We will be shutting down neeva.com

I did not ask for ads, and I can pay, so why should I suffer them? If I want to buy something, I will search for it. I would not welcome a salesman who interrupted my dinner with a voucher for my next meal; I'd give him a wedgie.

We will be at the end of the AI hype cycle we are currently in. Majority of AI/search startups that exist today will no longer be around, failing to find a viable business model that has a hope of profitability, as stuffing ads inside will put them in direct trajectory of Google/Microsoft's insane resources.

Google and Microsoft situation will be much better defined. One of these companies will discover that being a platform open to developers is a strategic advantage. Ad-supported search as a model will fail to find ground in AI answers. Both companies will inject so many ads in AI chat answers to pay for the bills, that AI answers will become so intelligence insulting that even users who previously didn't mind ads (or had ways to block them) will finally start looking for ad-free search alternatives. Some ad-supported results will start having 'for entertainment purposes only' label as they will start to carry unwanted liability otherwise.

This will finally allow large scale prolifiration of a new breed of search products offering search experiences made for users instead of advertisers. Paying for search will become much more common and we will be slowly exiting the 25 years Matrix-like coma situation we are currently held in, where the expectation for the most valuable and intimate thing we do online (search and browsing) is to be free, while we accept to surrender our private information, time and attention in return.

The alignment of incentives in combination with enough resources and the newest techonlgoies will finally allow for truly amazing innovation in search, changing the way we consume information forever.

At the same time, we will start to see signs of the first public search engines (goverment subsidized), inheriting the role that public libraries had for centuries, as access to information will be deemed as a fundamental human right.

So when I think about Kagi's trajectory, it is surviving the next two years and keeping on innovating that matters. The business model is already sound and future-proof (the price will come down too).

Fair to say that people have tried. Hard. If feels unlikely that there will ever be another search engine. That product category is basically done.

There is obviously much excitement about the potentially disruptive role of LLM. Its a powerful alternative algorithmic interface to public information but both its tenuous relation with facts and ultimately it being based on the same adtech business model means the end-result might have to be massaged and be quite a bit less disruptive than what people think or hope.

It is hard to say where true disruption will come from. Its probably not going to be called "search" but it must make search obsolete.

I don't know how widespread that feeling might be, but I'm tired "searching". I don't want my interface to the world to be a daily grind defined by adtech optimizations. We need a new interface to information. More persistent, more tailored, more user-centric, and obviously, more private. For that we need to go back to the roots of the web and maybe even before that, the roots of computer user interfaces.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_internet_sear...