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Kagi search reached 20k paying members

blog.kagi.com

171–180 of 269 posts

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#171
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having received many t shirts from companies and conferences, I mostly don't wear them if the branding is really over the top. As described, a Kagi shirt would be something I'd actually wear

There was a hilarious blog post on here a few months ago from some guy who collects database company T shirts. A lot of them are quite bad but a few are really good. IIRC his favorite was from Snowflake. Edit: apparently his favorite was from mongo: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2016/07/my-favorite-datab... which I have to agree with, that is a good shirt. I think I might still like the Snowflake one (3) the bes…

For reference, that "some guy" is Andy Pavlo, a professor of databases at Carnegie Mellon. He has a lot of neat writeups online, like this annual review of new database systems [0]. He puts up lectures on the internet for free too.

Having been to Dr. Pavlo's office - or at least, one of them - I can attest to there being multiple cardboard boxes filled with gifted shirts from different companies. One of my favorite designs was actually from CMU's DB group itself - it has a little "this database kills fascists" tag on it, with a skull motif :D

[0]: https://ottertune.com/blog/2022-databases-retrospective

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#172
post #145

Happy 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 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.

That works out to 21 or so queries a day per user

That 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.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#173

Why 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...

For 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.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#174

Inb4 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 pa…

Not 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.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#175

And if they had set the subscription cost to, say, $2 a month, they might have had 200,000 "members" by now.

In 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.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#177

Inb4 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 pa…

I switched to Orion RC for the Kagi zero telemetry combination.

https://kagi.com/orion/

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There'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/ 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

Add-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.

Why does this matter?

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#179
post #85

>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.

> 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

Thanks for the reminder to learn and configure my Kagi.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#180

Why 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...

For 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 with…

I 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.
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