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> Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google. That's the big problem here. All the new search engines rel

> Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google. That's the big problem here. All the new search engines rely on the infrastructure of the old ones. It would take very little collusion between Google and Microsoft to crush something like Kagi. And the moment any new competitor gets big, they'll do it. What's needed is an anti-trust breakup. There's simply too big a conflict of interest between Google, the search engine product, and Google, the ad-tech giant earning money off the websites. Google is using their search engine monopoly to control the wider web, and fill it with spammy SEO garbage to juice their advertising revenues.

Exuma 2y ago
How would they crush kagi
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  Kagi relies on data from the search engine giants. Without that data, it's dead in the water. That's the dumbest part of it all; Kagi's not an entirely new search engine. It's Google's index but without the ad-tech juicing, and some clever use of a few other search indices to specialize results. (I.e. Google could unshit itself at any moment, it just doesn't want to.)
  - Exuma 2y ago
    Hmm... really? They don't do their own crawling and indexing? How does one simply repurpose google's index... just technically or business speaking?
    - ADeerAppeared 2y ago
      Google has an API. One just pays to use that. The problem being the aforementioned conflict of interest. The moment you're a competitor to Google Search (or any of Google's other products), they can kill your API access and ruin you.
      - Exuma 2y ago
        Damn... that makes Kagi way less exciting. I thought they had some secret sauce. It's just a paid wrapper WTF
        leotravis10 2y ago
        I fear that Kagi is going to suffer the same fate as Neeva did: "In a way, the brief flicker of Neeva’s existence tells everything you need to know about the last 20 years of search-engine supremacy. Building a search engine is hard. Building one better than Google is even harder. But if you want to beat Google, a better search engine is only the very beginning. And it only gets harder from there." [1] [1] https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva-android https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva... Not to mention Kagi's continued sustainability issues (28,071 users at the time of writing) [2] and their plans for their own AI products [3] [4] that would inevitably and eventually doom them. [2] https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats [3] https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314 Also, ADeerAppeared is right that government intervention aka a major breakup needs to happen for competition to thrive and I don't see it happening (although I hope I'm wrong).
        freediver 2y ago
        Thank you for your concerns, but Kagi is not just sustainable but also profitable. And if you want to know our plans, just check our own blog [1]. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy
- codalan 2y ago
  Kagi also seems to be built atop GCP. Not a great place to be if you want to compete against Google in the future.
ricardo81 2y ago
Agree, intervention is needed. Any new entrant sort-of has to prove itself also as crawling sites can be hard, e.g. Cloudflare which fronts an appreciable portion of the web. Also large sites like Reddit you need to crawl them at 100s of pages a second to keep up to date with content, not something they're generally going to appreciate without a recognisable benefit to them.
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  > Any new entrant sort-of has to prove itself also as crawling sites can be hard It's very hard, getting harder as websites grow more hostile to crawlers. (With more and more putting up login walls to keep poorly written AI crawlers out.) But the real problem is that tech is culturally unused to dealing with monopolists "on even ground". The wider tech community operates on the implied worldview that they can take on anyone by just asking daddy A16Z for a duovigintillion dollars. For 25 nearly-continuous years, you could just outspend to get into even the most hostile markets. That economic climate is just ... gone now. No more free money. You can't just buy your way to the top anymore, the business has to financially work. And most importantly: You can't outspend the incumbents anymore, but they still can outspend you.
no_identd 2y ago
I know there exist whole fields of people out there sitting on content crawls

Exuma 2y ago

How would they crush kagi

ADeerAppeared 2y ago
Kagi relies on data from the search engine giants. Without that data, it's dead in the water. That's the dumbest part of it all; Kagi's not an entirely new search engine. It's Google's index but without the ad-tech juicing, and some clever use of a few other search indices to specialize results. (I.e. Google could unshit itself at any moment, it just doesn't want to.)
- Exuma 2y ago
  Hmm... really? They don't do their own crawling and indexing? How does one simply repurpose google's index... just technically or business speaking?
  - ADeerAppeared 2y ago
    Google has an API. One just pays to use that. The problem being the aforementioned conflict of interest. The moment you're a competitor to Google Search (or any of Google's other products), they can kill your API access and ruin you.
    - Exuma 2y ago
      Damn... that makes Kagi way less exciting. I thought they had some secret sauce. It's just a paid wrapper WTF
      - leotravis10 2y ago
        I fear that Kagi is going to suffer the same fate as Neeva did: "In a way, the brief flicker of Neeva’s existence tells everything you need to know about the last 20 years of search-engine supremacy. Building a search engine is hard. Building one better than Google is even harder. But if you want to beat Google, a better search engine is only the very beginning. And it only gets harder from there." [1] [1] https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva-android https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva... Not to mention Kagi's continued sustainability issues (28,071 users at the time of writing) [2] and their plans for their own AI products [3] [4] that would inevitably and eventually doom them. [2] https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats [3] https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314 Also, ADeerAppeared is right that government intervention aka a major breakup needs to happen for competition to thrive and I don't see it happening (although I hope I'm wrong).
        freediver 2y ago
        Thank you for your concerns, but Kagi is not just sustainable but also profitable. And if you want to know our plans, just check our own blog [1]. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy
codalan 2y ago
Kagi also seems to be built atop GCP. Not a great place to be if you want to compete against Google in the future.

ricardo81 2y ago

Agree, intervention is needed. Any new entrant sort-of has to prove itself also as crawling sites can be hard, e.g. Cloudflare which fronts an appreciable portion of the web. Also large sites like Reddit you need to crawl them at 100s of pages a second to keep up to date with content, not something they're generally going to appreciate without a recognisable benefit to them.

ADeerAppeared 2y ago
> Any new entrant sort-of has to prove itself also as crawling sites can be hard It's very hard, getting harder as websites grow more hostile to crawlers. (With more and more putting up login walls to keep poorly written AI crawlers out.) But the real problem is that tech is culturally unused to dealing with monopolists "on even ground". The wider tech community operates on the implied worldview that they can take on anyone by just asking daddy A16Z for a duovigintillion dollars. For 25 nearly-continuous years, you could just outspend to get into even the most hostile markets. That economic climate is just ... gone now. No more free money. You can't just buy your way to the top anymore, the business has to financially work. And most importantly: You can't outspend the incumbents anymore, but they still can outspend you.

no_identd 2y ago

I know there exist whole fields of people out there sitting on content crawls