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Kagi founder here. I like simplicity too, but if that is the only thing I cared about I would have never attempted to build a paid search engine. We started wo

Kagi founder here. I like simplicity too, but if that is the only thing I cared about I would have never attempted to build a paid search engine. We started working on the browser before we started working on search. There were many browsers and search engines before us, and all of them failed because you can not compete with an ecosystem company (Google) with a single product. If your customers use your search engine, but then use Gmail and Chrome, your main competitor has means (friction) with them to attempt to win them back over (and you are paid, they are free!) if you ever become more than a nuisance. This is why it was clear to me from day one that we need to offer a hollistic replacement for big tech for consuming the web - and search, browser and email (yes, we are building that too) account for 99% of consumption of the web. Yes, it makes our job everything but simple, but without it we will not survive long term - I am 100% sure. (and in the meantime generative AI showed up and made things even more complicated) I still love my job and the challenges it brings, every single day. While we live as a company in a complex environment we try to remove the complexity for our customers and make high quality products. I have pretty high standards for browsers and have been using them for almost 30 years - and Orion is by far the most powerful option on the market (speed/energy/privacy/features). Inviting you to give it a try.

roughly 1y ago
I think it depends on what you're trying to do, and I also think the landscape is different right now than it would have been 5 years ago. I'd actually view the browser as a more difficult market to crack than search, because there are plenty of decent free options that have not obviously succumbed to the lure of advertising revenue yet. You're also always playing a "red queen's race" with the browser market where that friction you mention with Gmail and other google properties can be used to push people away from your browser. Similarly, for email, Fastmail and Proton are both fine answers for what to do without Google, and both cover a wide enough spread of the market that I'm not really looking for alternatives (and, relatedly, running an email service _sucks_ - if you haven't hired someone with large-scale public email service experience yet, you absolutely need to do so, because it's one of the worst problems on the internet). The search market is different - you are, to the best of my knowledge, the only actual paid search engine out there, which means you're the only one whose interests align with mine and the only one who can pursue a product strategy of actually delivering the best available information to me. This is part of why I'm concerned about dilution of focus - as a dedicated Kagi subscriber, the reason I'm here is because you offer good search aligned with my interests, and that's why I'm going to keep paying you money. The additional products in the pipeline weren't requirements to get or keep my business, and I suspect it's the same for many of your subscribers. I trust you to run your business - you've created a great product that I'm happy to pay for, so you've earned that - but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.
- freediver 1y ago
  > but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business. Having best web search in the world has been our bread&butter from day one. This is what so many people pay us for! Great search becomes even more important in the age of agents - model quality is converging to the same spot across frontier models and what will make great answers different from mediocre ones is the quality of search fed to them. We are currently testing v2 of our Search API with select partners and plan to make this generally available soon. We 100% intend to continue to dominate this and we heavilly invest and innovate in search quality space. A major announcement soon.
kurtis_reed 1y ago
Do many Kagi customers use Orion? Are you having trouble retaining ones who don't? > I am 100% sure I'm definitely less than 100% sure. (I'd take a bet at those odds.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43982643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43982643
- freediver 1y ago
  Many customers do, and in fact Orion feedback forum [1] is more active than Kagi feedback forum [2] (we do not have any telemetry and all product input is given directly by our users). While Kagi has "only" about 50k customers, Orion was downloaded more than a million times last year and continues to be a major distribution channel and entry point for the Kagi eco-sytem. (you are not seeing any ads for Kagi right? Our products are our "ads", that is how we grow + wonderful user community) And while you can use Kagi in any browser, it is a really nice experience when you use Orion (and it will get only better as we build more integrations). We are also aware about cross-platform users - which is why we are also developing Orion for Linux as the next platform, with more to come. Not sure what point you wanted to make by linking to the comment - happy to address it after clarification. [1] https://orionfeedback.org https://orionfeedback.org [2] https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org
  - awill 1y ago
    How do you plan to solve sync (bookmarks, history etc..) when going cross platform? iCloud makes things easy when it's just Mac/iOS, but that won't work for Linux. I use Linux at home, Mac at work, and have an iPhone, and very few apps look native and work seamlessly across all 3.
    - freediver 1y ago
      Orion is native on 2/3 and will soon be native on Linux too!
      - weikju 1y ago
        I noticed the reply didn't answer about sync...
hypotrochoid 1y ago
I’m personally a Kagi early adopter and Protonmail user for all other standard GSuite product replacements. I find this arrangement perfectly smooth and painless, and never once wished that the services that I get from Proton in any way interacted with the service I get from Kagi. It’s not clear to me at all that duplicating the google product spread would be the best way to extend the value to customers of Kagi search.
- freediver 1y ago
  One use case: I would like to be able to see my emails appear in search results when relevant. Also would like to be able to quikly search the web when writing emails. This is not rocket science but for this you need deep integration between email and search. For some reason Google didn't do this in 20 years although perfectly capable of.
  - OldfieldFund 1y ago
    This is very specific. Why would you want that? Can you give me an example?
zamalek 1y ago
You indicate wide extension compatibility. This is more of a thought experiment (by virtue of inbuilt adblocking), does - or do you hope/plan for - the likes of uBlock Origin work.
- freediver 1y ago
  On macOS yes, on iOS limited by what iOS lets us do (we'll push it to the max)
barrell 1y ago
Kagi and Orion user here. I love them both. Would love a Kagi mail. Thanks for building such amazing products. Although I have to be honest - even as a very devoted and technical user, I still have no idea what or why assistant is. Luckily it doesn’t take away from everything else you’ve built.
joshjob42 1y ago
If Vimium would work in Orion I'd be happily paying for Orion+ and Kagi but sadly it doesn't.
- dalingrin 1y ago
  I couldn't agree more. The model of trying to support 3rd party extensions but not having full compatibility puts Orion in an awkward position. I would consider creating a Vimium replacement for Orion but where would you publish it? Firefox store? Chrome web store? Seems like you'd just have to distribute it as a zip that the user would need to manually import and manually update. Besides Vimium, I generally experience enough bugs with other extensions or the browser itself that I just wind up not using Orion, despite following development for many years now. What they're trying to achieve with Orion is very admirable but they simply don't have enough resources to pull it off. Making a browser is hard, making a cross platform webkit browser is even harder, making a cross platform webkit based browser that supports Firefox, Chrome, and in some cases Safari extensions is yet even harder.
- mvieira38 1y ago
  Agree, either Vimium or Tridactyl or some other form of proprietary Vim bindings. Nothing feels quite as bad with browsers as programming with both hands on keyboard, poppping into the browser for a quick search and having to quick on stuff

roughly 1y ago

I think it depends on what you're trying to do, and I also think the landscape is different right now than it would have been 5 years ago. I'd actually view the browser as a more difficult market to crack than search, because there are plenty of decent free options that have not obviously succumbed to the lure of advertising revenue yet. You're also always playing a "red queen's race" with the browser market where that friction you mention with Gmail and other google properties can be used to push people away from your browser. Similarly, for email, Fastmail and Proton are both fine answers for what to do without Google, and both cover a wide enough spread of the market that I'm not really looking for alternatives (and, relatedly, running an email service _sucks_ - if you haven't hired someone with large-scale public email service experience yet, you absolutely need to do so, because it's one of the worst problems on the internet). The search market is different - you are, to the best of my knowledge, the only actual paid search engine out there, which means you're the only one whose interests align with mine and the only one who can pursue a product strategy of actually delivering the best available information to me. This is part of why I'm concerned about dilution of focus - as a dedicated Kagi subscriber, the reason I'm here is because you offer good search aligned with my interests, and that's why I'm going to keep paying you money. The additional products in the pipeline weren't requirements to get or keep my business, and I suspect it's the same for many of your subscribers. I trust you to run your business - you've created a great product that I'm happy to pay for, so you've earned that - but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.

freediver 1y ago
> but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business. Having best web search in the world has been our bread&butter from day one. This is what so many people pay us for! Great search becomes even more important in the age of agents - model quality is converging to the same spot across frontier models and what will make great answers different from mediocre ones is the quality of search fed to them. We are currently testing v2 of our Search API with select partners and plan to make this generally available soon. We 100% intend to continue to dominate this and we heavilly invest and innovate in search quality space. A major announcement soon.

kurtis_reed 1y ago

Do many Kagi customers use Orion? Are you having trouble retaining ones who don't? > I am 100% sure I'm definitely less than 100% sure. (I'd take a bet at those odds.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43982643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43982643

freediver 1y ago
Many customers do, and in fact Orion feedback forum [1] is more active than Kagi feedback forum [2] (we do not have any telemetry and all product input is given directly by our users). While Kagi has "only" about 50k customers, Orion was downloaded more than a million times last year and continues to be a major distribution channel and entry point for the Kagi eco-sytem. (you are not seeing any ads for Kagi right? Our products are our "ads", that is how we grow + wonderful user community) And while you can use Kagi in any browser, it is a really nice experience when you use Orion (and it will get only better as we build more integrations). We are also aware about cross-platform users - which is why we are also developing Orion for Linux as the next platform, with more to come. Not sure what point you wanted to make by linking to the comment - happy to address it after clarification. [1] https://orionfeedback.org https://orionfeedback.org [2] https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org
- awill 1y ago
  How do you plan to solve sync (bookmarks, history etc..) when going cross platform? iCloud makes things easy when it's just Mac/iOS, but that won't work for Linux. I use Linux at home, Mac at work, and have an iPhone, and very few apps look native and work seamlessly across all 3.
  - freediver 1y ago
    Orion is native on 2/3 and will soon be native on Linux too!
    - weikju 1y ago
      I noticed the reply didn't answer about sync...

hypotrochoid 1y ago

I’m personally a Kagi early adopter and Protonmail user for all other standard GSuite product replacements. I find this arrangement perfectly smooth and painless, and never once wished that the services that I get from Proton in any way interacted with the service I get from Kagi. It’s not clear to me at all that duplicating the google product spread would be the best way to extend the value to customers of Kagi search.

freediver 1y ago
One use case: I would like to be able to see my emails appear in search results when relevant. Also would like to be able to quikly search the web when writing emails. This is not rocket science but for this you need deep integration between email and search. For some reason Google didn't do this in 20 years although perfectly capable of.
- OldfieldFund 1y ago
  This is very specific. Why would you want that? Can you give me an example?

zamalek 1y ago

You indicate wide extension compatibility. This is more of a thought experiment (by virtue of inbuilt adblocking), does - or do you hope/plan for - the likes of uBlock Origin work.

freediver 1y ago
On macOS yes, on iOS limited by what iOS lets us do (we'll push it to the max)

barrell 1y ago

Kagi and Orion user here. I love them both. Would love a Kagi mail. Thanks for building such amazing products. Although I have to be honest - even as a very devoted and technical user, I still have no idea what or why assistant is. Luckily it doesn’t take away from everything else you’ve built.

joshjob42 1y ago

If Vimium would work in Orion I'd be happily paying for Orion+ and Kagi but sadly it doesn't.

dalingrin 1y ago
I couldn't agree more. The model of trying to support 3rd party extensions but not having full compatibility puts Orion in an awkward position. I would consider creating a Vimium replacement for Orion but where would you publish it? Firefox store? Chrome web store? Seems like you'd just have to distribute it as a zip that the user would need to manually import and manually update. Besides Vimium, I generally experience enough bugs with other extensions or the browser itself that I just wind up not using Orion, despite following development for many years now. What they're trying to achieve with Orion is very admirable but they simply don't have enough resources to pull it off. Making a browser is hard, making a cross platform webkit browser is even harder, making a cross platform webkit based browser that supports Firefox, Chrome, and in some cases Safari extensions is yet even harder.
mvieira38 1y ago
Agree, either Vimium or Tridactyl or some other form of proprietary Vim bindings. Nothing feels quite as bad with browsers as programming with both hands on keyboard, poppping into the browser for a quick search and having to quick on stuff