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Kagi search reached 20k paying members

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#221

Post by VapidLinus »

theshrike79 wrote: post #209
djha-skin wrote: post #107

It 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.

!expert takes me to https://www.expert.nl/ ...

!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.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#222

Post by wiether »

endisneigh wrote: post #60

Nice. 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.

Fortunately 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 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.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#223

Post by mminer237 »

Exoristos wrote: post #146
mminer237 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they would be losing money with every user then. It costs them way more than that just to pay Google and Microsoft their fees.

How 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?

No, 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#finan...

[2]: https://kagi.com/stats

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#224

Post by wiether »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #53

Kagi 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 s…

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.

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

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#225

Post by kmod »

I 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.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#227

Post by xigoi »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #148
cwsx wrote: post #21

I 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 d…

I've been curious for a while too and I've been trying to de-google myself a tiny bit each year (more or less dropped Chrome in 2023). Once I actually grab a full time job again I wouldn't mind grabbing my own subscription here to try it out. I'm curious if 300 searches/month is truly enough for me, though. And what would happen if I go over that rate. Am I simply unable to search more for that month?

Look at your browser history to find out how much you search. I was surprised to find that I’m consistently nowhere near 300.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#228

Post by xigoi »

al_borland wrote: post #172
ipaddr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I estimate that the median is substantially lower though.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#230

Post by xigoi »

wiether wrote: post #224
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #53

Kagi 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 s…

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. 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 request…

If I understand correctly, the results on Kagi are only personalized based on the manually set whitelists/blacklists, not based on user tracking.
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