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This seems like a useful feature, but from looking at the data it suggests a strong bias towards a few disciplines. That makes me wonder whether this is just th

This seems like a useful feature, but from looking at the data it suggests a strong bias towards a few disciplines. That makes me wonder whether this is just the marketing so far, or a more fundamental limitation on the market that will actually draw value from Kagi. Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users?

smallerfish 3y ago
It does. They have a lean team, and I believe are bootstrapped.
VHRanger 3y ago
> Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users? You're paying for the service. One would hope the unit economics are immediately positive, unlike ad-driven businesses or VC-scale-at-all-cost growth businesses
- danpalmer 3y ago
  If they had 1 paying user that's clearly not sufficient to pay for servers and engineers, so at some level this is not accurate. The same is true for ads, but you have the advantage of much wider markets, and in some cases, higher revenue per user compared to paying users.
freediver 3y ago
> Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users? It depends on your definition of "works as business"? I'd argue that Kagi already works as a business. It has sustainable business model and happy users. Most importantly the business model aligns incentives with those users. Kagi was never envisioned to be a "Google killer", in fact we use much of Google infrastructure and APIs. Kagi is made to offer an alternative way to consume the web, that focuses on serving the users instead of advertisers. For (growing) number of people this is already appealing and I think this will only accelerate when AI search answers become more widespread in classic search engines like Google and Bing, and those start inserting ads in chat answers on a more massive scale. Since chat answers force you to read chunks of text, and therefore ads in chat answers can not be easilly skipped, ignored or blocked like ads in link based results, this is when a lot of people may have their 'Matrix' moment [1] and realize that information they are being served does not always have their best interest in mind and that itself has a hidden cost. Will it be enough for them to pay for search? Considering how a lot of people already care about what food they put into their body, extrapolating from this, it is concievable to think that in the future a lot of people will care enough about what information they put into their brains to consider having a search engine (and the web browser!) that work in their best interest being a part of their budget. So I do not see anything preventing Kagi from growing to million users, apart from our own stupidity and bad decision making. If anything, we have a strong tailwind from the above factors and they do not even account for the enhanced productivity and privacy made possible by aligning incentives in search. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

smallerfish 3y ago

It does. They have a lean team, and I believe are bootstrapped.

VHRanger 3y ago

> Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users? You're paying for the service. One would hope the unit economics are immediately positive, unlike ad-driven businesses or VC-scale-at-all-cost growth businesses

danpalmer 3y ago
If they had 1 paying user that's clearly not sufficient to pay for servers and engineers, so at some level this is not accurate. The same is true for ads, but you have the advantage of much wider markets, and in some cases, higher revenue per user compared to paying users.

freediver 3y ago

> Does Kagi work as a business if it doesn’t grow to millions of users? It depends on your definition of "works as business"? I'd argue that Kagi already works as a business. It has sustainable business model and happy users. Most importantly the business model aligns incentives with those users. Kagi was never envisioned to be a "Google killer", in fact we use much of Google infrastructure and APIs. Kagi is made to offer an alternative way to consume the web, that focuses on serving the users instead of advertisers. For (growing) number of people this is already appealing and I think this will only accelerate when AI search answers become more widespread in classic search engines like Google and Bing, and those start inserting ads in chat answers on a more massive scale. Since chat answers force you to read chunks of text, and therefore ads in chat answers can not be easilly skipped, ignored or blocked like ads in link based results, this is when a lot of people may have their 'Matrix' moment [1] and realize that information they are being served does not always have their best interest in mind and that itself has a hidden cost. Will it be enough for them to pay for search? Considering how a lot of people already care about what food they put into their body, extrapolating from this, it is concievable to think that in the future a lot of people will care enough about what information they put into their brains to consider having a search engine (and the web browser!) that work in their best interest being a part of their budget. So I do not see anything preventing Kagi from growing to million users, apart from our own stupidity and bad decision making. If anything, we have a strong tailwind from the above factors and they do not even account for the enhanced productivity and privacy made possible by aligning incentives in search. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over