9 ms·

There is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose

• sintezcs 3y ago
  I am a big fan of Kagi and a happy paying customer for more than year already. Thank you for such a great product and pleas keep going and growing!
  • nmstoker 3y ago
    Me too! It's really good. Being able to suppress results for a few (bad) sites is one of many useful features. Briefly got a bit concerned with the recent billing tweaks but that's all worked out fine too.
• marban 3y ago
  Bing doesn't need to win — they just want Google to be a little less profitable.
  • echelon 3y ago
    Or a lot less profitable. “From now on, the [gross margin] of search is going to drop forever,” Nadella said in an interview with the Financial Times. “There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all,” he added, referring to the competition against Google as “asymmetric”. https://www.ft.com/content/2d48d982-80b2-49f3-8a83-f5afef98e8eb https://www.ft.com/content/2d48d982-80b2-49f3-8a83-f5afef98e... https://archive.is/4JOW1 https://archive.is/4JOW1 It's 50% of Google's revenue, and they'll suffer immensely if this goes away.
    • jjeaff 3y ago
      I'm curious what the 50% figure includes? Because my understanding is that about 60% of Google's total revenue is search ads, and if you include network ads (which would be relevant since they are at risk from AI as well) then it is more like 70%.
      • joelcloud 3y ago
        Adsense revenue from different websites will drop because it will be summarized and cost per query will go up. This AI push will backfire
        • wbl 3y ago
          The buggy wip maker couldn't have stopped Ford
          • somat 3y ago
            A strangely mixed metaphor, and incorrect, the buggy manufacturer did well enough... for a while at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studebaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studebaker
            • TylerE 3y ago
              Not a mixed metaphor, it’s a standard phrase. Note buggy WHIP makers, not buggy makers.
              • somat 3y ago
                It is mixed because it is comparing two different class of items whips to cars does not really compare. Cars to buggies would compare or perhaps whips to steering wheels.
                • stonogo 3y ago
                  No, it's not mixed. It's related to the saying about the people who get rich off a gold rush being the ones who sell shovels. In the buggy-whip case, it's about a company not understanding the market changing entirely to make them obsolete. The transportation market moved to cars, and so nobody needs a buggy whip.
  • jimsimmons 3y ago
    At least on HN can we stop parroting this supposed open book strategy from 5D chess Nadella? Bing has failed to take away meaningful marketshare from Google by MSFT’s on admission https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-eyes-firefox-search-deal-as-bing-chatbot-gains-sputter https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-eyes-firef...
    • mrtranscendence 3y ago
      Anecdotally, after the first wave of excitement I don’t know anyone who still uses Bing chat. The value add in chat-augmented search isn’t huge IMO, and forcing the use of Edge doesn’t help.
      • stOneskull 3y ago
        it works a lot better than bing search at least
      • vstollen 3y ago
        I find lots of value in chat-augmented search. But, Bing is not ready yet. It is slow, hallucinates, only vaguely cites its sources and is therefore not trustworthy. On the other hand, I am really happy with https://phind.com https://phind.com and find myself using it if I struggle to understand some concept. For me, the power of the chat based apps is that I can explain my mental model and they can directly build upon that.
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      Restaurants didn’t kill the supermarket. I still use Google, but sometimes I use ChatGPT where I may have used Google. But having said that we are still early. If ChatGPT gets access to current information and can quote sources, pull out pertinent parts of web pages, etc then I might stop using Google. That would be like a restaurant that lets you eat then leave with your weekly shop but at costco prices.
      • Andrex 3y ago
        I feel like my Google searches are too short and precise in general; if I were to try getting the same information from an informal AI chat, it's a huge loss of productivity and efficiency I'd imagine. Google: "<local restuarant>" = Full page of information including reviews, links to order delivery, directions, etc. All in a standard UI that doesn't change from restaurant to restaurant. Muscle memory takes over. ChatGPT: "Tell me about <local restaurant>" = Blurb of text that may or may not be useful. People, including myself, have asked Google a lot of straight-up questions over the years, and those use cases match well with generative AI. But the overall point of a search engine is to find something on the internet, and I don't think that's going to go away.
• nugget 3y ago
  Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution. Sundar became a rising star and ultimately CEO of Google because he directly managed more paid distribution and user acquisition for Google search than anyone else. Not a coincidence. Google promotes the narrative that they organically grew to dominate the search market when in fact they spent many billions of dollars on user acquisition (while also, for most of that time, having the best product).
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    You're talking about being the default search engine in Firefox and Safari, right?
    • kyrra 3y ago
      Sundar was the lead PM on Chrome (before it even released).
    • EscapeFromNY 3y ago
      That, and also bundling their browser (and hence their search engine) inside lots of popular apps during the late '00s and early '10s. Remember these prompts? https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/chrome_real_bundle_400x443.png https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ch...
    • nugget 3y ago
      Toolbar, Chrome, other software partnerships and many enterprise search deals besides Firefox and Safari.
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    Not best product. The only product. IMO altavista and yahoo were so far behind they were hopeless, relying on unchanged habits and noisy news.
• emrah 3y ago
  Kagi is great. Please have a look at perplexity.ai and get inspired. We need more good options available
  • rand_flip_bit 3y ago
    Ughh, please don’t. The last thing I want in my search engine is AI, especially for a “privacy focused” one like Kagi. Paying to have all my search queries get routed through ChatGPT (and effectively used as training data) is absolutely not what I want. I suspect it’s too late though, Kagi has already drank the AI koolaid.
    • SquareWheel 3y ago
      > and effectively used as training data Models are not trained during inference, are they? Regardless, it seems like LLMs are going to have some role to play in search in the future. It's just not clear what that role is yet.
      • rand_flip_bit 3y ago
        100% the data you input to the ChatGPT 4 prompt window is being used to train ChatGPT 5, there is a reason a lot of companies are placing bans on it and telling employees to never enter sensitive data. I sincerely hope that LLMs won’t play a role in search, I don’t need a search engine trying to infer what I “meant” to type, Google and DDG started doing that and pushed me to Kagi as a result. Just take the words I type verbatim and search them in your index, don’t assume this is my first time using the internet.
        • losteric 3y ago
          only in the chat app. Per TOS, data sent to APIs is not used for training. All thesee services undoubtedly use the API
    • tildef 3y ago
      Koolaid or not, as long as they're sticking to Claude (or at least away from MS/Google/Meta) I don't really mind. FastGPT[1], which recently became unaccidentally public[2], seems to work pretty well, even though it's still separate from their main offering. The feature creep of their main search engine, like the podcast search and listicle stuff, is easy to toggle off, so I imagine LLM integration will be optional as well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719482 [2] https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt
• wellthisisgreat 3y ago
  Hey guys keep it up! I am one of your early supporter customers, and I haven’t used Google ever since I switched to Kagi sometime in 2022 The pay for use model for search is refreshing. I hope the economics work out
  • behringer 3y ago
    I don't know what the early pricing is, but the current pricing is a bit absurd. I can't even consider it as a viable option.
    • wellthisisgreat 3y ago
      hmm it comes down to $10/ month for me + 1-2$ in case of very intense searching
      • behringer 3y ago
        Even that seems a bit high but at least manageable
• djbusby 3y ago
  What happens in two years?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • freediver 3y ago
    Let me have a stab at this: We will be at the end of the AI hype cycle we are currently in. Majority of AI/search startups that exist today will no longer be around, failing to find a viable business model that has a hope of profitability, as stuffing ads inside will put them in direct trajectory of Google/Microsoft's insane resources. Google and Microsoft situation will be much better defined. One of these companies will discover that being a platform open to developers is a strategic advantage. Ad-supported search as a model will fail to find ground in AI answers. Both companies will inject so many ads in AI chat answers to pay for the bills, that AI answers will become so intelligence insulting that even users who previously didn't mind ads (or had ways to block them) will finally start looking for ad-free search alternatives. Some ad-supported results will start having 'for entertainment purposes only' label as they will start to carry unwanted liability otherwise. This will finally allow large scale prolifiration of a new breed of search products offering search experiences made for users instead of advertisers. Paying for search will become much more common and we will be slowly exiting the 25 years Matrix-like coma situation we are currently held in, where the expectation for the most valuable and intimate thing we do online (search and browsing) is to be free, while we accept to surrender our private information, time and attention in return. The alignment of incentives in combination with enough resources and the newest techonlgoies will finally allow for truly amazing innovation in search, changing the way we consume information forever. At the same time, we will start to see signs of the first public search engines (goverment subsidized), inheriting the role that public libraries had for centuries, as access to information will be deemed as a fundamental human right. So when I think about Kagi's trajectory, it is surviving the next two years and keeping on innovating that matters. The business model is already sound and future-proof (the price will come down too).
    • gtirloni 3y ago
• omegant 3y ago
  Google has been unusable for some years. Limited results, capped searches… such a difference with the original Google, it’s just a ghost of what it used to be. I’m definitely going to give Kagi a try, I hope you are not restricting results by politics or so. I’m paying for Chat gpt at the moment but I still need to just search and not to be spoon fed curated results all the time… the moment they include payed advertisement in gpt results is going to feel like browsing in the Truman show.
  • iLoveOncall 3y ago
    I've been using Google professionally for 10 years and 10 more before that as a hobbyist, and there has not been a degradation of the results. Every single time I have had someone claim that, and they then shared their search methodology, it became extremely obvious that the problem is between the keyboard and the chair, not in the search engine.
    • mbrochh 3y ago
      I don't think your argument holds. When people experience search degradation (which I definitely do), they experience that while using the product EXACTLY like they did for years. Why else would they experience the degradation. It is most striking when something that used to work suddenly doesn't work any more.
    • anenefan 3y ago
      If one was a professional researcher and relied on the various search switches [1] for nearly every search conducted, one would have found unequivocally that google's search ability has seriously declined some number of years ago. Google's present search is an insult to what it once was. It's presently perhaps a good fit for grasping, or easy to find data. Also, additionally even with a focused search back pre 2010-12, I being thorough, often found myself 700 to 800 entries in search result, selectively opening about 10 or more sites to investigate further for a broad all encompassing search. Present time I'm lucky to get three results that are not ads, and no second or third page of 10 results per page. Google is clearly playing the numbers game. [1] https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
• dehrmann 3y ago
  9 months ago, before LLMs gained widespread attention, I'd say that's the most optimistic view of Bing I'd heard in a long time. It's interesting hearing it from the founder of Kagi because it shows how you see the market.
• theonlybutlet 3y ago
  Just btw I get a 403 developer hasn't given me access when trying to sign up with my Google login
• seventytwo 3y ago
  I’ve been really happy with Kagi! It’s much better on technical searches and doesn’t try to direct me to the absolutely most profitable commercial results like google does. Love the lenses also. It feels weird paying for search, but I think the price is fair.
• data-abuse 3y ago
  Love Kagi. Love paying for good software like it
• kovac 3y ago
  Hello, I looked at Kagi and found it too expensive. I'm a paying user for many software I use: vpn, email, git to list a few. And i am willing to pay a reasonable price for a search service. To put it in to perspective, my vpn costs less than $9 a month and I use it for high speed multimedia streaming, video games with no limits on usage. I hope you can come up with more reasonable pricing plans or consider open-sourcing the software. In which case I'll support it as a matter of principle.
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    The pricing for Kagi is reasonable, even cheap. I think you're doing the mistake of comparing a normally priced product with a great bargain product like your VPN. Just because two things are on the computer doesn't mean their prices are comparable. Go to a bar and get a drink for $9 and you won't raise an eyebrow at the price, even though your VPN is immensely more useful to you. If you pay for parking downtown you won't write a comment on HN about it, even though you pay the same price for a couple of hours of parking as you pay for watching Netflix every evening the whole month. You get a meal in a restaurant for the same price as you pay for bed sheets that you use for hundreds or even thousands of hours. Kagi is very reasonably priced for the quality of life increase the better search results give.
  • Daunk 3y ago
    This is a bit off-topic, but sadly, I have to agree. I AM a paying Kagi user, but the new limits have hit me extremely hard. I'm now paying twice as much per month and still almost hitting my monthly limit. I really don't want Kagi to go away but I think they have to adjust their prices if they want to keep thier customers around, me included
    • cmer 3y ago
      Same here. I was a customer for a long time and loved the service, but having to watch my “search spend” and constantly going over limits is really annoying. I ended up cancelling but I really wish I didn’t. Personally I’d like to see an ad-supported, or partially ad-supported version that isn’t evil. The way Google started out with relevant ads in the sidebar or a single relevant ad at the top is acceptable in my opinion if it means bring the cost way down for the end user and ensuring sustainability for the company. I don’t think asking users to shell out $10, $20, $30 per month for search is a viable long term model that’ll ever appeal to the masses.
• yablak 3y ago
  Love Kagi! Thank you for your hard work and amazing product!
• _benj 3y ago
  I’m a very happy Kagi user, the search results are way better (subjective, I know) for me, that is, I can usually find what I’m looking for in the first few entries. I’m under the early adopter pricing but I fear that the higher price (and cognitive effort in lower prices to keep track of how many searches I’ve made) might make adoption a bit harder. I really really really don’t want Kagi to go away! I’ve shared with some friends that are also using it and even though they also reacted to the price change, they decided to stay (just like me) because of the early adopters price. This part is totally unsolicited advice, but I find my self searching quite often for the same thing, like, my browser will remember a search instead of the domain of the thing I’m searching for (i.e. wanna go to namecheap, my browser remembers the namecheap kagi search instead of namecheap.com), maybe there could be some space to optimize repeated searches? Idk, if I’ve made a search X times the just cache it and return me the same result, don’t count that towards the total, and add a little message that the results are cached and if I want to search again click there? I know I could make bookmarks but changing behaviors is a way taller ask than caching. Anyways, best of luck and I really really hope that kagi stays afloat!
  • stOneskull 3y ago
    what if they had a free plan that allowed 100 searches each month. or extend the trial each month if requested. maybe it'd take many users more than a month to get into it and see the value in investing in a paid plan.
    • freediver 3y ago
      We find that 80% of users that end up paying, do that after their first week (35% on their first day!). We are trying to make it very clear that this is not a yet another free search engine to manage both expectations and cost.
  • weinzierl 3y ago
    Fellow Kagi user here and for me the search results are so similar to Google's that day-to-day I don't notice which search engine I'm using. This is good and bad: Kagi is on par with Google but for me it hasn't enough benefit to pay for it in the long run. When it comes to your point of repeated searches: I wish my search results would be a combination of global (unpersonalized) ranking and local personalized ranking. The global ranking would filter out spam and useless content but the final ordering of the results could be determined by a locally running algorithm that learns my preferences. For example when searching for Rust it could filter out all gaming related content and only present me the programming language related results.
• marymkearney 3y ago
  I'm a happy Neeva user and I'll miss it. I even liked the media bias feature. Tried a Google search yesterday and it was ridiculously pointless. I'm looking forward to trying your product.
  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Totally agree here and even though it was slow at times, the LLM summary and resulting links were always on point
  • gremlinsinc 3y ago
    Curious, how did neeva stack up against phind.com? also kagi if anyone wants to chime in. I'm loving phind, I stan for them so much I should be on payroll lol.
    • marymkearney 3y ago
      Thanks most kindly for that link. I'd never heard of phind, but it instantly solved a knotty CSS question I've been stuck on. I really like the matter-of-fact tone of "here's how you do that." Refreshing, after days of unproductive paging through wordy explanations and definitions and tutorials. Bookmarking.
• onetokeoverthe 3y ago
  [dead]
• tinco 3y ago
  I was just yesterday wondering how I was going to incorporate search into my autonomous agent. I think I'm going to have to wrap an agent around Bing but if there was a cleaner option with per query pricing I'd definitely try it out. I don't see any mention of API usage on your product page, I guess you're not marketing it as a tool in that way yet?
• StockHuman 3y ago
  As an aside, I recently made Orion my default across my devices, and I wonder of paid browser is more viable than paid search.
• TradingPlaces 3y ago
  Hi Vlad! Kagi subscriber here. Been thinking about this since Neeva dropped that, and I think bootstrapping is why you’re still running and they aren’t. Good luck!