI though. Going through their changelog https://kagi.com/changelog it looks like they regularly make improvements to their core product and there've been a lot of significant QoL improvements in recent months. Just the Wolfram change alone has cut my need for Google significantly.

The one thing I really hope they put more work into is searching for local news. That's one of the areas where I still have to turn to Google.

> Everything else, including the insanity of the t-shirts thing, is a complete waste of time and money.

Presumably the tshirts are a marketing cost that they hope will lead to greater brand exposure and more subscribers.

They should've spent it on a marketing agency, because I don't know how a shirt which doesn't even have the name Kagi on it is supposed to give them brand exposure.

Or advertise on a billboard along Hwy 101 as you enter San Francisco.

I was giving them the benefit of the doubt up until this. Wtf? I’d be happy to wear a brand t-shirt “Kagi” and that’s it.

What an own goal. I’m sure it made sense to them but I’m worried they don’t truly understand their customer base.

A shirt that looks less like an ad is one I’d actually wear.

I agree with a lot of your sentiments, but we’re just in peak ai I think.

I can't speak to the t-shirts. I was on duckduckgo before Kagi and also can't imagine returning there. I don't know what they're doing there but it's not improving. And yeah I am so with you on 2).

It seems like (again, t-shirts aside) Kagi is throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I hope they're having fun because I sure am.

I agree, but not necessarily that AI will make results better. Search engines already rely heavily on heuristics, and I really doubt that LLMs or vector databases are going to improve results in any combination. At best, they will overfit results to the lowest common denominator.

What I want is a search engine that supports full-text queries with exact matches. This quite literally no longer exists anywhere, and maybe that's because it just doesn't scale. Nevertheless, I would find a lot more value in a search engine that returns exact matches. Someone will probably reply saying that Kagi, DDG, or The Google do exact matches with quotes, but this is not true. When it works, you've just gotten lucky. At best, it will filter out inexact matches, but that doesn't mean it will actually return every exact match in the index.

Agreed, I want that + the page ranking that Kagi has, and literally don't care about any other features.

Yeah, the page ranking is great. Same with lenses. Though I wish they would improve the lenses. They're pretty basic.

I agree pretty much verbatim. I don't see how anyone could criticize them for getting into the AI game as well or at least using a 3rd party AI software for some results. That would just be silly these days. I like Orion browser but to be honest firefox does what I need.

I'm actually looking forward for the t-shirt...

Kagi’s killer feature is somehow managing to get literally every post about them featured on the front page of HN.

If they fail with all of the free marketing they’ve been gifted by this community I can only shake my head.

A lot of us either use them or have used them in the recent past

I've been using Kagi only for a couple of months, so I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase. Perhaps they're still searching for their identity. Very much hope they rest independents and good at web searches.

I can't stand the randomness of how posts seem to be getting flagged more and more on HN. Seems like if a post is flagged and killed a reason should be given somewhere on the page by the flagger. Educate us on why our discussions should be off-limits, please. It would also be interesting to see if certain topics are always flagged by the same individuals and patterns emerge.

FWIW, this one got unflagged pretty quickly.

I didn't flag it, but I came close just because the tone of the piece is so sensational and needlessly aggressive. I left it put because it's the first negative Kagi piece I've seen and I didn't want to silence an alternative perspective, but the quality was definitely below what I hope to see on the front page.

It’s a pretty good thing to discuss though?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com