[HN Gopher] Kagi raises $670k
___________________________________________________________________
Kagi raises $670k
Author : erwinmatijsen
Score : 376 points
Date : 2023-06-29 06:38 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.kagi.com)
| alberth wrote:
| Flywheel Effect.
|
| Don't free search engines have a competitive edge because for
| every search performed, the clicked result better informs future
| search results.
|
| As such, the more users searching - the more it improves the
| search engine results quality.
|
| And since Kagi is a paid offering, they will inevitably have less
| searches performed - leading to lower quality search results?
| yjp20 wrote:
| While true, I think people underestimate the bad network
| effects of being the top search engines causing adversarial
| development with people optimizing for your specific search
| engine algorithm ultimately making results worse.
| TheFreim wrote:
| Because most, if not all, users of a paid engine are real
| people it could be possible that the quality would actually be
| better in the long run since there would be less manipulation.
| abtinf wrote:
| If by "better" you mean "more profitable search engine, the
| user be damned", then sure.
|
| As a user, I've found Kagi is _much_ better than free search
| engines. With DuckDuckGo, I often found myself reverting to
| Google. With Kagi, almost never.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Installed, trying kagi search "registration required", deleted
| PKop wrote:
| It's not free and unlimited, they charge for search based on
| usage, it's not that complicated.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| $5 a month for just 300 searches? Who is their target audience??
| hans0l074 wrote:
| How do you pronounce this? Is it a soft <g>? Whenever I see Kagi
| on HN I smile, because my daughter has a soft toy (a sea horse)
| that she has named Kagi (she pronounces it kha-gee, with a hard
| g). Good luck!
| sph wrote:
| I pronounce it like her, which is unfortunate because in
| Italian "KA-ghee" (written _caghi_ ) is the verb "you shit".
| weikju wrote:
| I also pronounce it with a hard g, same as "kagi" the
| Japanese word for "key"
| samsquire wrote:
| I am glad there's alternatives to Google and Bing.
|
| I think the (open) web is troubled from a content, quality and
| funding perspective.
|
| The old web was the volunteer web. People produced useful content
| and it was interesting (Digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon and
| delicious)
|
| I like reading personal tech blogs from the volunteer web. I get
| a lot of value from them.
|
| I don't want the web to get worse so I subscribe to Wikipedia and
| at one point medium.
|
| I kind of think the secret to quality is to commission high
| quality authors.
| wallmountedtv wrote:
| > I am glad there's alternatives to Google and Bing.
|
| Kagi is just Bing under the hood with an OpenAI summarizer and
| a lot of tuning. It is fully reliant on the quality of search
| results it can fetch from Bing's databases.
|
| I know there exists Qwant (a french company) which claim to
| have an independent engine, but they keep turning their Bing
| backend on for a lot of searches. Only truly independent engine
| from Google/Bing with relevant results that i know of is Brave
| Search. Not a great company, but they do know how to make a
| good search engine, and are practically alone in the space
| fighting against the Bing-based alternative search engine
| business model.
| justusthane wrote:
| I'm not sure what percentage of the results are Bing (perhaps
| the majority), but I think it's inaccurate to say that Kagi
| is _just_ Bing under the hood:
|
| > Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional
| search indexes like Google and Bing and vertical sources like
| Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-
| commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI
| for instant answers.
| getmeinrn wrote:
| I'm surprised that a search engine that isn't powered by AI is
| able to raise money. From the direction things seem to be going,
| LLM tech may very well level that entire industry.
| adultSwim wrote:
| It aggregates search results from engines that are powered by
| AI. Google creates a BERT embeddings of indexed pages.
| qqtt wrote:
| How do you think "LLM tech" discovers content to train it's
| massive models?
| [deleted]
| starbugs wrote:
| That's likely true for search queries that can be phrased as or
| somehow represent a question (that can be answered with the
| information contained in the training data, usually limited to
| 2021 atm). For all others, probably not so much. Try GPT4's web
| plugin. It's not a pleasant experience.
|
| There's a gap in the market for a search engine whose incentive
| structure doesn't cause it to become corrupted.
| Veen wrote:
| Kagi has lots of LLM-based features: Quick Answers in results,
| results summaries, Ask Questions About This Document, the
| Universal Summarizer[0], FastGPT[1].
|
| - [0]: https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
|
| - [1]: https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| They do have AI features.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| LLMs are a great new interaction paradigm for interrogating a
| corpus of documents, but not such a good way of finding which
| documents to interrogate (and unless you do, it's not all too
| useful for information retrieval).
|
| The real magic happens when you stick the two together. Let
| traditional search find the relevant documents, and then
| interact with them through a LLM. This isn't a shortcoming in
| model tuning or context window size.
|
| The way I see it, recent AI improvements make the future
| brighter for new search engines. In a gold rush, there are two
| types of winners, you can win by beating the rest to the gold,
| or you can win by being the guy selling maps and pickaxes.
| Traditional search indices fall squarely in the second camp.
|
| AI actually opens new avenues for profit for traditional
| search, since while it's notoriously difficult to monetize an
| internet search engine, suddenly you can make ends meet selling
| API access to AI start-ups.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Happy Kagi subscriber here. Keep up the good work!
| rychco wrote:
| Good, Kagi is great. The killer feature for me is the use of
| filters for programming/academic/forum results (in addition to
| having generally more relevant results overall). I will happily
| continue paying for this service.
| furyofantares wrote:
| The other day I wanted to make a quick Venn diagram as a joke,
| and I was sure hundreds of people have made a simple tool for
| this and put it on the web.
|
| I did a search (on kagi) and all the top results wanted me to
| sign up or subscribe. The joke I wanted to make wasn't worth it
| for that.
|
| I was reminded of google in present times, loads of results that
| are almost what I'm looking for, but filled with frustration
| instead.
|
| I don't feel entitled here, but I do know that in the old web,
| back when I fell in love with google, I'd have found some
| hobbyist site that did this without trying to get anything from
| me.
|
| Anyway I then clicked "non-commercial" and was instantly
| teleported to the old web, the first result was a free simple
| tool from some hobbyist.
| EdgeExplorer wrote:
| https://excalidraw.com/ is a great tool to have in your belt
| for this and other quick drawing needs
| winrid wrote:
| Where is the non commercial filter??
| europeanNyan wrote:
| You can turn it on in Settings under Lenses.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| If I become a paying member, can I set kagi as my default search
| engine on my Apple devices?
| mastercheif wrote:
| Yes, Kagi has Safari + Chrome + FF extensions on Mac + iOS
| Safari extension that sets Kagi as default search.
| lorenz_li wrote:
| With the xSearch[1] app you can.
|
| [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-
| safari/id157990206...
| Alifatisk wrote:
| I use FF on my apple devices, it's easy to set the default
| search engine there. I can customize my preferred search
| engine on the settings app, but Kaigi is not there.
|
| The only options for me is: - Google - Yahoo - Bing -
| Duckduckgo (my current option) - Ecosia
| alexruf wrote:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-
| default.h...
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Thanks
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| I know a lot of people here thought Kagi wasn't worth it, but I'm
| an early adopter who has been a happy customer for some time now.
|
| Search is really important to me, and it isn't just about looking
| up businesses or Wikipedia pages. I read lots of academic papers
| and just want it to be easy to separate the wheat from the
| chaffe. Kagi makes that really easy with its lenses. Sure, Brave
| search has something similar, but I like Kagi's interface better
| and having to pay them gives me the sense their service won't
| just be deprecated or significantly changed at the whim of a CEO
| trying to satisfy advertisers or whatever. Having insight into
| how many ads and trackers on a page is nice too, as well as being
| able to demote and block certain domains. It's nice that I can
| block a domain and it's also blocked on my phone.
|
| What's especially important to me is the ability to wrap my
| queries in quotes for literal string matches. Granted, no search
| engine is perfect at this anymore because the web has become so
| huge, but Kagi seems to be the only search engine I use that gets
| string matches right more of the time and doesn't give me fake
| results when there are no actual matches. That's what pisses me
| off about The Google. And though I once used DDG, I found that
| the quality of search started getting worse and now it seems like
| quotes barely even work with that search engine now.
|
| I hope Kagi succeeds. It doesn't need to compete with The Google.
| Just be good enough for those willing to pay for it.
| solardev wrote:
| What is a Kagi lens? Is it different from Google Scholar?
| justusthane wrote:
| It's basically a way to restrict search results to particular
| websites. So you could create a "programming" lens including
| Stack Overflow and Github, for example, and a search using
| that lens would only return results from those sites.
| solardev wrote:
| So how would that apply to academic searches? Do you
| manually create a lens for the journals and arxiv etc.?
| ravenstine wrote:
| There's actually a built-in Academic lens they provide,
| although I haven't really used it much, favoring my own
| "Research" lens. It's not very sophisticated, but since
| I'm mostly into research related to health, I use this a
| lot:
|
| arxiv.org, nih.gov, researchgate.net, *.edu
| justusthane wrote:
| I assume so.
| digging wrote:
| I forgot I signed up for a free Kagi account a while back and
| reading some of these comments has reminded me to start using
| it. I don't need it to offer a huge leap in quality as long as
| it's actually good and doesn't degrade in quality.
|
| G search is right out for me because I avoid any G products
| whenever possible. Also it's quite bad these days. So I
| primarily use DuckDuckGo, except it's honestly not that good
| either. And I'm very suspicious of how much money they have for
| advertising with a free, privacy-focused product. It just
| doesn't feel sustainable. I could be wrong! Maybe their non-
| personalized ads are more sustainable than Kagi's subscription
| model. But the search kind of sucks. Actually, sometimes I do
| end up using `!g` to improve my results (rather: to actually
| get relevant results), and it feels bad.
|
| So I'm going to switch over to Kagi and see if that can deliver
| the results I want/need. If so, I'll happily pay. I might even
| pay $25/mo... it's a lot for a subscription, but it's not a lot
| when compared to my monthly income, so if it makes me job
| easier it will feel like a fair trade.
| dmje wrote:
| Kagi is really, really good. Lenses (where you can setup set
| filters for particular search use cases) are particularly good.
|
| Very happy to see them raising, and very happy to give them my
| $10 each month. Money well spent.
| greazy wrote:
| How do you use lenses? Trying to use more kagi features.
| freediver wrote:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html
|
| or just
|
| !help lenses
| cosmojg wrote:
| But how do _you_ use lenses?
| europeanNyan wrote:
| I'm not Vlad (the person you asked), but I use Lenses
| almost all the time. They have changed how I search for
| user generated content completely. I used to add
| "site:reddit.com" to at least 2/3 of my searches and the
| Forum Lense does the same for me while including many
| other discussion boards. I love it.
|
| As an example: I'm playing Diablo 4 at the moment and
| getting info about the convoluted systems can be a chore.
| For example: I didn't know that I have to do at least a
| Tier 3 Nightmare Dungeon to unlock Sigil Crafting. None
| of the usual pages mentioned that. The Forum Lense saved
| me a lot of time because users discussing it mentioned it
| quite a lot.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Kagi has successfully raised $670K in a SAFE note investment
| round, marking our first external fundraise to date. This was
| made possible with the participation of 42 accredited investors,
| most of whom are actual Kagi users.
|
| That is a dense paragraph.
|
| 1) What is a "SAFE note"? Google tells me: A
| "Simple Agreement for Future Equity" note is a way that startups
| can raise capital. The SAFE note is a legally binding agreement
| that allows an investor to buy a specific number of shares for an
| agreed-upon price at some point in the future, usually when the
| startup has a subsequent funding round.
|
| 2) What are "accredited investors"? Let's assume US.
|
| SEC tells me:
| https://www.sec.gov/education/capitalraising/building-blocks...
| Net worth over $1 million, excluding primary residence
| (individually or with spouse or partner)
|
| Or: Income over $200,000 (individually) or
| $300,000 (with spouse or partner) in each of the prior two years,
| and reasonably expects the same for the current year
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| SAFEs are common in equity crowdfunding. Raises on Republic are
| often SAFEs. I'm not a fan.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| They are also standard in early stage institutional equity
| funding.
| dotcoma wrote:
| Why are you not a fan of SAFEs ? Thanks.
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| To be clear, I don't like them from the perspective of
| equity crowdfunding, which has an alarmingly high
| percentage of low-information, follow-the-crowd, "dumb
| money" retail investors.
|
| SAFEs muddy the waters. It's just another thing that
| already overwhelmed retail investors need to take into
| account when considering whether to invest.
|
| https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/safe-securities
| senko wrote:
| For context, you're reading this on Hacker News, a forum hosted
| by YC.
|
| What Google didn't tell you is that SAFEs were invented by YC
| ten years ago in order to provide better angel/seed investing
| framework than the then-current bespoke convertible notes.
|
| You can read all about it here:
| https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/
|
| "Accredited investor" is basically someone who is supposed to
| be sophisticated enough that they won't first give you (a
| startup) some money, then later on say they didn't know that
| your startup was risky and sue you. Accepting investments only
| from accredited investors is a way to shield yourself from that
| scenario.
|
| Both terms are used fairly often on HN (and really throughout
| the startup communities anywhere).
| candyman wrote:
| Most of the cost in the internet is advertising. I was so happy
| to discover Kagi about a year ago. Saves me hours every week.
|
| https://ipocandy.substack.com/p/finally-a-better-search
| voytec wrote:
| Shame that the requirement to be an accredited investor was
| disclosed just before the round while previously forms only asked
| yes/no on this. $670k from just accredited investors is rather
| unimpressive.
|
| I believe that it stopped a lot of folks from being able to
| invest in Kagi, since this issue was brought up in FAQ sent out
| by Vlad in May.
|
| > Q: Can I still invest if I am not an accredited investor?
|
| > A: Not through this round. If we organize a different vehicle
| in the future (e.g., crowdfunding), we will let you know.
| throwaway51057 wrote:
| That was a bad surprise for me too, but I understand why they
| did it this way. They were not after millions of dollars, but a
| (relatively) small amount.
|
| I'm assuming accredited investors reduce the paperwork /
| liability and are a better plan A. As they secured their
| funding target with that scope, they don't need to action the
| plan B of non-accredited investors. That's less energy spent on
| investor relations and more on the product.
| coopykins wrote:
| I'm a happy customer, so good for them.
|
| One thing I started to use a lot since they removed the usage
| limit is their summarizer.
|
| I made a little bookmarklet to quickly see a summary of the
| current page I'm browsing:
|
| https://gist.github.com/Julioevm/68275ea1324046caedfdfb2ba0e...
| snielson wrote:
| Thanks for this! The summarizer is great for quickly getting
| the gist of legal cases.
| slipperlobster wrote:
| What's the best way to use this bookmarklet in Firefox?
|
| Nevermind, I'm dumb. Just create a new bookmark and post the
| raw contents of the file into the URL field.
| mordae wrote:
| > we have an exciting surprise in the works, which we're not yet
| ready to announce
|
| Now I am worried.
| fairity wrote:
| Advice for the Kagi team: create a way for new visitors to try
| your product before signing up.
|
| I understand that it's a paid service but you're destroying
| conversion rate, and there's no way there are enough
| countervailing benefits to gating your service behind sign up.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| If you singup you will have the summarizer for free (request-
| time limited). Amazing tool.
| packetlost wrote:
| They have the 100-search trial. I don't know how they could
| support account-less trials that without inviting abuse
| joshstrange wrote:
| Can someone help me a little? I tried Kagi and when my 100
| searches ran out I stopped using it. I really didn't like the
| feeling that I needed to meter my searches, it added a barrier to
| every search I did (should I use Kagi for this or should I just
| use Google?). It sounds stupid but literally every search I did I
| had a pang of worry that I was "wasting" a search.
|
| I also didn't experience a huge increase in search quality that I
| noticed. I didn't really get into the Lenses stuff even though it
| seemed cool because I just don't think about things like that
| when I'm searching. I guess 25 years of googling has conditioned
| my way of thinking about search.
|
| Kagi feels like something I should really like and I'd be fine
| with paying for it but I guess I need some more "tips" about how
| to get the most out of it and/or how to change my way of thinking
| about this.
| dns_snek wrote:
| I felt the same way about query metering and ended up
| cancelling my Kagi subscription once they raised their prices.
| I still occasionally check their Discord server for updates and
| it sounds like they're trying to bring the cost of unlimited
| search back down to around $15.
|
| Regarding search quality, I don't think it's a revolutionary
| improvement over Google, but for me it's been noticeable during
| the time I used it, where as Neeva and Brave have been very
| noticeable downgrades. I think Kagi shines once you lean into
| the tools they provide and start upranking and downranking
| different domains.
|
| Keep in mind it's been a couple of months since I last used it
| and they've added the search result summarizer and some other
| AI tools since then that might help tip the balance their way.
| joshstrange wrote:
| $15/unlimited would be acceptable to me, $25 just seems way
| too high. I never played much with the summarizer since it
| was metered as well and I get squirrely about using up
| limited things (see also: my inventory at the end of every
| RPG, so many potions that "I might need later").
|
| The ranking and lenses seemed very cool to me but I burned
| through my free tier before I could really use them. Maybe
| I'll try again at the $10/mo price.
| nvr219 wrote:
| I really enjoyed Kagi but it wasn't worth paying $25/mo for
| unlimited, and like you I don't want to be thinking about
| metering my searches.
| malnourish wrote:
| I am a very avid searcher and have not once brushed up
| against the search limit.
| nvr219 wrote:
| Maybe I'm holding it wrong.
|
| During my one-month test of Kagi using it for everything on
| all my devices I did 674 searches according to them.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I've been using it since the beta, and am still paying for it.
| I shared your concerns at first, but in practice I've never run
| into the limit. In fact, checking my history, I've never
| actually gotten close to the limit. I pay $10/mo for 1500
| searches, and most months I do less than 500 searches.
|
| I don't think the search quality is anything special. I have
| never figured out how to use Lenses, and I don't even care to
| try them again. I like it for privacy, and I like that you can
| give weight to different websites, and even block ones you
| don't want to see again. I know there are Google plugins for
| blocking sources as well.
|
| I don't have any tips. I think Kagi is about as good as
| DuckDuckGo, and the advantage it has is that it costs money.
| I'm at the point where I don't even trust a nominally privacy-
| focused search engine like DDG not to drift into the unethical.
| For some reason--maybe naivety--I think a company that takes
| money in exchange guaranteeing my privacy is theoretically more
| reliable, if only because it would be too audacious to outright
| lie about that.
| philwelch wrote:
| How are you paying for it? Can't they trace your searches
| back to you via your payment method?
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'm sure they can, but until new information comes to
| light, I'm trusting that their business model makes it
| against their interests to do that.
| philwelch wrote:
| I would be more inclined to trust them if they had a
| warrant canary. I can't seem to find one.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Sounded like they claim to not store identifying
| information along with searches at all, which is the
| biggest privacy concern to me.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| This is my usage: Jun 2023 1171
| May 2023 822 Apr 2023 2451 Mar 2023 3700
| Feb 2023 3632 Jan 2023 5664 Dec 2022 1245
|
| I found that most of my searches are in my phone actually.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Jan 2023 5664
|
| That's 183 searches per day, assuming 8 hours of sleep
| that's 11.5 searches per hour, that's roughly a search
| every 5 minutes. That's a busy month :)
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I was preparing for my defense :D
| carlosjobim wrote:
| There is no problem, except in your imagination. Each
| additional search costs a couple of cents, why would you worry
| about such a small amount? When you're driving a car you're
| using cents of fuel every minute, do you worry about that when
| you're driving, counting the cents?
|
| You've literally managed to find the most insignificant thing
| to worry about in existence.
|
| But if quality is not impressive to you there's no reason to
| use the service.
| junon wrote:
| > You've literally managed to find the most insignificant
| thing to worry about in existence.
|
| * in your opinion, in your circumstances, for your usage
| patterns.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Wow, not really sure where the hostility is coming from. I'm
| literally asking for suggestion/motivations/reasons to pay
| because I feel like it is something I want but I need help
| getting over the hump of paying for search. I also outlined
| that I didn't experience an increase in quality and posited
| that I might be using it wrong or not taking full advantage.
|
| > You've literally managed to find the most insignificant
| thing to worry about in existence.
|
| It's clearly not "insignificant" since others here have
| voiced the same concern or annoyance. I think we have enough
| research/studies to show that metering/limiting has an effect
| on how people use something even if the overage fee is low.
|
| I used the trial and I wasn't sold on it, I was asking for
| people to tell me how they get value out of it, you're doing
| literally the opposite and being a jerk about it. If anything
| your comment makes me want to just forget about Kagi.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I really didn't intend to be hostile in any way, and I
| apologize if that's how my comment looked.
|
| We as humans tend to trick our own minds into worrying
| about insignificant things and sometimes need somebody to
| help us snap out of it. I was trying to help you with that,
| but instead you think I came across as a jerk. It's not
| worth your time to worry about a couple of cents for a
| search. I know many people have the same concern and worry
| as you, it is still not rational.
|
| > I used the trial and I wasn't sold on it
|
| Then there is no reason for you to use it - even if it was
| free. The only reason to use paid search is to get better
| quality results. There is no special maneuver to use with
| Kagi, it's just typing the query into the box like on
| Google.
| tiltowait wrote:
| I initially worried about surpassing my quota at first, but
| I've never come close to it (I'm on the grandfathered $10/1500
| plan).
|
| For me, I notice better search results than Google (not night
| and day, but noticeable). The ability to block/promote/demote
| certain sites is fantastic, and I like the URL rules you can
| create. For instance, I've set Reddit links to open in
| old.reddit.com, and I've set Youtube links to redirect to an
| Invidious instance.
|
| It's got some other nice things--I like the universal
| summarizer a lot, and the search result summarizer has come in
| handy many times. But mostly, I just like using something that
| isn't Google without feeling like I'm compromising (which I did
| feel with both DDG and Brave).
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| It's the personalisation element combined with slightly
| better results that makes it so much better. Plus, I don't
| have to block any ads or tracking. Google without an
| adblocker has become harder and harder to navigate.
|
| On the other end, I'm seeing Google results get really really
| bad. Mostly just missing results. When I search the same term
| on bing there are pages and pages of results. I've no idea
| what's going on at Google. I don't use it logged in and don't
| know if that affects the results.
| europeanNyan wrote:
| I'm completely the same as you so I did the following: I took
| the $10 plan and watched my usage for a week. I seem to hover
| roughly at about 30-40 searches per day on average so I
| upgraded to the Family plan. Yes, I know, it sounds weird but
| now I've got 1400 searches and just didn't invite anyone. And I
| don't have to worry about if it's going to be enough because my
| own data says that it's going to easily be enough.
|
| Lenses are actually why I subscribed mostly. I search for
| organic data often while trying to find help for a product or
| the opinions on a service or something like that. Regular
| search is ok, changing to the Forum Lense is mind blowing
| because I only get discussions from real people.
| BilalBudhani wrote:
| Glad to know Kagi did not raise crazy amount of venture funding
| which often leads to company switching gears & pursuing
| unattainable long term goal.
|
| I think Kagi is focused on a great niche with simple business
| model. Unsurprisingly this works out well in the long run.
| asah wrote:
| Is classic search relevant? Within a year, I expect Google to
| replace search with an LLM that delivers answers and references
| to the source material vs making users click through.
|
| ChatGPT is the opposite of teenage sex: everybody is doing it,
| but nobody is admitting to it.
| jart wrote:
| Raising money to build an ad-free Google is like raising money to
| build a rainbow without a pot of gold.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| They've already built a search engine that is better than
| Google and ad-free.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Love their summarizer, it is my daily tool now. Was kinda
| surprised by $670k, looking at others who rising billions with
| 1000x worse products ...
| Pinegulf wrote:
| >Kagi Search requires an account only because it is a paid
| service which requires an account for the transaction.
|
| ref: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#why-
| doe...
|
| Eh... This is a tall order when competition is 'free'. Anyways, I
| wish them good luck as competition is inherently good.
| Sakos wrote:
| Competition is free if you don't care about your privacy or
| your personal data. Many don't, sure, but it seems enough do
| care such that Kagi has continued to grow and improve over
| time. A tall order for what? They already have plenty of paying
| customers and it's a self-sustaining business already. What
| more do you want?
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Not just privacy and personal data. Search results are
| objectively better than goog & ddg.
|
| Specially so for technical queries or prior art queries it
| really feels like a 2007 google crawler, which is actually a
| complement.
| raincole wrote:
| If you make video games, or movies, or TV shows, you're also
| competing against "free".
|
| To be clear, I don't think Kagi will be next google. But I do
| think they have a chance to survive if they don't ruthlessly
| over extend their scope.
| oneTbrain23 wrote:
| I am initial user of Kagi. It was great until they started the
| pricing. I quit as I dont see simply search service is worth
| their pricing. I have DuckDuckGo alternative which is free. Then
| you.com come along which I now pay monthly. Kagi need to offer
| more if they want that kind of pricing. Or offer a low end
| versions that cost like Bitwarden.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I thought the same thing. Then I went back to Google and was
| _incredibly_ surprised how bad the results were. I tried out
| Bing, Brave Search, and Duck Duck Go. Nothing is better than
| Kagi, so here I am paying $25/mo for search.
| EGreg wrote:
| Anyone here old enough to remember when Kagi was a payment
| gateway? At least, I think it was. It was the first one I used,
| back when I used to make "shareware" software. Ah, those were the
| days.
| Applejinx wrote:
| They still owe me hundreds of dollars :D
|
| Weirdly, this seems to be an entirely different thing. I guess
| the name and/or domain got sold to a completely distinct
| operation.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Yes you remember correctly
| EGreg wrote:
| My friend Tom Connolly who wrote the first editor for
| Kaleidoscope (before Mac OS X came out, you could style your
| own buttons etc) used it, and that's how I found out.
|
| https://www.akamaidesign.com/studio/
|
| UPDATE: his web design and hosting service was very advanced
| for its time!
|
| https://www.akamaidesign.com/
| andrewstuart wrote:
| $670k ain't much runway is it?
| weikju wrote:
| they also have paying users!
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > business model
|
| Welp. Until now their search and their browser were supported by
| me and people like me, but now they are supported by investors
| who will want ROI. As history shows, the best way to get ROI is
| to become free and mine user data. Congrats to the team on
| paycheck though!
| Sakos wrote:
| The funding is from investors who are Kagi users. You could
| sign up to be a part of their next funding round if you want.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| even if they were all users (they aren't), it's relevant how
| exactly? If Saudis who are 2nd biggest Twitter investors use
| Twitter it doesn't make its business model better.
| Sakos wrote:
| It's relevant because they aren't just VC bros or Saudis.
| It's just 670k. I'm not sure why you're so worked up about
| it or why you think Kagi shouldn't get additional funding.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I think a good transparent business is funded by users
| and/or is publicly traded. This stuff makes me cautious.
| Sakos wrote:
| You think being publicly traded would be better? That
| just gives a business perverse incentives detached from
| the quality of the business's products/services.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Private investment is what means perverse incentives. You
| care about your big donors now. If you take 50k from a
| guy you want to give him what he wants in return so he
| gives again. It's about ROI. The bigger the amount the
| more strings attached.
|
| Public trading means clear protocol for ROI and it allows
| to have many small investors who can have as little say
| as you specify (non voting shares etc). Comes with
| requirement for a lot of documentation and transparency
| too. So accountability. If business I like wants to grow
| and needs money this is the route I want it to take
| prh8 wrote:
| Publicly traded means that your primary customers are
| Blackrock and Vanguard, the whole concept of individual
| investors is just investment firms fooling people into
| thinking they have some influence over a company.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Lol ETFs don't get to tell you what to do, they just buy
| if you perform well and sell if you don't. Though who am
| I kidding they don't even sell
|
| You don't need to organize fundraising events etc you
| just do your thing and if you do it well you get extra
| money.
|
| But of course it is all assuming Kagi cannot profit
| enough from is users. Which apparently it cannot.
| metadaemon wrote:
| I pay for Kagi, love it and use it every single day. It's a full
| blown replacement for Google and my searches tend to trend more
| technical.
| gman83 wrote:
| I find the data on their pricing interesting. It says 300
| searches per month is enough for 99% of users. I'm pretty sure I
| use more than 300 searches every day.
|
| Edit: 300/day is too much, apparently I use about 100/day
| according to my search history.
| Sakos wrote:
| I'm a fairly heavy user. I used around 1000 searches last
| month. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from my own usage habits
| about how other people use the internet or how many searches
| they'd need.
| sn0wleppard wrote:
| Agreed - That 99% of users they're talking about aren't going
| to be the ones looking for an alternative search engine like
| this
| mrweasel wrote:
| I'm sure they're right, my dad doesn't need 300 search per
| month. What I question is whether or not 300 search is
| sufficient for their average user.
|
| The person who is willing to pay for a search engine is also
| going to be a person care more about search and use it more. My
| best guess is that 1000 searches per month is right on the edge
| of what their average user can get by with. It's fair enough,
| they do need to make money, and I have no problems believe that
| 300 is about right for the average internet user. It just gives
| a false impression of your expected cost as a potential
| customer.
| asaddhamani wrote:
| The pricing was interesting to me too. If the average user
| searches 3-4 times a day, most programmers are definitely
| outside that average. And I think programmers and other techies
| are the ones most likely to care enough about online privacy
| and search engine personalisation to pay for this. I myself
| seem to average around 40 searches per day, so I'd end up
| paying $18 per month.
| samwillis wrote:
| That would be one search every 3 min, if you sleep 8hrs a
| day...
| gman83 wrote:
| Yeah I just checked my search history, I did 100 searches
| yesterday. That's probably more like what I do on an average
| day. That's roughly 10 searches per hour, doesn't seem
| unreasonable to me.
| samwillis wrote:
| I can see that, certainly in bursts. Some days it's
| research, some days it's reading docs, some it's heads down
| and very little searching.
| sequence7 wrote:
| That's because you are in the other 1% of users, they're not
| saying 300 searches is the average, median or mean across all
| users.
| int_19h wrote:
| They explained their reasoning on HN before. The number refers
| to the average user of online search in general, not the
| average Kagi user (who tends to be more technical and uses
| search more).
| function_seven wrote:
| I had to read the headline twice. At first I read it as $670
| million, and I was very sad. That's "VCs gonna enshittify it in 3
| years" money.
|
| But then I saw the "K" and grinned. This is proper bootstrap
| money, and makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its
| original mission.
|
| Congrats. I am really pulling for you, Vlad.
| nivertech wrote:
| It's " _K_ agi", not " _M_ agi" ;)
| weikju wrote:
| and it seems like many actual users of Kagi (and Orion?) have
| contributed, so this isn't a (completely) a "big VC firm will
| enshitify this". This gives me hope. I wish I would qualify to
| invest in things like this...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| You can lie. That's what "self-certify" means.
|
| If you have the money to participate and lie about
| having/earning more money then you qualify.
|
| There is no constitutional way to prevent you from investing
| based on net worth, so the law places consequences on the
| companies offering investments.
|
| And the only time this affects the company is if they were
| relying on a regulatory exemption that _also_ allows
| unaccredited investors, in which case you should have just
| participated as an unaccredited investor and they were
| supposed to verify.
|
| Otherwise, the law says "self-certify", which is the state
| sanctioned term for lying.
| xcavier wrote:
| I read that headline as precisely the opposite: oh, bugger,
| they are not doing well and that money won't help
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > "This was made possible with the participation of 42
| accredited investors"
|
| Same impression here
| detourdog wrote:
| Kagi is such a funny company. I remember as an early internet
| payment provider. I subscribe to kagi search.
| Taniwha wrote:
| this is a totally different company from Kagi the shareware
| recovery provider
| alwaysbeconsing wrote:
| That is right. There's a bit in their FAQ about this https:
| //help.kagi.com/kagi/company/history.html?highlight=sh...
|
| > We are not affiliated with the legendary Kagi - the
| shareware payments platform. ... We liked the name and
| acquired it when we got the chance.
| detourdog wrote:
| D'oh had no idea.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You're one of today's lucky 10 000 :).
|
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| redbell wrote:
| > At first I read it as $670 million
|
| Same here!
|
| I think this is because our eyes-brain system is optimizing the
| read operation by scanning the words and maps them against a
| list of words we already familiar with, thus, sometimes it got
| the wrong meaning. This trick was used by some brands to
| mislead people to buy some products with a familiar brand
| name.. like "Adibas" and "Reedok".
|
| > makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original
| mission
|
| I really hope so but no one can guarantee this would be the
| case if the company get bigger with more money being thrown
| there.
|
| In its first years, Google's tagline was _"don't be evil"_ but
| they couldn't deliver the promise.
|
| OpenAI's original mission evaporated as soon as ChatGPT became
| a thing.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979981
| RGBCube wrote:
| > "Reedok"
|
| Huh?
| JohnFen wrote:
| This made me happy, too. I've been delaying becoming a paying
| customer because I wanted to see if they were going the VC
| route first. This is a signal to me that they aren't, so I've
| signed up.
| weego wrote:
| $670k investment is not "bootstrap money". It's literally the
| opposite of bootstrapping. What is the value in this attempted
| narrative? Is it the entrepreneur equivalent of "I don't work
| with big data, only 500 billion row sets but..."
| codegeek wrote:
| I agree with you. The amount doesn't matter.
|
| Investment = you are not personally liable and no need to
| return the money if u fail. It's not ur money.
|
| Bootstrap = you are responsible to pay it back.iys ur money
| once u get it.
| tough wrote:
| You can pay a couple years software engineers for a year at
| SF rates
| ignoramous wrote:
| Or pay 2 capable engs in India for 11 years. PS670k is a
| _lot_ in some parts of the world
| AdamN wrote:
| The typical formula is that it costs double a person's
| salary for the total budget. So really you're saying 5.5
| years and 2 people is a low number so maybe you build a
| team of 4 and then the runway is an excruciatingly short
| 2.75 years.
| skrebbel wrote:
| That formula makes no sense if you're a scrappy
| distributed team.
| hcks wrote:
| If by << a couple >> you literally mean 2 then sure
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| He clearly meant "a couple of three things" like from the
| Sopranos /s
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| You're going to have to explain the relevance of the K man.
| blokey wrote:
| K=thousands....
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilo-
| mattweinberg wrote:
| The "k" means "thousands", meaning they raised $670,000 and
| not $670 million.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I genuinely read that thing about the K as being a
| reference to the K in Kagi.
|
| I'm going to go have a coffee.
| barbazoo wrote:
| We all have moments like that :)
| Tostino wrote:
| Just that it was a smaller number than would you are expected
| to sell your soul for with VC cash. Only raising what you
| need to grow "naturally" and retaining control is a good
| thing in my book, but that isn't what a lot of people want to
| do in that situation.
| tromp wrote:
| What does Kramer have to do with it?
| https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/1mpeu5/the_kman/
| detourdog wrote:
| The K-man knows all.
| thejazzman wrote:
| Giddy up!
|
| https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=seinfeld_06_01_191×tam
| p=0...
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| Nice, Vlad. Keep up the good work!
| sgt wrote:
| It's not $670 million, it's: They've raised a bunch of money!
|
| Now let's go and blow that money in Vegas.
|
| /s
| pindab0ter wrote:
| Is there any specific reason for this take?
| sgt wrote:
| See fly.io's "bunch of money" story
| abound wrote:
| Another happy paying Kagi user here. Several commenters have
| mentioned concerns about metering their searches. I'm
| grandfathered into a $10/mo 1,500 search plan, and there have
| been a few months where I do indeed hit that limit. The UX is
| quite good, it makes it clear when you're close, when you hit it,
| and allows you to set further limits on subsequent searches (you
| pay $0.015/search after the limit).
|
| I've also gotten quite a bit of utility out of their API, with
| just a thin wrapper for querying via the command line [1]. I
| think I'd still prefer using the Search API directly (I currently
| use the GPT-enabled API), but that's only available for Teams at
| the moment [2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/bcspragu/kagi [2]
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html
| Version467 wrote:
| Love to see it. Happy paying customer here. Their product is
| great and I actually found myself enjoying their AI integrations
| as well. Specifically their universal summarizer is surprisingly
| good. But that's just an added Bonus. I'm primarily very happy
| that I can use a search engine that is incentivised to build a
| great search product because their revenue depends on it.
| iamleppert wrote:
| I'd pay money if there was a way I could get access to the actual
| data store of an index of the web, and tools built on top of it
| (or a language / DSL / API) that made it easy and fast to build
| complex queries.
| slipperlobster wrote:
| I'm a recent Kagi subscriber. Glad to see there's a generally
| positive reaction to this. I'm still trying to break the anxiety
| of "I only get a certain amount of searches per month" but I am
| glad to be a part of the service.
| mkeedlinger wrote:
| I don't think I've seen this sentiment shared by anyone else, so
| I'll go ahead and share it:
|
| I need a way to pay anonymously. For me, this usually means via
| Monero. Searches are simply too personal and too habitually
| unrestrained for me to trust to anyone who can de-anonymize them.
|
| Honestly, in retrospect I'll acknowledge that my intense quest
| for privacy is more ideological than practical, and it wouldn't
| likely be a big deal if my searches were leaked or whatnot, but
| still. I've wanted to pay for Kagi and looked for a way to
| multiple times, but until I can do so anonymously, it ain't
| happening.
| darknavi wrote:
| Maybe they could pull a Mullvad and accept cash via mail.
| networked wrote:
| This sounds like good news for Crystal, too. Thanks to more
| resources, a company powered by Crystal is more likely to hire
| developers, publish code, sponsor open source projects, and
| generally be a showcase for the language.
|
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32687071:
|
| > Crystal powers 90% of the Kagi search backend (reminder being
| Python). Highlights are great performance and concurency
| handling. Biggest downsides at this moment are compilation speed
| (does not take advantage of multi CPU cores) and debugging tools.
| dean2432 wrote:
| i really liked their fastgpt in the beginning (it did hallucinate
| a bit but not as much as chatgpt). but gradually it has become
| worse and worse in my opinion. now i don't use it any longer.
| alberth wrote:
| I find it interesting that Google is generating $6.70/user/month
| for their _free_ search, while Kagi lowest paid tier is $5.00.
|
| Google is generating more revenue per "free" user than Kagi
| lowest paid plan.
|
| Goes to show just how much money there is in advertising.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/306570/google-annualized...
| api wrote:
| That actually makes great sense. Kagi is not using advertising
| so you have to pay for it directly. That may be about what a
| decent search costs.
| NikxDa wrote:
| Looks like they significantly missed their goal. From Kagi's
| investment round invitation email:
|
| - SAFE note round with a valuation cap of $40MM (pre-money)
|
| - 249 investors maximum
|
| - We are looking to raise around $2MM from our users in this way
| ($5MM max)
|
| - Minimum investment amount per investor is $5,000, and maximum
| is $500,000.
|
| So the $670k they now raised are only about a third of what they
| were aiming for.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Their revenue in September was $318k/yr, what is it today?
| Let's say it's $600k? $1M? $40M is a really high valuation for
| that revenue, I'd not have invested either. It's not 2021
| anymore.
| jefftk wrote:
| $40M is the valuation cap, not the valuation.
|
| When you raise money with an SAFE, you are postponing the
| negotiation about how much your company is worth. It could
| easily convert at well under $40M depending on how well they
| are doing when they next raise.
| Mashimo wrote:
| What is MM?
| frankthedog wrote:
| Finance language for million. Mil Mil aka thousand thousand.
| Mil is Latin for thousand hence why CPM is cost per thousand,
| not cost per million impressions.
| solardev wrote:
| Heh, too bad finance doesn't use SI units. Instead of
| billionaires we'd have gigadollarbros.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| it's "million" as in 10^6, but I don't know why that is not
| abbreviated just with a single M or m.
| jononomo wrote:
| This is the size of a funding round that makes sense to me for a
| startup that is trying to build software.
| p-e-w wrote:
| That's great news. If there ever was an opportunity for newcomers
| to enter the search engine market, it is now.
|
| 15 years ago, the idea of competing with Google would have been
| laughable. Not only did they have all the money, their search
| engine was so incredibly good that it's hard to imagine what a
| new market entrant could have brought to the table.
|
| Today, Google's results are so hilariously bad that I have no
| doubt the majority of HN users could easily come up with ranking
| algorithms that would outperform Google's by a large margin. It's
| not that the problem is so difficult; the quality of results
| clearly indicates they aren't even trying.
|
| So please, go ahead and punish Google, Bing, and Co for what they
| have allowed to happen during the past decade or so.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| > I have no doubt the majority of HN users could easily come up
| with ranking algorithms that would outperform Google's by a
| large margin
|
| Google is facing incredible adversaries whose only goal is to
| subvert their search. These adversaries are extremely skilled,
| motivated, and effective.
|
| You're probably right that many people can do better than
| Google, until you get enough traction that these adversaries
| pay attention to you. And then you'll have the exact same
| problem Google does.
|
| Don't overestimate yourself. Google/Bing are doing a pretty
| good job considering what they're facing, instead curse out the
| SEO teams who are subverting them.
|
| (And no, I'm not saying the major search players are without
| concern or condemnation, but "search quality" is not one of
| those issues for which they're directly responsible)
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Google is facing incredible adversaries
|
| Are they? Google could manually remove the worst SEO sites
| from the index and like reduce the spam you get for dev
| queries with like 95%.
|
| It takes time to build up rank and like 10s to remove the
| site.
|
| There is an extension that does this client side for Firefox.
| Try it. (I don't remember the name. I only have it on
| desktop).
|
| The only explaintions are that Google is too dysfunctional to
| do anything or they are doing it on purpose to increase
| revenue. Otherwise there is no way the SEO would suddenly
| become this bad.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| > Are they? Google could manually remove the worst SEO
| sites from the index and like reduce the spam you get for
| dev queries with like 95%.
|
| Do you think they don't have a huge team doing just that?
| Easier said than done.
|
| > The only explaintions are that Google is too
| dysfunctional to do anything or they are doing it on
| purpose to increase revenue. Otherwise there is no way the
| SEO would suddenly become this bad.
|
| This is not based in reality.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Do you think they don't have a huge team doing just
| that? Easier said than done.
|
| How can the Stackoverflow mirrors, that kinda hide that
| they are mirrors, rank so high then? If there was any
| team at Google doing manual review, the Google engineers
| would spam them with mails complaining that those site
| ruins their copy-pasta coding flow.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Anyone having a terrible Kagi experience with Safari lately?
| Something seems to have changed recently. My search bar is
| effectively useless.
| ianyanusko wrote:
| So happy to see this at the top of Hacker News. Rounds < $1
| million need to be celebrated more. Rooting for Kagi.
| kelvie wrote:
| Ever since they upped the search limit (before it's pay per
| search), I've been a happy camper.
|
| On the other hand, it did teach me the true cost of searches, and
| I use a lot more !bangs now, like !mdn or !archwiki (although the
| search powering both of these are probably funded by donations)
| hashworks wrote:
| So it basically supports the same bangs as DDG? Couldn't find
| it in their feature list. Do bangs count as a search?
| coopykins wrote:
| Bangs don't count towards the Kagi searches.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > On the other hand, it did teach me the true cost of searches
|
| It really does change the dynamic of how you search, if you
| know that the next search will cost you 1.25C/. Right now I use
| Ecosia, so I'm actually more motivated to do extra searches, to
| increase the number of trees they plant. Kagi is the other way
| around, search has a cost, so be mindful about what you search
| for. It's a great way for them to have a sense of their load,
| while also perhaps being ever so slightly more sustainable.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Right now I use Ecosia, so I 'm actually more motivated to
| do extra searches, to increase the number of trees they
| plant._
|
| Ecosia and Kagi aren't targeting the same market. Ecosia, for
| example, isn't as serious about _privacy_ :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713050
| wartijn_ wrote:
| You can cut out the middle man for those searches, at least on
| the desktop versions of Firefox and Chrome. You can add a new
| search engine in the browser settings and add a keyword. If
| you've done that you can type that keyword in your address bar,
| followed by the search term you want.
| gcanyon wrote:
| A bit of a non sequitur, but every time kagi comes up I get a
| twinge: "kagi.com" had a long, robust life in the earlier days of
| the internet as an e-commerce facilitator. They handled the
| credit card transactions for hundreds or thousands of small
| businesses in the '90s and '00s, including mine, and I somewhat
| knew the founder, Kee Nethery.
|
| The internet changed over time, of course, and Kagi changed with
| it. Then something bad happened (I don't remember what, and
| archive.org is being unhelpful finding the announcement) and Kagi
| shut down. Then I guess Kee sold the domain, and here we are.
|
| And every time the new kagi.com comes up, I think of Kee.
| hu3 wrote:
| I searched for "Kagi shut down" and found that it seems to be
| related with a ton of credit card chargebacks.
|
| https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
| gherkinnn wrote:
| The recent price reductions [0] were fantastic. But investors
| always smells fishy to me. Granted I don't understand much of it,
| so my nose might be off.
|
| 0 - https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes
| mrweasel wrote:
| > But investors always smells fishy to me.
|
| I was thinking the same, but then again, the investment is
| rather low, so it is a lot easier to dump that investor, if
| values don't align in the future. I might be reading it all
| wrong, but it also seems like the money comes from 42 different
| investors, making it even easier to part ways.
| MandieD wrote:
| It's kind of reassuring to see Kagi get funding that is
| significant for an individual/small business, but not the kind
| of wild VC money that sloshed around these last several years,
| and a minimum investment that even I could manage (if I were an
| accredited investor).
|
| This is money expecting "more of this, just a bit better"
| rather than "giant exit, who cares what happens to the product
| afterwards"
|
| Hint: non-wealthy people can become an Accredited Investor by
| passing the Series 7 or Series 65 (Investment Adviser), the
| latter of which can be done all on your own. I'm considering
| the Series 65, because it will also give me better retirement
| investment options as a US citizen (and taxpayer) residing in
| the EU.
| ftxbro wrote:
| I'm not hating but why is a company raising $670k such big news
| here? Aren't there some companies constantly raising like
| hundreds or thousands of times that much money, one got sold for
| $1B that I had literally never heard of it.
| mattmanser wrote:
| It's an ad-free, privacy focused, search engine.
|
| So it's more what they're doing rather than how much they
| raised.
| nologic01 wrote:
| > why is a company raising $670k such big news here
|
| because "news" is something that is "new" (in this case raising
| a tiny amount) as opposed to what everybody else is doing
| (raising 100x or 1000x that amount)?
|
| there is of-course an availability and reporting bias (there
| are countless of small firms raising small amounts in various
| sectors) but kagi is reasonably known in this audience so the
| news is interesting
| raincole wrote:
| Because people here like Kagi and crave for a google
| alternative.
|
| I've seen Krita reach HN's front page. Not "Krita 5 just
| released". Literally just sigifing Krita's existance.
| ftxbro wrote:
| OK I had never heard Kagi before this and I didn't realize it
| was that kind of post so I was confused.
|
| If it's a Google alternative, wouldn't it be difficult
| because I imagine Google has so much lock in by now? Like I
| imagine they have special deals with like cloudflare or
| whatever so that Google's spiders are allowed but spiders
| from random companies that got less than a million dollars
| spiders aren't allowed? Is it even legal to webcrawl anymore
| if you don't have a team of lobbyists stationed at DC and
| Brussels just constantly pleasuring every politician?
| Probably they would say you are doing cyberfraud or wirecrime
| or interstate proxyterror of some kind, whose rules are
| buried in a stack of hundreds of thousands of pages of
| regulations?
| freediver wrote:
| > OK I had never heard Kagi before this and I didn't
| realize it was that kind of post so I was confused. If it's
| a Google alternative, wouldn't it be difficult because I
| imagine Google has so much lock in by now?
|
| You are absoluetly right. This is what this paragraph from
| the announcement addresses.
|
| "Looking ahead, we are cognizant that when building Kagi,
| we are running a marathon and not a sprint. Altering
| entrenched habits in the society, such as the reliance on
| personal data and even pieces of what makes us human as
| currency for essential online activities like search and
| browsing, is a gradual process that will take time."
| piva00 wrote:
| They aren't trying to replace Google, they are an
| alternative for privacy-minded individuals who use/rely on
| searching a lot and want a better experience than Google
| provides.
|
| Google will have its lock in but there's a market share of
| people like me (and many others here on HN) which have been
| let down by the constant enshittification of Google's
| search and will pay for an alternative providing the
| experience we were used with Google some 10-15 years ago.
|
| Kagi is being smart, they don't need to become a multi-
| billion company, it's a small team (last I've seen it was
| about 15 people), providing a good enough product to have
| paying customers. I've been using it since Nov/2022 and
| been pretty happy to pay the US$ 10/month for a better and
| more private search product.
| samwillis wrote:
| > Looking ahead, we are cognizant that when building Kagi, we
| are running a marathon and not a sprint.
|
| They are specifically drawing attention to the fact that they
| are aiming to build a long term sustainable business, not grow
| quickly and exit. Thats likely to be important to their
| customers.
|
| They needed some cash for investment, but didn't need to
| maximise investment to push for rapid growth.
| pixeladed wrote:
| Neeva - cofounded by an ex-Google exec also provided a paid
| search experience with similar features. They have since shut
| down and in their blog post pointed out that the issue they faced
| was not convincing people that they should pay for search but
| rather the fact that distribution of their service is difficult
| (i.e. being browser defaults, at work, on people's phones).
| What's Kagi doing differently to be able to succeed?
| sph wrote:
| They reach the top of HN front page. Because I've never heard
| of Neeva before, but I'm a Kagi paying user.
| comfypotato wrote:
| It's hot and new, but this is still a valid question. Neeva
| shows up, not Kagi, when you query Google about paid search
| engines.
| imiric wrote:
| That's hardly a relevant criteria. HN consists of a niche
| audience of technical users already interested in startups
| and search technology. The real criteria is whether Kagi will
| be able to scale beyond a niche market, and establish a
| sustainable mainstream business. OP's question is valid, but
| it can't be answered by outsider speculation. Hopefully
| someone from Kagi is able to address it.
|
| This investment is a good sign, though. I'm rooting for them.
| We need more competition in this space, and a proper business
| not hijacked by advertisers is always a good thing.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > The real criteria is whether Kagi will be able to scale
| beyond a niche market, and establish a sustainable
| mainstream business.
|
| Why? Even if they never get close to being as popular as
| Google, they can still have millions of paying users.
| int_19h wrote:
| Why can't it be a sustainable niche business?
| imiric wrote:
| True, it could be. I'm just not sure it can survive as
| such when its main competitors are billion-dollar
| corporations.
|
| But maybe there's room for smaller search engines with
| alternative business models to compete with each other.
| marginalia.nu is another promising startup.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| because they raised a SAFE
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You're forgetting that the "niche technical audience" has
| something marketers and influencers and other kinds of
| pushers don't: _competence and credibility_. And (not
| relevant here, but to plenty other products) control or
| influence over procurement process in SMBs, corporations,
| universities and government facilities.
|
| Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are the
| personal IT support departments of some subset of our
| family, friends, and _their_ friends. They come to us
| asking for advice, or to set their computers /phones up, or
| to fix them after they "caught viruses". However
| begrudgingly we do that, it puts us in a position of power
| - they listen to and trust in what we say, and accept
| uncritically what we do to their machines. And, our
| interests are mostly aligned with theirs - even if we don't
| care about particular friend-of-a-friend's happiness, we'll
| still do them good so they don't have to come back with
| more issues any time soon.
|
| This is how Google Chrome spread. This is how Firefox still
| survives. This is how several brands of anti-malware
| software spread - a mistake that's now difficult to undo.
| This is how AdBlock Plus became a thing, and how uBlock
| Origin is now replacing it. All these trends and more, I
| participated in first-hand. People still remember and
| follow advice I gave them over a decade ago (which isn't
| always good - see the anti-malware stuff).
|
| And so is the case with Kagi, to a degree. I'm paid user
| for 1.5 years now, happy with the service. I recommend it
| in relevant discussions, I mention it to people who spot it
| - but since it's a paid product, it is a tough sell with
| general population. Still, I try to spread the word, like I
| do with any other good and non-user-abusive tool.
|
| That said, this news makes me somewhat reluctant to
| recommend Kagi. I'll keep using it because it provides me
| immediate value for reasonable price, but taking investment
| often is a Faustian bargain. In this case it's not as clear
| as with regular VC backing, so I guess we'll see where this
| goes.
| imiric wrote:
| I think you're overestimating the impact technical users
| have on the survival of a business. Word of mouth and
| technical influence inside SMBs and corporations can only
| do so much, especially for a business that doesn't have a
| corporate sales strategy.
|
| > Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are
| the personal IT support departments of some subset of our
| family, friends, and their friends.
|
| How has that influence worked out for you so far? By that
| logic, all our family and friend circles would be running
| Linux, using OSS, and be more mindful of their privacy.
| IME my attempts at convincing others to use the tools
| that I use has mostly been met with lukewarm response, or
| even arguments in favor of the tools that they already
| use. Convincing someone to change their computing habits
| is not just a matter of being considered an expert in the
| field.
|
| Google Chrome spread because it had the resources and
| influence of a billion-dollar corporation, and the
| marketing budget to reach millions of users. Firefox is
| barely surviving, and most of it is due to its corporate
| contracts, not because of its technical audience.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > How has that influence worked out for you so far? By
| that logic, all our family and friend circles would be
| running Linux, using OSS, and be more mindful of their
| privacy.
|
| Asking normal people to use Linux and OSS is a bit too
| much, but I think that Macbook sales have had at least a
| bit of help by being endorsed by the technical crowd.
| sumedh wrote:
| > HN consists of a niche audience of technical users
| already interested in startups and search technology.
|
| Isnt that how firefox got popular, techies started to use
| it and then convinced others to switch. Of Course in the
| end it was no match against Google marketing for Chrome.
| nine_k wrote:
| So did Neeva. This is how I got on their waitlist.
|
| Did not have enough time to actually use them though.
| detourdog wrote:
| Kagi is not convenient in the sense of browser search engine
| awareness. They do plug-in type thing. Needs work from the
| browsers for better integration.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| They've made their own browser for MacOS and iOS, so at
| least they've threaded that path.
| qassiov wrote:
| I didn't realise Neeva had shut down. I tried it for about a
| week, but stopped using it because it wasn't as snappy as
| Google. In fact, I always seem to return to Google from every
| other search engine I try because of its snappiness -- decades
| of tuning seems to have paid off.
| drcongo wrote:
| I find Kagi snappier than Google. Plus the results you want
| are actually on the first page.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Kagi is the first alternative search engine that I actually
| use regularly instead of Google.
|
| I used DDG for years, but more than half my queries ended up
| being prepended with !g because their results just weren't
| very good. With Kagi, I fall back on Google maybe once a
| month, and usually Google doesn't end up finding anything
| better.
| dharmab wrote:
| On my work PC I use Kagi via the session link feature.
| leokennis wrote:
| At least for iOS/Mac but 99.999% sure for other browsers as
| well, they could write an extension that rewrites
| "https://www.google.com/search?q=some%20search" into their own
| search url right? Then keep Google as default search engine.
| Installing an extension sounds like a hurdle people paying for
| search are willing and able to jump over.
| remedan wrote:
| Kagi already has a browser extension that does one thing only
| --switches your default search engine to Kagi.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| They do have a Safari extension on iOS, which directs
| searches to kagi.com
| ziftface wrote:
| I love kagi but I hate this. It's not their fault, it's
| just a limitation of the os but it's such a hassle when you
| have to solve a Google captcha to get kagi results. I'm
| considering just removing that from my phone and switching
| back to Google there.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| You can switch default search engine to DDG or Ecosia,
| Kagi extension will still redirect you away. Or use
| extensions like xSearch or xEngine, they seem to be
| better at redirecting
| nunez wrote:
| That's exactly what I do. I feed searches to Ecosia and
| the Kagi extension handles the rewrite. Works well on Mac
| and iOS. I only use Google explicitly with the !g
| operator (which I use sparingly, and often get the same
| results or slightly worse) or for Google Images (which
| are better for now)
| drcongo wrote:
| I tried Neeva and immediately hated it - it felt slow and
| clunky. I tried Kagi and immediately loved it enough that I've
| been paying ever since they let me. I think the big thing that
| Kagi is doing differently to Neeva is just being good.
| detourdog wrote:
| My first Kagi search was so rich with results it was a
| throwback to a different era.
| drcongo wrote:
| I know right! I can't remember the last time I had to click
| through to the second page of Kagi unless my search was a
| futile one in the first place (ie: I hadn't understood the
| problem enough to know what to search for)
| dns_snek wrote:
| > What's Kagi doing differently to be able to succeed?
|
| Define success? It outperforms every other search engine in
| terms of quality of results and at least from what I
| understand, they're not too far off from breaking even on their
| salaries.
|
| Neeva was a VC funded abomination and it showed, they even had
| deals with "big brand" companies like LastPass to offer
| bundles, but their core product sucked. Neeva search results
| were often worse than Google. That's not the case with Kagi.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > Define success?
|
| Its not hard to define success. It means having more revenue
| than their cost, and paying all employees market rate
| salary(including the founder himself).
| dns_snek wrote:
| > Its not hard to define success.
|
| Everyone has their own definition of success. For many, a
| "successful" tech startup is one that eventually lands a
| $100M+ buyout, or gets millions of paying customers, or
| some other metric that's far beyond "simply" arriving at a
| sustainable business that you (and I) mentioned.
| rondini wrote:
| If that's your view of success then many of the web's
| biggest services aren't successful
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's a common bar for the continued
| existence of companies. I'd say successes if the company
| still offers a service in 5 or 10 years. Unless the
| operators an employees are all independently wealthy, you
| need to break even
| rendaw wrote:
| Maybe it's because they were funded too much and then had
| unrealistic growth goals, and were then pressured into selling?
| drunkan wrote:
| They have their own browser, the Orion browser, to funnel
| people onto their search engine.
|
| Their search engine is also better than google for me for most
| use cases already, it has a clean and smart design with well
| thought out features that add value.
|
| I hate that Orion is not cross platform and limited to apple
| ecosystem.
|
| With that said it is native and my default choice for macOS and
| iOS.
|
| No telemetry, ad blocker built in, performant and supports
| extensions from chrome and firefox - on iOS too.
|
| Hands down the best native tree style tabs of any browser on
| the market on top of that and easy tab syncing.
|
| It's still in development but it's stable enough for me to be
| my main browser.
|
| These two products show some serious technical ability from a
| small team. I bet on companies who invest in and show technical
| ability over those with VC money, big names focused on
| marketing and growth.
| dharmab wrote:
| I'm using Orion as my iOS browser and in the past few months
| I've not had to reach for Safari. Looking forward to a Linux
| and Windows release.
| escape-big-tech wrote:
| Neeva did only one thing right: they cared about privacy, but
| otherwise they really did not do a good job. Their search
| results were worse than google, their load times were even
| slower than google, they tried making too much money too
| quickly, and they jumped towards fads too quickly.
| drumhead wrote:
| That's a paltry amount, why would they need to raise so little,
| don't they have the cash flow to cover it? I guess VCs arent in
| the mood to be so generous with their money anymore with the
| competition for capital so intense. We've probably reached the
| culling stage of the current cycle.
| keyle wrote:
| That's great news. I don't particularly care about the search
| engine, for me, it's about the browser. Orion is really great, I
| hope they don't stuff it up!
| scubadude wrote:
| I'd be using it now, but Mac only /eyeroll
| elishah wrote:
| For anyone else who, like me, was confused by the name:
|
| > Are you affiliated with the legendary Kagi shareware platform?
|
| > No. That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events.
| We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance.
| arketyp wrote:
| Cagey...
| ddevault wrote:
| I dunno, names are scarce and if a project fails then I don't
| see too much wrong with reuse of the name.
| mellosouls wrote:
| cagey != shady, but maybe they meant canny
| arketyp wrote:
| It was a pun. Cagey as in shrewd.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| In territories where small enterprises are numerous you can
| count _n_ "Technodata" and _m_ "Smith and sons" per square
| kilometer.
| mewse wrote:
| I think the post you're replying to was intended as a pun.
| potro wrote:
| Is $670K adequate sum to he raised through such financing round?
| I get used to multi-million numbers in startup announcements.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| The irony is, I think I could get more delivered with a $670k
| cheque than I could with a $6.7 million one. With the latter,
| you would grow too big, management would creep in, you would
| overengineer, you might spend too much time working behind
| closed doors etc.
|
| Later on you would need cash to scale this business, but for
| early stage product development I think $500k to $1 million is
| the sweet spot.
| dmje wrote:
| This. A smaller team without all the b/s is going to have way
| more impact than a monster bloater full of "happiness
| engineers".
| potro wrote:
| I imagine that their hosting costs must be quite big and not
| very elastic. Crawling takes compute and bandwidth, storage
| cost will be high, as you need to store data in low latency
| storage, then indexing which is more compute costs.
|
| They may have access to talent pool willing to work for their
| vision at significantly reduced rates, but unless they
| effectively sell themself to big cloud provider, they can't
| significantly reduce the infrastructure cost.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Also since Kagi is a paid product, I imagine that the amount
| of external funding needed is inherently less than a startup
| that is built on the "scale first, monetise later" model.
| Animats wrote:
| "Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a
| powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the
| web."
|
| With 670K?
|
| Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone
| search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was
| simpler.
|
| There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably
| runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real
| efforts to keep out spam. Everybody is fed up with Google and
| Bing. There's a great opportunity here to disrupt the industry
| and destroy a trillion dollars in market cap.
|
| But not for $670K.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Perhaps the business is already sustainable and that $670k will
| just let them hire an additional person to speed things up a
| bit?
|
| There's a lot of wasted effort in this industry. Slack has
| 1500+ employees just to make a chat app. Granted, it's a damn
| good chat app, but Mozilla is maintaining a browser with half
| as many people, with not everyone focused on Firefox at that.
|
| My friend is now in a project where he billed for three weeks
| until all the issues with his dev account were sorted out. It
| remains unclear when he will be able to start actually working.
|
| I spent two years building a web app + gRPC server that perhaps
| could have been just the latter.
|
| I could go on. Point is, you can blow through $30mln easily but
| that doesn't mean you _have to_.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| someone below linked to the fact that they do leverage other
| search engines for their tech. So that can explain the lower
| cost: https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from
|
| It's more about curation (and I guess some machine learning)
| than completely new tech.
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| Have you seen what they've already built? The product is out
| there and very usable: https://kagi.com/
| yxre wrote:
| I use it, and it's better than google and duckduckgo. What
| features are they missing?
| golemotron wrote:
| That $30 million might not have yielded a great search engine
| but it did produce Cuil Theory, a branch of mathematics with
| the potential to change the world:
|
| http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory/
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| This is a joke about how bad the search results of Cuil were
| right?
| golemotron wrote:
| Yes, but very amusing regardless of how it came to be.
| detourdog wrote:
| They have already done it I'm a paying subscriber.
| fho wrote:
| Have you tried kagi? Because I have and it is pretty good. I
| was sold when they summarized several "listicles" (ie your
| typical Top10 blog spam) into one concise listing. "Yes these
| results would pop up for your search ... but you probably don't
| want to look at them".
| thiht wrote:
| I have no idea how you could justify a $30 million budget.
| $670k seems much more reasonable to me. I can imagine where
| this budget goes, the numbers make sense.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think a small operation is exactly the sort of outfit to do
| it. Makes you focus on what is important.
|
| The absolute worst way you can arrange a search engine project
| is as some sort of manhattan project with a humongous budget
| and an army of professors and experts.
|
| History is littered with bold and ambitious Google killers that
| went nowhere.
|
| You can throw almost any amount of money at an operation, and
| it will gobble it up. I think search in particular is very
| prone to bloated R&D budgets and various forms of mission
| creep.
|
| Yet the underlying reality is that software development scales
| very poorly with organization size, and the larger your
| organization is, the harder it is to steer and the more
| difficult it is to make the right calls. A squad of 3-4
| motivated and talented guys is absolute peak get-shit-done.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> I think a small operation is exactly the sort of outfit to
| do it._
|
| A small operation in terms of number of developers yes. But
| not being able to subsidise user growth means they will never
| be able to build their own full web index as the fixed cost
| of doing that is too high for a small number of users.
|
| As a consequence, they will always be at the mercy of
| Google/Bing. The range of things they can innovate on will
| always be limited. And the situation can only get worse as
| people start to expect more AI functionality.
|
| I doubt that you can build a sustainable niche product if the
| effort you have to put into it is just as big as if you're
| building for billions of users. Having few users is not what
| defines a niche. Niches are defined by specialisation.
| alwaysbeconsing wrote:
| > not being able to subsidise user growth
|
| You're ignoring that Kagi runs on subscriptions, so this
| funding is not all there is. If the subscription covers
| basic user costs (which it should, because they just
| adjusted the pricing) or at least covers most of them then
| the 670K can be used for growth.
| petra wrote:
| //As a consequence, they will always be at the mercy of
| Google/Bing. The range of things they can innovate on will
| always be limited.
|
| Sure. But Google/Bing has shown lack of interest in
| innovating for power searchers. I believe they'll continue
| doing so.
|
| And even so, this space is big, I'm sure there are many
| niches that would fit a scrappy, subscription based player.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > A small operation in terms of number of developers yes.
| But not being able to subsidise user growth means they will
| never be able to build their own full web index as the
| fixed cost of doing that is too high for a small number of
| users.
|
| What do you reckon the cost of doing this would be?
|
| Just doing the napkin math for say a Mojeek sized index
| (couple of billion docs) doesn't seem to justify a
| particularly astronomical budget.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> What do you reckon the cost of doing this would be?_
|
| That is indeed the key question. I tried to find out
| before commenting but the information I found is very
| vague. Internet Archive spends millions per year, but
| their index is updated far too slowly for a search
| engine. I have no idea what it costs to create a Google-
| size index.
|
| Do you think the Mojeek index is good enough to compete
| with Google?
| neurostimulant wrote:
| Internet archive snapshot the whole page while google
| only index the first few kb of text data on every page
| (forgot the number, was it 100kb max per page?), so maybe
| it'll cost lower to build a search engine index compared
| to an internet preservation project?
|
| Assuming they'll need to index 820 billion pages (the
| number of pages preserved in the internet archive), at
| 100kb each, and assuming they use a database with 0.3x
| text data compression efficiency, they'll need at least
| 24600 TB to store those text data. Assuming $300 per 16TB
| disk, then they'll need to spend at least $7,380,000 for
| disk alone. This is a lot of money just for storage and
| we haven't included stuff like replication and backup,
| indexing metadata overhead, etc.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >so maybe it'll cost lower to build a search engine index
| compared to an internet preservation project?
|
| An index is just hashmap of words and list of urls. So
| you have to parse the page, and add the urls and word
| frequencies to the list.
|
| In terms of storage is cheaper, in terms of computing
| power is more expensive.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A hash table is not a good backing structure for a search
| engine.
|
| Hash tables almost guarantee worst case disk read
| patterns. You use something like a skip list or a b-tree,
| since that's makes much better use of the hardware, and
| on top of that allows you to do incredibly fast joins.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| >100kb max per page?
|
| They changed that limit somewhere in the mid-2000s. Just
| as well, there's some CMS's out there where there's
| several hundred kilobytes of inline JS and CSS before any
| body text.
| leoedin wrote:
| This seems like a good use case for some sort of spam
| filtering. Maybe the web is that big, but what percentage
| of it is data someone will ever care about? I wonder if
| you could make a good-enough search with agressive
| filtering of pages before they enter the index.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > Internet archive snapshot the whole page while google
| only index the first few kb of text data
|
| Is that a good way to build an index?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A search engine doesn't index the HTML code. You're
| looking at a few Kb per document. You also don't need
| multiple historical snapshots of the document like WM
| retains.
|
| So you're looking at maybe 20 bn docs, 4 Kb each. 100 Tb,
| _before_ compression.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| You don't index HTML code, but you have to process HTML
| and eventually run Javascript to get the text content.
| Then you have to compute the word frequencies.And that
| means you have to use more compute power.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| True, but then Google doesn't just download the page
| source and index that. They run JavaScript in some cases
| to get to the actual content. This must come at a
| significant cost. Their index is enormous as well:
|
| _" The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions
| of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in
| size."_
|
| https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/search/howsearchworks/h
| ow-...
|
| Doesn't mean you have to be as big as Google to do
| something useful of course.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| I've been told, by a very credible source that would
| know, that the top level index is (only) 10 billion web
| pages.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Sure, download and run the javascript, but then you can
| snapshot the DOM, grab the text, and discard all the
| rest. The HTML and js is of little practical value for
| the index after that point.
|
| Google's index is likely very large because they don't
| have any real economic incentives to keeping it small.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _>... but then you can snapshot the DOM, grab the text,
| and discard all the rest_
|
| Yes, absolutely, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But
| first you have to figure out what you can discard beyond
| the HTML tags themselves to avoid indexing all the
| garbage that is on each and every page.
|
| When I tried to do this I came to the conclusion that I
| needed to actually render the page to find out where on
| the page a particular piece of text was, what font size
| it had, if it was even visible, etc. And then there's
| JavaScript of course.
|
| So what I'm saying is that storing a couple of kilobytes
| is probably not the most costly part of indexing a page.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You don't need to store it indefinitely though, and
| there's not much point in crawling faster than you can
| process the data.
|
| The couple of kilobytes per document is the actual
| storage footprint. Sure you need to massage the data, but
| that almost entirely CPU bound. You also need a lot of
| RAM for keeping the hot parts of the index.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> When I tried to do this I came to the conclusion that
| I needed to actually render the page to find out where on
| the page a particular piece of text was, what font size
| it had, if it was even visible, etc. And then there 's
| JavaScript of course._
|
| Are there open source projects devoted to this
| functionality? It's becoming more and more a sticking
| point for working with LLMs. Grabbing the text without
| navigation and other crap but while maintaining
| formatting and links, etc
| DeathArrow wrote:
| There are many software libraries that can output just
| the text from HTML or run JS. For C# there's HTML Agility
| Pack and PuppeteerSharp, for example. I did use them for
| web scrapping.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Good question (meaning I don't know :)
|
| For my specific purposes it has always been good enough
| to apply some simple heuristics. But that wouldn't have
| been possible without access to post rendering
| information, which only a real browser (https://pptr.dev)
| can reliably produce.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Google started becoming an answer engine from ~2015 with
| the introduction of "People Also Ask", and arguably
| earlier than that [0]. Mojeek.com is a (information
| retrieval) search engine, and we resist the temptation to
| also become an answer engine. So you might say we do not
| compete with Google. afte all we have a very different
| business model and proposition.
|
| As for the index; this underpins mojeek.com and our API;
| which customers use for search and/or AI. Common Crawl is
| ~3.5 billion pages and underpins LLMs. Our index is ~7
| billion. Who knows what (else) Google, and Bing, do with
| their index ;) ?
|
| [0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-
| threatens-dive...
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> Google started becoming an answer engine from ~2015
| with the introduction of "People Also Ask", and arguably
| earlier than that [0]. Mojeek.com is a (information
| retrieval) search engine, and we resist the temptation to
| also become an answer engine. So you might say we do not
| compete with Google._
|
| I'm sure you know your users well after so many years in
| the search engine business, but having read your article
| I must say I find your approach risky. You seem to be
| betting on search engines and answer engines continuing
| to be complementary rather than substitutes.
|
| But we are not the ones making this decision. Users will
| be making the decision in light of the newly available AI
| capabilities, and they will be making it with complete
| disregard for the health of the web, as is their nature
| :)
|
| The "funny" thing is that big publishers are as happy
| right now as I haven't seen them in the past 25 years,
| because it is so completely obvious that chat AIs will
| destroy the web unless big tech starts making big
| payments to big publishers. As you rightly say, small
| businesses and publishers will be collateral damage.
|
| But how do you make sure you're not collateral damage as
| well?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's basically the safest position you could be in.
|
| An LLM to digest results of a classic search index is
| greater than the sum of its parts. An LLMs that is not
| permitted to brush up on the relevant literature before
| answering a question generally doesn't produce very good
| answers, is prone to hallucinations etc. A pure LLM
| design isn't even a serious contender in the answer
| engine space.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| That would mean it's safe if "you" are Google or
| Microsoft+OpenAI as no one else has both a search index
| and an LLM.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You don't need to have both to sell search index access
| to anyone with an LLM, which seems like just about anyone
| these days.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Why would publishers allow you to crawl their sites if
| you're not sending them any traffic?
|
| The big publishers certainly won't let you do that as
| they are selling their data to Google, Microsoft,
| Facebook and whoever else has the money to train a fully
| fledged LLM, which is certainly not everyone.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > Do you think the Mojeek index is good enough to compete
| with Google?
|
| As a back-end for something like Kagi, it's sure getting
| there. Most of what sets Google apart is their
| exceptional level of user profiling. The actual indexing
| technology is likely on par with most of their
| competition.
|
| Of course very little of that enters into API queries.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| 7 billion+ actually, and our investment level mentioned
| here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517505
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Shit, man. That number is larger every time I check :D
| antupis wrote:
| Also search is now kinda in the strategic inflection point
| where Google has to change so it will create opportunities
| for smaller players.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There's also interesting things happening in the server
| space that doesn't get talked about enough. Not only are
| the latest generation of Epycs _very_ good, the price of
| RAM and especially SSDs has absolutely plummeted.
|
| If ever there was a moment where horizontal scaling looked
| promising, this is it.
| davedx wrote:
| Yeah, there's a lot of truth in this, and it matches my
| experience, with the caveat that the 3-4 guys need to stay
| very clear eyed and pragmatic with their technology choices.
| Kind of covered by the "talented" part but I've seen so many
| otherwise talented people fall into holes because of this,
| and I'd guess it applies doubly for building a search engine.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Same. Perhaps for a search engine though my previous
| experiences in several ambitious startups is not so
| different. In our case it was 1 guy for a long time
| https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-
| track.htm...
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > History is littered with bold and ambitious Google killers
| that went nowhere.
|
| What are some examples of those?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well Cuil has already been mentioned, there's A9.com and
| Quaero; on the open source side there's mozDex, notably
| Jimbo Wales failed twice with Wikia Search and then
| Knowledge Engine.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Recently saw a talk from one of the ID software people.
| Really supports and illustrates your claim.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I think a small operation is exactly the sort of outfit to
| do it. Makes you focus on what is important.
|
| They're focusing on 2 things: a search engine AND a Mac-only
| web browser.
| hgsgm wrote:
| A nearly impossible project and a nearly pointless project
| make a perfect pairing.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Mac-only web browser
|
| Such a waste. MacOS users _might_ be open to paying (for
| Kagi in general) because they 're used to paying for a
| bunch of things other OSes get included or as freeware, but
| still, the market share is small (depending on the source,
| 10-30%). And even if many of those would enjoy a Mac-native
| app, there are at least some, like myself, that refuse to
| use single platform tools. I have a bunch of devices on a
| bunch of different OSes, I'm not going to use a very
| special browser on _one_ of them, losing sync, history,
| muscle memory when switching. That 's the reason I can't
| stay on Arc even if I quite like some of it's goals and
| structure.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Congratulations Kagi.
|
| We beg to differ on the need to raise large sums. Like Kagi we
| are on a marathon not a sprint. We have built a no-tracking and
| completely independent crawler search engine and infrastructure
| from the ground-up having raised PS3m from angels only. Cuil,
| Blekko, Quaero and Neeva who raised 10s/100s of $m may have
| come and gone; meanwhile we have been slowly building since
| 2004, with a user and API customer base that is also growing
| healthily.
| freediver wrote:
| Thanks Colin!
| hgsgm wrote:
| Do you have an option to filter out or downrank porn when I
| search for a slightly obscure initialism?
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| We have Adult Search option available for API customers.
| This will be rolled out on mojeek.com very soon.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Per TFA, this money was mostly raised from Kagi's existing
| customers.
|
| They aren't building a web crawler. Kagi is a search "client"
| (it is one way to build on a shoestring budget, alright),
| augmented by an in-house small-scale just-in-time crawler.
|
| > _From here, we take your query and use it to aggregate data
| from multiple other sources, including but not limited to
| Google, Bing, and Wikipedia, and other internal data sources in
| order to procure your search results._
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html
|
| > _We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news
| index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers._
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
|
| I like Kagi's general vision for LLMs + Search. There's a real
| chance small competitors can compete with Google with clever
| use of LLMs' zero-shot summarization, categorization, intent
| recognition, and answering abilities.
| kaba0 wrote:
| > competitors can compete with Google
|
| Especially when google continues to be worse off year after
| year. Just search for my damn keywords, like you did 10 years
| ago, especially when I have already put quotes around them
| because you Re useless!
| resolutebat wrote:
| I'm happily paying $10/mo for Kagi, I find it genuinely better*
| than Google already. And yes, it's genuinely amazing that it's
| a pipsqueak startup that's pulling this off.
|
| * For core search, that is, obviously there's vast slabs of
| services like maps, translate, etc etc where they're not even
| trying to compete.
| detourdog wrote:
| This demonstrates to me how distorted searching has become.
| The early days of the web. The standard thing was to show
| someone yahoo which was a human curated list of sites. The
| other site was a search engine from one of the colleges I
| think it was Lycos.
|
| This changed with ads. Suddenly search engines were used to
| find people searching.
| grantcarthew wrote:
| I've been using Kagi since I could first get onto the product.
| As soon as it came out of Beta, I subscribed.
|
| I had no idea how intrusive Google was. I love Google services.
| Google Cloud is far better than the others. That said, the
| search is just poison.
|
| I now spend time looking at results, not searching for results.
|
| I have to admit though, ChatGPT did make me consider dropping
| the subscription. Mr Chat has weakened the value of Kagi to me.
|
| They have their own AI summarizer engine though:
| https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
| unshavedyak wrote:
| As a subscriber to both ChatGPT and Kagi, agreed. You may be
| interested to know that Kagi also has
| https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt. It's been pretty good in my
| tests so far, nothing magical just fast and similar to a
| search input field.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Google Cloud is far better than the others._
|
| Per their own documentation, Kagi servers are hosted on
| Google Cloud.
| qmarchi wrote:
| That in of itself isn't such a scary thing.
|
| There's real restrictions, contractually, that Google has
| on accessing any data the a customer generates, and of
| which carry hefty fees for Google.
|
| This is one of the reasons on why some Google products
| never launch with support for Workspace accounts. There's
| just too much red-tape that a team doesn't want to deal
| with.
|
| Source and Disclaimer: I was a Technical Solutions Engineer
| for Google Cloud.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > I have to admit though, ChatGPT did make me consider
| dropping the subscription. Mr Chat has weakened the value of
| Kagi to me.
|
| I felt the same, but I do still need web search, and I do
| still want it to be as good as possible, so it's still worth
| it to me.
|
| And actually, as I type this I'm less sure about how much
| ChatGPT has reduced the value of web search for me. I start
| with ChatGPT for almost everything that's not "news". But I
| still frequently do web searches branching out from what I
| learned via ChatGPT. It's fewer total searches than I've done
| before, but each one might be more valuable. And since I'm
| flowing from one tool to another, not having to wade through
| ads and bad ui and SEO spam also becomes even more valuable.
| shafyy wrote:
| Stop drinking the VC kool-aid. It's possible to build almost
| any software business without huge upfront investments.
| Sakos wrote:
| There's a huge difference between typical VC funding and what
| this is. Kagi is already a self-sustaining business with a
| working and effective search engine. This is extra funding on
| top that they have available for improving Kagi. That's great.
| You don't need 30 million for that.
| raincole wrote:
| The less money they raise the more hope I have in them.
|
| So long story short, my opinion is the exact polar opposite of
| what you said.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| At their current pricing, about 10k paying users would get them
| 600K/year in revenue. Which is what they just raised. Enough
| for a small team and modest infrastructure. You don't need a
| lot to serve 600K users.
|
| All they need to do is nail enough value add for those users.
| The wider goal of disrupting Google/Bing is a different game.
| But getting a small company to 10K paying users might be doable
| given enough of a value add.
|
| Of course they are based in the Bay area, so this kind of money
| doesn't have a huge runway there.
| dcow wrote:
| Kagi has been around since 2018. They're privately bootstrapped
| (not by a VC firm). 670K is not the _only_ money that 's gone
| into the business. 670K is how a bootstrapped company
| responsibly raises money.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > But not for $670K.
|
| As someone who has already replaced Google with Kagi, as far as
| I'm concerned they've _already_ done it.
|
| I've never paid Google for anything (apart from with my data)
| but I've been paying Kagi for almost a year now. The model is
| different. From what I've seen so far, it's better.
|
| The amount of money you burn through is _not_ a good indicator
| of whether you 'll end up with a good product or viable
| business at the end, IMHO
| threeseed wrote:
| I can't seem to tell from the website.
|
| But are they depending on results from Google, Bing etc. or are
| they crawling the web themselves.
| ssd532 wrote:
| Yes, they use other search engines. Check their FAQ for details
| https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| According to their Help page they've their own indexes:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html...
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Looks like they'll need to update that first table as Neeva
| are no longer a functioning search engine.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Both. They aggregate data from lots of sources, and they have
| their own index as well. Seems like a winning model, IMHO.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-29 23:02 UTC)