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Kagi search reached 20k paying members
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 3y agoI’ve been a very happy customer since early 2022. It’s rare I goto the old search engine with the ads as Kagi continues to improve with each update. Raise pin and block are great features.
- wkat4242 3y agoI hardly use search engines anymore. So there's no point in paying for Kagi. 90% of the time I'm not looking for a website, I need the answer to a question. I can either spend 15 minutes sifting through clickbait sites until I finally find the answer, or I can spend 15 seconds asking a chatbot. For the handful times a month I still need to find a webpage there's no point in paying for one..
- infinityio 3y ago> 15 minutes sifting through clickbait sites The reason people like Kagi is that it doesn't show these (anywhere near as much), the top result has the answer
- wkat4242 3y agoHmm I tried it in the beginning (when they still had a monthly free allowance) and I didn't really find it significantly better than DuckDuckGo which is what I normally use (I almost never use Google). But my point is that they introduced it a little too late. I'd have loved to have something like this a few years ago but now most of my search engine activity is being displaced by LLMs. And DuckDuckGo already meets my needs enough for when I do still need it (yes I know it's just a skinned version of Bing :) ). And I don't have to bother logging in to it on every computer and phone I own (I easily have 10 computers and 6 mobile devices in my home alone).
- _lvbh 3y agoAny idea what tech stack they use?
- stupidog 3y agoI love Kagi. Happy to pay $10 a month for a great search experience. These shirts look great too. Looking forward to the store!
- XCSme 3y agoThe stats page is really interesting: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=-2 https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=-2 You can instantly see which domains/websites are hated by users (to be more accurate, by the technically-inclined users that use Kagi) and which ones are most valued.
- weikju 3y agoI hope their success continues!
- alabhyajindal 3y agoI love Kagi so much. My favorite features other than great search results are: - Vim keybindings to select search results. - Quick bangs to use bang shortcuts without an exclamation mark. Example: search "mdn yield" to directly get search results for "yield" on MDN. - Blocking sites. No more annoying Quora results. Kagi team cares deeply about the product and it shows. They recently added Quick Peek [0] to search results and it's implemented using the `details` element. [0] https://kagi.com/changelog#2931 https://kagi.com/changelog#2931
- _benj 3y agoThis news makes me so happy! With the trend that the tech industry seems to be taking towards enshitification (I might be quite cynical...) Kagi proves that is possible to make profitable business differently! Congrats!!
- rrdharan 3y agoKagi is not profitable. Back in 2022 they had this blog post on their economics: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan... Their target was to break even around 25K paying customers. Would be interesting to hear if that is still the goal and where they currently stand but TFA doesn’t cover that topic.
- Kerrick 3y agoAs a Kagi customer, I hope their choice to allocate nearly a third of their investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts doesn’t lead to their demise.
- dinkleberg 3y agoYeah it’s definitely an interesting move
- blitz_skull 3y agoUh… what? Did I miss something important? That sounds like a profoundly terrible move.
- dmd 3y agoPerhaps you missed clicking on the link?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blitz_skull 3y agoPerhaps I did click on the link and still find this to be a profoundly terrible business move?
- _benj 3y agohehe! I see it as great marketing, possibly decreasing churn (although Kagi subscribers seem among the most enthusiastic I've seen around!) and just generally continuing with the tred of goodwill towards users (the opposite of the usual treatment of users from big tech)
- fuddle 3y agoThe t-shirt doesn't have their name on it. I don't see how it will help spread their brand.
- explain 3y agoSo they raised $670K (https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round) and spent almost $223K of that on printing dog t-shirts to give away?
- vicktorium 3y agohow let the VCs out? whoof whoof whoof whoof whoof!
- juunpp 3y agoDid you type 'whoof' five times and misspell 'who'?
- rob 3y ago"'You miss 100 percent of the chances you don't take. – Wayne Gretzky'" – Michael Scott
- machomaster 3y ago"You save 100% of the money you don't waste" - me
- solardev 3y ago"You clothe 0% of the people you don't send shirts to"
- machomaster 3y ago"If you search for a search engine but only find the one that gives you a stupid t-shirt - you truly are in need of improving your search abilities"
- freediver 3y ago"Stupid is in the eye of beholder."
- Zetobal 3y agoMy results got so much worse since they started using the brave API for search results I had to cancel. Was a great product but I am back on self hosted search.
- tremarley 3y agoThey use brave API?
- acdha 3y agoYes. There has been some debate on that point: https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-...
- oneseven 3y agoSeems like at least partially https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html#external https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- ahkurtz 3y agoAs a pretty new subscriber, can you tell me a bit more about this? Using bing under the hood is part of what eventually made me leave DDG. And I'm not particularly excited about using brave services. When what this change made and what does it do? What's your self-hosted choice of the moment?
- Zetobal 3y agoResponded to what changed in another comment for hosted search I use a fork of searxng.
- EasyMark 3y agoThat's your choice, but not all of us want to wear our politics on our search engine. I don't support what the Brave founder did, but there are probably 100+ people there that don't think that way and are just working and living their lives, and since Brave doesn't have any stance one way or another, it's just another company with a service to me. So is Kagi
- user- 3y agoAm I actually reading that they spent 33.33% or $220k of their investor money on printing t shirts?
- lolc 3y agoWould be about one month of their revenue at current if you want to believe my quick estimate.
- aidenn0 3y agoThe absolute lowest it can be with their public pricing is: 9264 users on the annual family plan at $3/user/month = 27792 10799 users on the annual starter plan at $4.50/user/month = 48595.5 Total: $76387.5
- mminer237 3y agoMy understanding is that the vast majority of their revenue is used to pay Google and Microsoft for access to their indexes though.
- therealdrag0 3y agoOooh. And here I was wondering how the heck such a small team could build their own indexes.
- kasdi 3y agoThe retail price you pay them is unlikely the wholesale price they pay the factory.
- evanjrowley 3y agoWhy is their logo the letter g instead of k? Have they considered the risk of a trademark violation lawsuit from their competitor, Google? As one of the 20K paying members, I feel embarrassed that I hadn't noticed this until now. Because this article presented the idea of wearing a Kagi T-Shirt, I suddenly started to care about what the logo looked like. Also, yes, I am excited to rep Kagi search.
- ethbr1 3y agoWhy shouldn't it be? Google doesn't deserve all uses of the letter g, worldwide, in all media, in perpetuity, exclusively.
- BadHumans 3y agohttps://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/logo.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/logo.html
- fullshark 3y ago> Our designer insisted the Kagi logo is "anchored" in the letter "g," and we had to agree. Huh what am I missing? I have no idea what this link is trying to say.
- sp332 3y agoIf you look at the kagi logo, the g is much more attention-getting and memorable than the k.
- fullshark 3y agoI don't even see a K!
- OJFord 3y agoTook me a while too, I think GP and the text about the designer considering where the 'logo' is anchored in designing the, err, 'logo' are talking about the full name as shown at https://kagi.com/assets https://kagi.com/assets at the top. I don't know where else that's used though. It's definitely confusing to call it a logo in talking about designing the logo (let's say icon) though. Mind you before seeing that about the 'g' I thought the dog was their 'logo'. I'm surprised the designer didn't insist on some simplification, a stronger, single identity; not that I know anything about design or marketing.
- mococa 3y agoI am a happy customer.
- bbertelsen 3y agoThe product is great. I love that I can pin, raise or lower the importance of specific websites. I average about 800 searches a month, and I have only had to go to another search engine maybe once or twice a week. This product feels like what the web should be.
- cwsx 3y agoI switched to them a few months ago, I was previously using duckduckgo (and Google before that). As most of you have probably noticed Google search results have seriously dropped in quality the last few years, but especially in 2023. I'm no longer able to get meaningful results for almost any topic, especially if it's technical, the only results are AI generated (?) / obvious SEO spam websites. It takes me multiple different search terms and clicking through multiple results to find anything semi relevant, and even then it's a shallow article maybe summarising what I'm looking for. Unfortunately DDG seems to be going the same way. Whereas Kagi reminds me of the 'old' google search. The results are meaningful and relevant, not diluted with pages of generic article results. They also offer a lot of great customisation options like being able to block or boost certain sites in results. They have some built in lists for common filler sites. I can't comment on the AI variation but I hear that's progressing well. I wouldn't call myself a power user of Kagi, but even then I'm getting far better results than other search engines, definitely worth the price per month. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just thought I'd share my anecdotal experience.
- LargeTomato 3y agoI just signed up. You get 100 searches for free to try it out.
- hunter-gatherer 3y agoI did that a couple months ago, and just signed up for a paid tier after I tried to go back to duckduckgo and started losing my mind. Kagi is better for discovering new content and mediocre places on the internet.
- justinclift 3y agoSmall warning. If you click the "more" button at the bottom of a list of results, it silently does another search and deducts that from your remaining free searches.
- solarkraft 3y agoDoes it have an option to exclude commercial websites? That'd be quite useful to me. Pretty much every time I try to find information about a product, all I find are sites trying to sell it to me (but I already have it and want to find information about it, damn it!).
- cdata 3y agoI'm a happy paying customer. Kagi is the first non-Google search engine I've used where I don't feel the need to constantly cross-check the results with Google. For all the people gawking at the expense of the free t-shirts: AFAICT those of us who are receiving them are paying customers; it's not like the money is coming right off of the top of their venture funds.
- ketzo 3y agoHonestly I think the whole "we are a startup search engine company who decided to spend the time to set up a production chain for t-shirts" is a worse use of resources than the actual money spent.
- stupidog 3y agoWell, at least it wasn't drugs.
- freediver 3y agoWe are only humans, and we have a mountain to climb. Setting a base camp to pause and reflect on what we already achieved makes climbing that mountain more, not less, likely. Besides, there is no rush. We might as well enjoy the journey.
- PKop 3y agoThe shirts probably won't fit people that well. It just seems like a waste of time/money that nobody will really see value in (I'm a paying customer btw). But if it's more for "you" than the customer then that is a better way to frame it.
- WheatMillington 3y agoThey cannot be for real... Is this a troll post?
- pests 3y agoWhere is the troll?
- tremarley 3y agoFreely distributing 20,000 t-shirts to your first 20,000 customers is a nice reward. But Kagi is missing an opportunity for a huge brand awareness campaign from this. People who are already really happy with Kagi would become brand ambassadors. Why isn’t the name ‘Kagi’ found anywhere on the t-shirt design? People who want to know where it’s from would have to go out of the way to ask the tee wearer.
- cdata 3y agoFWIW I'm way more likely to wear a t-shirt that doesn't have the word "Kagi" on it.
- jhardy54 3y agoYep, honestly their black shirt with the dog on the back is kind of cool, but the corny “Humanize the web!” on the sternum ruined it for me.
- Terretta 3y agoTo what end?
- frakkingcylons 3y agoIt's just a matter of each person's taste. I also prefer it without the name (or any text really).
- afthonos 3y agoNot GP, but…to wear clothes? Most people don’t wear clothes for any other end.
- themadturk 3y agoI'm not much for graphic tees either, but doggo is cute, and I'd wear one.
- al_borland 3y agoMaybe that’s by design. If someone sees “Kagi” on the shirt they may look it up, not get it, and move on. If instead the dog acts as an ice breaker, “cute dog,” then the person wearing it can mention what it is, but more importantly, why they like and use it. I’d also be much more likely to wear a shirt without a URL on it. I’ve been gifted shirts with URLs before, I have never and will never wear them in public.
- resolutebat 3y agoHappy paying Kagi member. Took a look at the stats page, and I'm shocked by just how small they still are: only 430 thousand queries per day! https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats I still think the 20k shirts is a terrible waste of mine, and I'm unlikely to even claim mine because the designs/colors don't appeal (there's a reason why very few clothes are bright yellow) and I'd still have to pay for shipping.
- ipaddr 3y agoThat works out to 21 or so queries a day per user
- al_borland 3y agoThat sounds pretty plausible. I use Kagi liberally across my work and home computers and phone. I’m sitting just shy of 1000 searches per month, which works out to 30-ish per day.
- xigoi 3y agoI estimate that the median is substantially lower though.
- rcdemski 3y agoI signed up a month ago and this is the first time something “not Google” has stuck for me. The results are solid, the interface is clean, and it feels good supporting an ad free product. I wish them their best with platform growth.
- deely3 3y agoDoes Kagi allows to search some not-so-official resources? Torrent trackers, adult stuff, etc?
- neural_thing 3y agoKagi has been good apart from weather. "LA weather" gets you to Louisiana, "SF weather" gets you to Santa Fe. Californians in shambles.
- weikju 3y agoAs a paying customer, I suggest filing bug reports. [1] [1] https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/
- shepherdjerred 3y agoI love this, but I really hope that spending so much on shirts doesn't come back to bite them. But, to their credit, this is something that a truly special company would do.
- disqard 3y agoSeconded! In this age of ongoing enshittification, seeing a company do something special for the customers who are cheering for its success, is actually heartwarming. IMO, this will boost/cement customer loyalty. Also, I often want to contribute (financially) to such projects, because I want them to succeed. However, don't happen to have 3k USD to spare (kagi did a fundraiser via SAFE notes) -- I imagine that, now they've figured out the t-shirt logistics, they could offer other designs in future, as a way to contribute money (like buying merch at a band's concert). I'd buy a couple more doggo tees, if/when they made more designs.
- developersdevel 3y agoI find it charming that they’re putting their blog on BearBlog.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoKagi having a small user base is actually an intrinsic advantage in that there is no SEO spam arms race. It is not worth it to website operators to spend money/time trying to game Kagi’s algorithms. Because of this, as a paying user, I hope they can find a sustainable business with a relatively small number of paid users, where they can make nice profits and have nice salaries for their employees based of selling a service to a relatively few people who value it.
- wiether 3y agoAlso do note that there isn't really a "Kagi's algorithm", since every Kagi user will received customized results based on how the set their account. To game Google, you do stuff on your website content ; try various keywords regularly with authenticated and unauthenticated requests and see how your actions on your website affects your position on the requests' results. With Kagi, you can't do unauthenticated requests, so the results you'll get will be unique to your account. So what you'll see is not what another random user will get. I guess you can still create new raw account each time, and maybe use the free-tier, but it's going to be a lot of work on your side without any assurance that the results are going to be the same on most user's results. Furthermore, now that the team learned their lessons about monitoring usage more closely[^1], it's going to be quite hard to play this game without being noticed. [^1]: https://status.kagi.com/clrnl9zwl97290beoine8zlvzx https://status.kagi.com/clrnl9zwl97290beoine8zlvzx
- xigoi 3y agoIf I understand correctly, the results on Kagi are only personalized based on the manually set whitelists/blacklists, not based on user tracking.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> Also do note that there isn't really a "Kagi's algorithm", since every Kagi user will received customized results based on how the set their account. Of course, there is a "Kagi algorithm" that takes the website's contents and ranks it according to the search. The algorithm, of course, takes into account user preferences, but there is a massive amount of commonality. Yes, that ranking algorithm probably can be games, just like Google's algorithm is gamed now with SEO spam. However, because of the size, there is no real incentive to spend time/money gaming it, but it is misleading to suggest that there is no algorithm.
- endisneigh 3y agoNice. Good to see more competition in this space. I wonder if they’re profitable yet. Fun fact: Qwant, a French search engine had almost 20 million users and nearly failed before a revamp in 2021. Search is tough.
- wiether 3y agoFortunately Kagi has got nothing in common with Qwant. Qwant is, from the beginning, a scam to grab public funding. They made tons of promises but actually never delivered on them. Worst, they even lied on what the product could do, pretending to provide results from their own index while returning results from Bing. If it wasn't enough, there's also stories of management misconduct on employees. Some stuff is public and partly told on the Wikipedia page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Controversies It's a classic "we'll make a French/European [X]" with [X] being Google, Facebook, AWS... There's at least one project like that every year for two decades now. Every time it's a failure from the outside, but the founders are quite successful in pocketing millions of public funding from France/Europe. Meanwhile, Kagi is "let's make a search engine for power users willing to pay for it". They're not here to take on Google. They're not here to grab public funding. They're making a product for which people are willing to pay. They deliver on absolutely everything they say. Proof is in the pudding. I'm a happy Kagi user/customer for a few months now, but what I find the most satisfying is not the website itself, it's how they are building it. While every big company is falling for the _enshitification_ of their products, seeing Kagi doing the exact opposite, and yet being clear that their goal is to take our money each month, is honestly quite refreshing.
- nomilk 3y agoI've long been suspicious that google doesn't want you to get an answer too quickly, or you'll go off google and back to whatever you were previously doing, thus they furnish you fewer ads and make less ad revenue. Curious to know if kagi or any of its users have tried to quantify how much more quickly they get answers to search queries. Even if it only saves 10 minutes a month, it could be worth switching.
- iamthepieman 3y agoIt's highly likely the site they go to will have Google's ads on it so they aren't really losing out. AdSense has 90% market share according to a couple sources I read (which I searched for using Kagi).
- depereo 3y agoAmazing, and I've somehow managed to find each and every one of 'em over time in various comment threads, here and elsewhere.
- 38 3y agoKagi needs a free tier. even if its only 10 searches a day, it needs something. I am never going to use it unless I can try it out for a while.
- endisneigh 3y agoKagi already has a free trial
- mmusc 3y agoThey have one
- Exoristos 3y agoAnd if they had set the subscription cost to, say, $2 a month, they might have had 200,000 "members" by now.
- mminer237 3y agoAnd they would be losing money with every user then. It costs them way more than that just to pay Google and Microsoft their fees.
- Exoristos 3y agoHow does that work? They have a contractual obligation to report to Microsoft and Google how many individual IPs have accessed Kagi domains and pay accordingly?
- darekkay 3y agoNo, they pay per search query. 200k users make statistically 10 times as many queries as 20k users.
- mminer237 3y agoNo, they just pay for their APIs per search. It costs Kagi about 1¼¢ per search.[1] Each user searches 20 times per day on average.[2] So it costs Kagi $7.50/month just to physically provide one person with search results, ignoring any overhead like buildings and employees. To keep the lights on they have to charge at least more than that. [1]: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan... [2]: https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats
- al_borland 3y agoIn the early days, as a user you could see how much your searches were costing them vs what you paid. One month I threw them an extra $10 or $20, as I was costing them more than I paid, even at $10/month. The goal should be profitability and sustainability, not user count. It’s not a social media site where the number of users should matter. The hardest hurdle is getting people to pay anything. Even 1 cent would be difficult, as it requires a sign up and adding payment information.
- nipperkinfeet 3y agoPaying for a search engine makes no sense to me. Startpage is just as appealing and free. There is also Yandex, which is identical to Google's old search engine. By the end of 2023, the search quality of Duckduckgo and Bing have dropped. DuckDuckGo is also now directing me to scroll through rubbish on the front page "Explore our features", so I moved to Startpage completely.
- xigoi 3y agoStartpage is just Google, so it’s also going to be full of SEO spam and sites with ads.
- monk_the_dog 3y agoI am a happy customer, and recently discovered their URL rewrite rules: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html. This lets me automatically rewrite urls so reddit automatically opens in "old" reddit and boost docs open with the latest version of boost. Really feels like this search engine was built for people like me.
- Lazare 3y agoAlso a happy customer, but I didn't know about that feature. That's quite useful; thanks for mentioning it.
- mportela 3y agoWow, thanks for sharing the tip!
- ijhuygft776 3y agoThere's a Firefox addon that does that too [0]... and another one made specifically for old.reddit [1] 0. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
- Departed7405 3y agoAdd-ons are terrible because they fingerprint you.Javascript allows for sharing of addons names. Having this niche add-on coupled with your device and browser type, IP, timezone this gives unique fingerprint. This comes from someone who used to have 50+ Firefox add-ons.
- syncbehind 3y agoWhy does this matter?
- Diti 3y ago
- PKop 3y ago>We would not be here without our early adopters (you!) and we deemed it important to pause, reflect and show gratitude. Why would any customer care about a T-Shirt though? Probably best to put that money into the product, which the early adopters would appreciate more than some generic, likely ill-fitting T-Shirt.
- freediver 3y ago> Probably best to put that money into the product Just want to chime in say that is not lacking. Check Kagi's release notes [1] and compare speed of development with any search engine (or internet product for that matter) in the world. Most users do not use 50% of Kagi's capabilities and new ones are being added each week. [1] https://kagi.com/changelog https://kagi.com/changelog
- mediumsmart 3y agoThanks for the reminder to learn and configure my Kagi.
- pcchristie 3y agoIt's funny, Kagi has almost been worth it just to allow me to prioritise Wikipedia results which for literally 80-90% of my searches is all I'm really looking for. Wikipedia has seemingly been relegated to the 8th or 10th result for most Google searches I noticed.
- tky 3y agoTheir end of year video recap and discussion answers a lot of questions asked here and gives some pretty deep insight into the product and its future. Highly recommend giving it a watch. https://youtu.be/DRVY-74lkBA?si=VsUW_09u53d7a8D2 https://youtu.be/DRVY-74lkBA?si=VsUW_09u53d7a8D2
- cvalka 3y ago[flagged]
- juunpp 3y agoI just cracked open with this comment. How do you drop that out of the blue without even bothering to make an argument?
- cvalka 3y agoThe founder willfully worked for one of the worst companies of the Internet era - Godaddy! If you're too young to remember, look up what kind of atrocities the SOPA and PIPA were. I hope the founder burns in hell along with the rest of the GoDaddy management.
- djha-skin 3y agoIt is so awesome to be able to put `!code` or `!expert` At the beginning of my search query and hit enter and have an AI do research for me with the query as the prompt. It doesn't interrupt my flow anymore to get AI insight. It's a game changer, a lot like github co-pilot was for me. As to the search results, it's always as good or better as Google. Sometimes I checked Google results just to make sure.
- theshrike79 3y ago!expert takes me to https://www.expert.nl/ https://www.expert.nl/ ...
- VapidLinus 3y ago!expert only works if you have access to the AI features. Right now, only available to users on the Ultimate plan. General release for all subscribers is end of February.
- andrethegiant 3y ago> Simply put, wearing the Doggo t-shirt is an incredibly awesome experience. Reeks of buyer’s remorse. No one cares about your shirts. Imagine if they used that 200k to buy carbon offsets instead.
- MissTake 3y agoJust in time! I need a new nightshirt! I’m so glad I signed up for Kagi - I tried DDG for a while but always felt it was missing huge swathes of results and invariably I’d find myself going back to the Goog to “fill in the blanks”. Think I count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve done that though in the last few months now I’m on Kagi. And, I have to say, as a tech geek I find it utterly glorious that my searches are Quora free!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- whalesalad 3y agoInb4 Google acquires them. I’m a paying customer and digging it. DuckDuckGo despite their privacy claims was (ironically) hanging hard for me due to blocked domains in pihole. Jumped to Kagi and have been pretty happy ever since. Just wish there was better safari integration - their extension perma bricked safari on my MacBook and despite being a Unix hacker for dang near 20 years I haven’t found the right library path to wipe to bring things back to life. Transitioned to Firefox on all platforms though and it’s been smooth sailing. The things we do for fast and relevant search.
- themadturk 3y agoHuh...Kagi works great in Safari on my 2020 M1 MBA. I did try their browser for a while, but there were too many sites that didn't quite work for me.
- mediumsmart 3y agoI switched to Orion RC for the Kagi zero telemetry combination. https://kagi.com/orion/ https://kagi.com/orion/
- al_borland 3y agoNot sure what the current status is, but they released a new plugin that had issues. I looked into it and they had pulled it and told people to use the old version until they could get it resolved. I haven’t checked back since then, but the old version is working for me. I haven’t changed my iPhone back, but feel like I should do something there, as it’s a bit inconsistent. I used Firefox for while, as it has support for adding any search engine possible, natively. But went back to Safari for whatever reason.
- lagt_t 3y agoTried it, I don't see the value over duckduckgo
- camdenlock 3y agoI pay for it.
- sotix 3y agoCongratulations to Kagi. This is by far one of the most useful products I use every day for both work and personal use, and I absolutely adore the small web feature. Excited to get a few stickers and a shirt as a thank you!
- akudha 3y agoThis is the search engine that uses Crystal in production, correct? I remember reading on HN, I might misremember though. Going to sign up now
- justinclift 3y agoDoesn't this sound like a substantial distraction? The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database. So, we basically ended up owning a merch production operation end-to-end, just so that we could ensure premium quality of these t-shirts!
- wakawaka28 3y agoWhy would you make a t-shirt without the company name fairly large on it? Especially when you have aren't a household name yet. It's weak advertising...
- al_borland 3y agoFor me, I’m much more likely to actually wear a shirt if it doesn’t have the brand plastered on it as a blatant marketing tool. And if people have to ask about the shirt, that opens up the conversation to talk about Kagi. If the name is just on there, I think fewer people would say anything, and I feel like it really needs an explanation from a user. Paying for a search engine isn’t something most people will do without someone giving them a reason why they should care.
- wakawaka28 3y agoI almost never wear graphic tees. But to me it seems like there are people too shy or uninterested to ask about a generic cartoon character on a shirt. The name doesn't have to be so bold, but it shouldn't be in fine print either. I think the logo is not cute enough either. The grungy sketch style is not as appealing as normal clean logos. I think they need to seek help in designing an appropriate logo. At least the name Kagi is catchy.
- davkan 3y agoHonestly I just pay for kagi because i find google to be a despicable company and every other search alternative is trash. Apart from YouTube, search was my last Google dependency and I’d happily pay $10/mo to get rid of it. Encountering Google search on an unconfigured browser now gives me ick feelings similar to when I occasionally have to go on to Facebook.
- zipping1549 3y agoKagi brings me joy every time I search. At first $25/m sounded crazy but honestly, it has paid for itself since day 1. Well done.
- mediumsmart 3y agoI like it when people own up to not making an informed choice about the currency with the simple statement no way I am going to pay for search
- goplayoutside 3y agoThis post has 179 comments and 305 points seven hours after it was posted, why is it on page six?
- subtlemuffins 3y agoI guess it has been manually downvoted?
- b__d 3y agoextremly happy customer, i just really hope they live up to their goals, but i have faith. the only thing i personally struggle with is deleting "google" as a substitute for "search for it on the internet" from my vocabulary. haven't used google search since then, feels weird… maybe it's because in german "kacki" is a childish saying for "shit". so "lass mich das kagin" ("let me kagi that") feels weird too :D but hey, wix (="wank" on german) made the best out of it :D
- steakscience 3y agoI wished Neeva was alive. Its search results were amazing.
- OJFord 3y agoTrying out ChatGPT Plus for the last couple of months has done a lot to warm me up to the idea of paying for Kagi - I've been using it to cover a lot of queries I'd struggle with for longer in a search engine previously - so I'm glad to see they're considering ways of integrating LLMs, I don't think I want to add two $20-25pcm subscriptions for it, though I'll likely continue one. (I use, and have used for at least 11 years, DDG for the rest.) I suspect the 'problem' (for someone in my position trying to choose) will always be that a ChatGPT sub is ahead in breadth of what it offers - for example DALLE image generation at the moment would probably stop me from swapping.
- benhurmarcel 3y agoNote that Kagi includes LLM tools in their highest tier. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
- OJFord 3y agoYes that was my point, and it's where the price I quoted comes from.
- theshrike79 3y agoUnless you are a _really_ heavy user of ChatGPT, the best way to use it is via the API with a separate application like MindMac or something similar. That way you pay exactly what you use, nothing more.
- OJFord 3y agoTrue, I did think a good solution (depending on usage) could be if Kagi let you BYO API key. Of course then the model choice (as it supports multiple) would have to be limited to what (is a third-party API and) you provide a key for. But then it's less of an up-sell and probably lower margin for them even if it did cost more than the lower tier unlimited search plan.
- ouraf 3y agoI hope Kagi is sustainable and sucessful in the long term. The ability of make "deliberate" and personal ranking changes to search results is less profitable than selling ads, but has a value beyond financial gain that can't be understated
- kmod 3y agoI switched to Kagi a month ago, and initially I was pretty skeptical because a lot of the excitement sounded kind of hype-y and anti-Google. But actually Kagi is quite good and definitely worth it. I have regained the expectation that when I search for something I will find the thing that I want, and I hadn't realized how much I had lost that with Google. It's hard to demonstrate this because I think it's an accumulation of many small improvements, so I encourage people to give it a try and see for themselves. I do worry that this won't last forever -- for example, I think the AI features are being provided below-cost to gain market share, and it does worry me that they're spending so much money on these tshirts. But I can always switch away later so I don't worry about it that much.
- leokennis 3y agoI recently switched from DuckDuckGo. The returned search results are very similar, but: * With Kagi I can up/downrank sites. Never again will my search return a result on TikTok or Facebook. * Kagi’s AI stuff is really useful: summarize a site, get GPT style answers by using the “!quick” bang etc. I still find $10/month steep but I think I’ll keep paying it.
- martin82 3y agoI must say, as a long term paying customer (pretty much since day 1), I'm a little bit shocked that they have only so few paying customers. People really have their priorities wrong when it comes to spending small amounts of money per month...