16 ms·

Kagi raises $670k

408 points by erwinmatijsen 3y ago

GRACE44 3y ago
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GRACE44 3y ago
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logicprog 3y ago
I tested out Yagi's search results real quick and they are truly excellent. I was actually remarking to my girlfriend yesterday that I wish search engines would surface personal special interest blog posts and stuff like that when I search for things, because personal blogs usually have significantly better content then articles from major websites, and certainly better than the clearly AI generated SEO shit most of the search results on major search engines are clogged with, and sure enough, the example search results on Yagi's homepage are exactly what I wish search results were! Many of the top results in the python exceptions example search were personal blog articles from software engineers talking about the actual theory and practice of using exceptions in Python, and the rest were just links directly to relevant parts of Python's actual documentation or stack overflow. It was amazing, incredibly refreshing. It makes me really want to subscribe to them honestly. It seems like Yagi would give me access to the internet I wish I could spend all my time in, the one I thought was gone but maybe was just lurking under the surface this whole time, the internet where it's just a bunch of people writing about subjects they care about, stuff that makes them excited or whatever, just for their own enjoyment and the enrichment of others. The problem is, I really don't want to be searching using an account that's linked to my credit card and thus my legal identity. That's a massive possible breach in privacy. And yeah, they say they don't log searches or link them to any account, but the thing is, even if I believe they don't right now, the fact that accounts are set up this way means that they very easily could start logging your searches to your legal identity in the future. It's like giving someone your social security number because they promise not to do anything nefarious with it. Maybe you trust them right now, but it's still a bad idea because of the opening it creates. Maybe they end up doing it to comply with some government regulation. Or maybe because it makes it easier to count searches. Or maybe because they start running ads. Why would they start running ads? Well, because under capitalism, where everything is supposed to grow in profits and size every year so that the shareholders can get their money, just having a source of income outside of ads isn't enough to guarantee a company won't decide to also run ads, as a source of extra income. Why would any capitalist company every turn down an opportunity to make more profit, just because it already has another profit source? Obviously the constant need for growth creates an incentive to vacuum up every possible way to make profit, not an incentive to be satisfied with a stable, reliable source of income that's enough to keep the lights on and everyone employed. That isn't how capitalism works.
kelvie 3y ago
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 3y ago
  So it basically supports the same bangs as DDG? Couldn't find it in their feature list. Do bangs count as a search?
  - kelvie 3y ago
    Sorry for the late reply (though that's what's great about HN), but yes it supports all of DDGs bangs as far as I know.
  - coopykins 3y ago
    Bangs don't count towards the Kagi searches.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  > 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 1.25¢. 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 3y ago
    > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713050
gherkinnn 3y ago
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 https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes
- mrweasel 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
  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.
keyle 3y ago
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 3y ago
  I'd be using it now, but Mac only /eyeroll
potro 3y ago
Is $670K adequate sum to he raised through such financing round? I get used to multi-million numbers in startup announcements.
- benjaminwootton 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
"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.
- yxre 3y ago
  I use it, and it's better than google and duckduckgo. What features are they missing?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  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 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 3y ago
  Have you seen what they've already built? The product is out there and very usable: https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
- golemotron 3y ago
  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/ http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory/
  - sunnybeetroot 3y ago
    This is a joke about how bad the search results of Cuil were right?
threeseed 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Yes, they use other search engines. Check their FAQ for details https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from
- vishnumohandas 3y ago
  According to their Help page they've their own indexes: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html#features https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html...
  - ricardo81 3y ago
    Looks like they'll need to update that first table as Neeva are no longer a functioning search engine.
- Gareth321 3y ago
  Both. They aggregate data from lots of sources, and they have their own index as well. Seems like a winning model, IMHO.
samsquire 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    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.
    - freediver 3y ago
      > I'm not sure what percentage of the results are Bing (perhaps the majority) Zero right now (we dropped Bing completely after their API price hike). We need to update the documentation to reflect this, thanks for pointing it out.
getmeinrn 3y ago
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.
- qqtt 3y ago
  How do you think "LLM tech" discovers content to train it's massive models?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- starbugs 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html - [1]: https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt
- sunnybeetroot 3y ago
  They do have AI features.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  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.
dmje 3y ago
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 3y ago
  How do you use lenses? Trying to use more kagi features.
  - freediver 3y ago
    https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html or just !help lenses
    - cosmojg 3y ago
      But how do you use lenses?
      - europeanNyan 3y ago
        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.
coopykins 3y ago
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/68275ea1324046caedfdfb2ba0e9b710 https://gist.github.com/Julioevm/68275ea1324046caedfdfb2ba0e...
- snielson 3y ago
  Thanks for this! The summarizer is great for quickly getting the gist of legal cases.
- slipperlobster 3y ago
  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.
Pinegulf 3y ago
>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-does-kagi-search-require-an-account 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  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.
andrewstuart 3y ago
$670k ain’t much runway is it?
- weikju 3y ago
  they also have paying users!
throwaway290 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        I think a good transparent business is funded by users and/or is publicly traded. This stuff makes me cautious.
        Sakos 3y ago
        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.
        3y ago
gman83 3y ago
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.
- sequence7 3y ago
  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.
- samwillis 3y ago
  That would be one search every 3 min, if you sleep 8hrs a day...
  - gman83 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
- Sakos 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  Agreed - That 99% of users they're talking about aren't going to be the ones looking for an alternative search engine like this
function_seven 3y ago
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.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  You're going to have to explain the relevance of the K man.
  - blokey 3y ago
    K=thousands.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilo- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilo-
  - mattweinberg 3y ago
    The “k” means “thousands”, meaning they raised $670,000 and not $670 million.
    - EdwardDiego 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        We all have moments like that :)
  - Tostino 3y ago
    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.
  - 3y ago
pixeladed 3y ago
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 3y ago
  They reach the top of HN front page. Because I've never heard of Neeva before, but I'm a Kagi paying user.
  - comfypotato 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      Why can't it be a sustainable niche business?
      - imiric 3y ago
        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.
drumhead 3y ago
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.
elishah 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Cagey...
  - ddevault 3y ago
    I dunno, names are scarce and if a project fails then I don't see too much wrong with reuse of the name.
    - mellosouls 3y ago
      cagey != shady, but maybe they meant canny
      - arketyp 3y ago
        It was a pun. Cagey as in shrewd.
        mellosouls 3y ago
        Oh yeah I completely missed the pun cheers.
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      In territories where small enterprises are numerous you can count n "Technodata" and m "Smith and sons" per square kilometer.
    - mewse 3y ago
      I think the post you're replying to was intended as a pun.
hans0l074 3y ago
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 3y ago
  I pronounce it like her, which is unfortunate because in Italian "KA-ghee" (written caghi) is the verb "you shit".
  - weikju 3y ago
    I also pronounce it with a hard g, same as "kagi" the Japanese word for "key"
- freediver 3y ago
  It is Kah-gee and comes from the Japaneese word for 'key'. Here is a video with pronunciation: https://kagi.com/faq#pronounce https://kagi.com/faq#pronounce
Alifatisk 3y ago
If I become a paying member, can I set kagi as my default search engine on my Apple devices?
- lorenz_li 3y ago
  With the xSearch[1] app you can. [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-safari/id1579902068 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-safari/id157990206...
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
      - Alifatisk 3y ago
        Thanks
- mastercheif 3y ago
  Yes, Kagi has Safari + Chrome + FF extensions on Mac + iOS Safari extension that sets Kagi as default search.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway2037 3y ago
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/accredited-investor 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 3y ago
  SAFEs are common in equity crowdfunding. Raises on Republic are often SAFEs. I'm not a fan.
  - jerrygenser 3y ago
    They are also standard in early stage institutional equity funding.
  - dotcoma 3y ago
    Why are you not a fan of SAFEs ? Thanks.
    - somewhat_drunk 3y ago
      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 https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/safe-securities
EGreg 3y ago
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.
- Taniwha 3y ago
  Yes you remember correctly
  - EGreg 3y ago
    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/ https://www.akamaidesign.com/studio/ UPDATE: his web design and hosting service was very advanced for its time! https://www.akamaidesign.com/ https://www.akamaidesign.com/
- Applejinx 3y ago
  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.
p-e-w 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    > 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.
ftxbro 3y ago
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.
- raincole 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      > 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 3y ago
networked 3y ago
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 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.
voytec 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
jart 3y ago
Raising money to build an ad-free Google is like raising money to build a rainbow without a pot of gold.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  They've already built a search engine that is better than Google and ad-free.
Version467 3y ago
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.
rychco 3y ago
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.
candyman 3y ago
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 https://ipocandy.substack.com/p/finally-a-better-search
mordae 3y ago
> we have an exciting surprise in the works, which we’re not yet ready to announce Now I am worried.
oneTbrain23 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
ianyanusko 3y ago
So happy to see this at the top of Hacker News. Rounds < $1 million need to be celebrated more. Rooting for Kagi.
alberth 3y ago
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?
- TheFreim 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.
- yjp20 3y ago
  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.
slipperlobster 3y ago
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.
replwoacause 3y ago
Happy Kagi subscriber here. Keep up the good work!
fairity 3y ago
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 3y ago
  If you singup you will have the summarizer for free (request-time limited). Amazing tool.
- packetlost 3y ago
  They have the 100-search trial. I don't know how they could support account-less trials that without inviting abuse
BilalBudhani 3y ago
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.
pk-protect-ai 3y ago
Love their summarizer, it is my daily tool now. Was kinda surprised by $670k, looking at others who rising billions with 1000x worse products ...
alberth 3y ago
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-advertising-arpu/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/306570/google-annualized...
- api 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    $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.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      $40mm cap when you’re going out to retail investors is a bit of a joke. Something is rotten here.
- Mashimo 3y ago
  What is MM?
  - frankthedog 3y ago
    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.
    - 3y ago
singularity2001 3y ago
Installed, trying kagi search "registration required", deleted
- PKop 3y ago
  It's not free and unlimited, they charge for search based on usage, it's not that complicated.
joshstrange 3y ago
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.
- nvr219 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    I am a very avid searcher and have not once brushed up against the search limit.
    - nvr219 3y ago
      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.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  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.
asah 3y ago
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.
ravenstine 3y ago
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 3y ago
  What is a Kagi lens? Is it different from Google Scholar?
  - DavideNL 3y ago
    Like Brave Search Goggles: https://search.brave.com/help/goggles https://search.brave.com/help/goggles "Goggles enable any individual—or community of people—to alter the ranking of Brave Search by using a set of instructions (rules and filters). Anyone can create, apply, or extend a Goggle. Essentially Goggles act as a custom re-ranking on top of the Brave search index."
  - justusthane 3y ago
    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.
metadaemon 3y ago
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.
iamleppert 3y ago
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.
mkeedlinger 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Maybe they could pull a Mullvad and accept cash via mail.
  - LanternLight83 3y ago
    Mullvad also notably accepts Monero, and if/when emulated, we should encourage and celebrate their comprehensive scope as much as any individual method
whalesalad 3y ago
Anyone having a terrible Kagi experience with Safari lately? Something seems to have changed recently. My search bar is effectively useless.
- freediver 3y ago
  Can you please open a bug report on kagifeedback.org with more details?
abound 3y ago
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 https://github.com/bcspragu/kagi [2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html
furyofantares 3y ago
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.
- winrid 3y ago
  Where is the non commercial filter??
  - europeanNyan 3y ago
    You can turn it on in Settings under Lenses.
- EdgeExplorer 3y ago
  https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ is a great tool to have in your belt for this and other quick drawing needs
monkeynotes 3y ago
$5 a month for just 300 searches? Who is their target audience??
gcanyon 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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-prey-to-fraud/ https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
dean2432 3y ago
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.
jononomo 3y ago
This is the size of a funding round that makes sense to me for a startup that is trying to build software.
andrewreedus 3y ago
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dfried 3y ago
Very happy Kagi customer here. If you're not paying then you're the product, not the customer. Having my primary interface with the internet be with a company that serves my interests is wonderful. Congrats and good luck to the team!

Kagi raises $670k

408 points by erwinmatijsen 3y ago

GRACE44 3y ago

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GRACE44 3y ago

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logicprog 3y ago

I tested out Yagi's search results real quick and they are truly excellent. I was actually remarking to my girlfriend yesterday that I wish search engines would surface personal special interest blog posts and stuff like that when I search for things, because personal blogs usually have significantly better content then articles from major websites, and certainly better than the clearly AI generated SEO shit most of the search results on major search engines are clogged with, and sure enough, the example search results on Yagi's homepage are exactly what I wish search results were! Many of the top results in the python exceptions example search were personal blog articles from software engineers talking about the actual theory and practice of using exceptions in Python, and the rest were just links directly to relevant parts of Python's actual documentation or stack overflow. It was amazing, incredibly refreshing. It makes me really want to subscribe to them honestly. It seems like Yagi would give me access to the internet I wish I could spend all my time in, the one I thought was gone but maybe was just lurking under the surface this whole time, the internet where it's just a bunch of people writing about subjects they care about, stuff that makes them excited or whatever, just for their own enjoyment and the enrichment of others. The problem is, I really don't want to be searching using an account that's linked to my credit card and thus my legal identity. That's a massive possible breach in privacy. And yeah, they say they don't log searches or link them to any account, but the thing is, even if I believe they don't right now, the fact that accounts are set up this way means that they very easily could start logging your searches to your legal identity in the future. It's like giving someone your social security number because they promise not to do anything nefarious with it. Maybe you trust them right now, but it's still a bad idea because of the opening it creates. Maybe they end up doing it to comply with some government regulation. Or maybe because it makes it easier to count searches. Or maybe because they start running ads. Why would they start running ads? Well, because under capitalism, where everything is supposed to grow in profits and size every year so that the shareholders can get their money, just having a source of income outside of ads isn't enough to guarantee a company won't decide to also run ads, as a source of extra income. Why would any capitalist company every turn down an opportunity to make more profit, just because it already has another profit source? Obviously the constant need for growth creates an incentive to vacuum up every possible way to make profit, not an incentive to be satisfied with a stable, reliable source of income that's enough to keep the lights on and everyone employed. That isn't how capitalism works.

kelvie 3y ago

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 3y ago
So it basically supports the same bangs as DDG? Couldn't find it in their feature list. Do bangs count as a search?
- kelvie 3y ago
  Sorry for the late reply (though that's what's great about HN), but yes it supports all of DDGs bangs as far as I know.
- coopykins 3y ago
  Bangs don't count towards the Kagi searches.
mrweasel 3y ago
> 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 1.25¢. 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 3y ago
  > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713050

gherkinnn 3y ago

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 https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes

mrweasel 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
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.

keyle 3y ago

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 3y ago
I'd be using it now, but Mac only /eyeroll

potro 3y ago

Is $670K adequate sum to he raised through such financing round? I get used to multi-million numbers in startup announcements.

benjaminwootton 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago

"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.

yxre 3y ago
I use it, and it's better than google and duckduckgo. What features are they missing?
johnnyanmac 3y ago
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 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 3y ago
Have you seen what they've already built? The product is out there and very usable: https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
golemotron 3y ago
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/ http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory/
- sunnybeetroot 3y ago
  This is a joke about how bad the search results of Cuil were right?

threeseed 3y ago

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 3y ago
Yes, they use other search engines. Check their FAQ for details https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from
vishnumohandas 3y ago
According to their Help page they've their own indexes: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html#features https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html...
- ricardo81 3y ago
  Looks like they'll need to update that first table as Neeva are no longer a functioning search engine.
Gareth321 3y ago
Both. They aggregate data from lots of sources, and they have their own index as well. Seems like a winning model, IMHO.

samsquire 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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.
  - freediver 3y ago
    > I'm not sure what percentage of the results are Bing (perhaps the majority) Zero right now (we dropped Bing completely after their API price hike). We need to update the documentation to reflect this, thanks for pointing it out.

getmeinrn 3y ago

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.

qqtt 3y ago
How do you think "LLM tech" discovers content to train it's massive models?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
starbugs 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html - [1]: https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt
sunnybeetroot 3y ago
They do have AI features.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
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.

dmje 3y ago

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 3y ago
How do you use lenses? Trying to use more kagi features.
- freediver 3y ago
  https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html or just !help lenses
  - cosmojg 3y ago
    But how do you use lenses?
    - europeanNyan 3y ago
      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.

coopykins 3y ago

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/68275ea1324046caedfdfb2ba0e9b710 https://gist.github.com/Julioevm/68275ea1324046caedfdfb2ba0e...

snielson 3y ago
Thanks for this! The summarizer is great for quickly getting the gist of legal cases.
slipperlobster 3y ago
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.

Pinegulf 3y ago

>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-does-kagi-search-require-an-account 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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.

andrewstuart 3y ago

$670k ain’t much runway is it?

weikju 3y ago
they also have paying users!

throwaway290 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      I think a good transparent business is funded by users and/or is publicly traded. This stuff makes me cautious.
      - Sakos 3y ago
        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.
        3y ago

gman83 3y ago

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.

sequence7 3y ago
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.
samwillis 3y ago
That would be one search every 3 min, if you sleep 8hrs a day...
- gman83 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
Sakos 3y ago
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 3y ago
Agreed - That 99% of users they're talking about aren't going to be the ones looking for an alternative search engine like this

function_seven 3y ago

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.

EdwardDiego 3y ago
You're going to have to explain the relevance of the K man.
- blokey 3y ago
  K=thousands.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilo- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilo-
- mattweinberg 3y ago
  The “k” means “thousands”, meaning they raised $670,000 and not $670 million.
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      We all have moments like that :)
- Tostino 3y ago
  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.
- 3y ago

pixeladed 3y ago

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 3y ago
They reach the top of HN front page. Because I've never heard of Neeva before, but I'm a Kagi paying user.
- comfypotato 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    Why can't it be a sustainable niche business?
    - imiric 3y ago
      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.

drumhead 3y ago

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.

elishah 3y ago

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 3y ago
Cagey...
- ddevault 3y ago
  I dunno, names are scarce and if a project fails then I don't see too much wrong with reuse of the name.
  - mellosouls 3y ago
    cagey != shady, but maybe they meant canny
    - arketyp 3y ago
      It was a pun. Cagey as in shrewd.
      - mellosouls 3y ago
        Oh yeah I completely missed the pun cheers.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    In territories where small enterprises are numerous you can count n "Technodata" and m "Smith and sons" per square kilometer.
  - mewse 3y ago
    I think the post you're replying to was intended as a pun.

hans0l074 3y ago

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 3y ago
I pronounce it like her, which is unfortunate because in Italian "KA-ghee" (written caghi) is the verb "you shit".
- weikju 3y ago
  I also pronounce it with a hard g, same as "kagi" the Japanese word for "key"
freediver 3y ago
It is Kah-gee and comes from the Japaneese word for 'key'. Here is a video with pronunciation: https://kagi.com/faq#pronounce https://kagi.com/faq#pronounce

Alifatisk 3y ago

If I become a paying member, can I set kagi as my default search engine on my Apple devices?

lorenz_li 3y ago
With the xSearch[1] app you can. [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-safari/id1579902068 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-safari/id157990206...
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
    - Alifatisk 3y ago
      Thanks
mastercheif 3y ago
Yes, Kagi has Safari + Chrome + FF extensions on Mac + iOS Safari extension that sets Kagi as default search.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

throwaway2037 3y ago

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/accredited-investor 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 3y ago
SAFEs are common in equity crowdfunding. Raises on Republic are often SAFEs. I'm not a fan.
- jerrygenser 3y ago
  They are also standard in early stage institutional equity funding.
- dotcoma 3y ago
  Why are you not a fan of SAFEs ? Thanks.
  - somewhat_drunk 3y ago
    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 https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/safe-securities

EGreg 3y ago

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.

Taniwha 3y ago
Yes you remember correctly
- EGreg 3y ago
  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/ https://www.akamaidesign.com/studio/ UPDATE: his web design and hosting service was very advanced for its time! https://www.akamaidesign.com/ https://www.akamaidesign.com/
Applejinx 3y ago
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.

p-e-w 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  > 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.

ftxbro 3y ago

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.

raincole 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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 3y ago

networked 3y ago

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 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.

voytec 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.

jart 3y ago

Raising money to build an ad-free Google is like raising money to build a rainbow without a pot of gold.

carlosjobim 3y ago
They've already built a search engine that is better than Google and ad-free.

Version467 3y ago

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.

rychco 3y ago

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.

candyman 3y ago

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 https://ipocandy.substack.com/p/finally-a-better-search

mordae 3y ago

> we have an exciting surprise in the works, which we’re not yet ready to announce Now I am worried.

oneTbrain23 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.

ianyanusko 3y ago

So happy to see this at the top of Hacker News. Rounds < $1 million need to be celebrated more. Rooting for Kagi.

alberth 3y ago

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?

TheFreim 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.
yjp20 3y ago
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.

slipperlobster 3y ago

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.

replwoacause 3y ago

Happy Kagi subscriber here. Keep up the good work!

fairity 3y ago

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 3y ago
If you singup you will have the summarizer for free (request-time limited). Amazing tool.
packetlost 3y ago
They have the 100-search trial. I don't know how they could support account-less trials that without inviting abuse

BilalBudhani 3y ago

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.

pk-protect-ai 3y ago

Love their summarizer, it is my daily tool now. Was kinda surprised by $670k, looking at others who rising billions with 1000x worse products ...

alberth 3y ago

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-advertising-arpu/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/306570/google-annualized...

api 3y ago
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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  $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.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    $40mm cap when you’re going out to retail investors is a bit of a joke. Something is rotten here.
Mashimo 3y ago
What is MM?
- frankthedog 3y ago
  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.
  - 3y ago

singularity2001 3y ago

Installed, trying kagi search "registration required", deleted

PKop 3y ago
It's not free and unlimited, they charge for search based on usage, it's not that complicated.

joshstrange 3y ago

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.

nvr219 3y ago
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 3y ago
  I am a very avid searcher and have not once brushed up against the search limit.
  - nvr219 3y ago
    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.
dns_snek 3y ago
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.

asah 3y ago

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.

ravenstine 3y ago

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 3y ago
What is a Kagi lens? Is it different from Google Scholar?
- DavideNL 3y ago
  Like Brave Search Goggles: https://search.brave.com/help/goggles https://search.brave.com/help/goggles "Goggles enable any individual—or community of people—to alter the ranking of Brave Search by using a set of instructions (rules and filters). Anyone can create, apply, or extend a Goggle. Essentially Goggles act as a custom re-ranking on top of the Brave search index."
- justusthane 3y ago
  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.

metadaemon 3y ago

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.

iamleppert 3y ago

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.

mkeedlinger 3y ago

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 3y ago
Maybe they could pull a Mullvad and accept cash via mail.
- LanternLight83 3y ago
  Mullvad also notably accepts Monero, and if/when emulated, we should encourage and celebrate their comprehensive scope as much as any individual method

whalesalad 3y ago

Anyone having a terrible Kagi experience with Safari lately? Something seems to have changed recently. My search bar is effectively useless.

freediver 3y ago
Can you please open a bug report on kagifeedback.org with more details?

abound 3y ago

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 https://github.com/bcspragu/kagi [2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html

furyofantares 3y ago

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.

winrid 3y ago
Where is the non commercial filter??
- europeanNyan 3y ago
  You can turn it on in Settings under Lenses.
EdgeExplorer 3y ago
https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ is a great tool to have in your belt for this and other quick drawing needs

monkeynotes 3y ago

$5 a month for just 300 searches? Who is their target audience??

gcanyon 3y ago

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 3y ago
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-prey-to-fraud/ https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...

dean2432 3y ago

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.

jononomo 3y ago

This is the size of a funding round that makes sense to me for a startup that is trying to build software.

andrewreedus 3y ago

[dead]

dfried 3y ago

Very happy Kagi customer here. If you're not paying then you're the product, not the customer. Having my primary interface with the internet be with a company that serves my interests is wonderful. Congrats and good luck to the team!