Kagi raises $670k • Hacker News Board

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#11

Post by samsquire » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:18 AM UTC

I am glad there's alternatives to Google and Bing.

I think the (open) web is troubled from a content, quality and funding perspective.

The old web was the volunteer web. People produced useful content and it was interesting (Digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon and delicious)

I like reading personal tech blogs from the volunteer web. I get a lot of value from them.

I don't want the web to get worse so I subscribe to Wikipedia and at one point medium.

I kind of think the secret to quality is to commission high quality authors.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#12

Post by getmeinrn » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:19 AM UTC

I'm surprised that a search engine that isn't powered by AI is able to raise money. From the direction things seem to be going, LLM tech may very well level that entire industry.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#13

Post by vishnumohandas » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:19 AM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #7

I can't seem to tell from the website. But are they depending on results from Google, Bing etc. or are they crawling the web themselves.

According to their Help page they've their own indexes: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html...

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#14

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:19 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #6

"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…

someone below linked to the fact that they do leverage other search engines for their tech. So that can explain the lower cost: https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from

It's more about curation (and I guess some machine learning) than completely new tech.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#15

Post by benjaminwootton » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:20 AM UTC

potro wrote: post #5

Is $670K adequate sum to he raised through such financing round? I get used to multi-million numbers in startup announcements.

The irony is, I think I could get more delivered with a $670k cheque than I could with a $6.7 million one. With the latter, you would grow too big, management would creep in, you would overengineer, you might spend too much time working behind closed doors etc.

Later on you would need cash to scale this business, but for early stage product development I think $500k to $1 million is the sweet spot.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#16

Post by mrweasel » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:20 AM UTC

gherkinnn wrote: post #3

The recent price reductions [0] were fantastic. But investors always smells fishy to me. Granted I don’t understand much of it, so my nose might be off. 0 - https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes

> But investors always smells fishy to me.

I was thinking the same, but then again, the investment is rather low, so it is a lot easier to dump that investor, if values don't align in the future. I might be reading it all wrong, but it also seems like the money comes from 42 different investors, making it even easier to part ways.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#17

Post by PufPufPuf » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:20 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #6

"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…

Have you seen what they've already built? The product is out there and very usable: https://kagi.com/

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#18

Post by scubadude » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:21 AM UTC

keyle wrote: post #4

That's great news. I don't particularly care about the search engine, for me, it's about the browser. Orion is really great, I hope they don't stuff it up!

I'd be using it now, but Mac only /eyeroll

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#19

Post by yxre » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:22 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #6

"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…

I use it, and it's better than google and duckduckgo. What features are they missing?

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#20

Post by golemotron » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:22 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #6

"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…

That $30 million might not have yielded a great search engine but it did produce Cuil Theory, a branch of mathematics with the potential to change the world:

http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory/