Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 228 posts

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#101

Post by skinkestek »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #91
ejb999 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really sure that you need a 'silicon valley salary' to afford $10/month. Netflix charges almost double this and they have 100's of millions of subscribers worldwide; my guess is that a premium search engine only needs a small fraction of that number of users to become a worthwhile and profitable service. Can't say if I would pay for it or not - haven't used it yet - but if that was the price of dumping google sea…

And how many people share their logins to avoid having a bunch of fees from different services? I bet its more common on the lower end of the income spectrum. When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight

> When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight

Correct. But what Volvo invented (3 point safety belt and more) soon became standard in ordinary cars.

Say Kagi is a luxury product for some people: it will still open the road for others to see that it is possible to carve out a niche that isn't as crowded as ad-sponsored-idiotic-AI-manipulated-answers-for-everyone-and-noone-at-the-same-time.

Neeva is freemium.

I think you.com is freemium too.

Marginalia is free and at this point so good that it is sometimes a better fallback from DDG than Google is. (To be fair, Marginalia is a side project running on a single desktop pc in Sweden somewhere but Google is that bad these days that if DDG doesn't have you covered chanses are Google doesn't either. And then marginalia comes in with a delightfully different ranking, respecting my queries and allowing me to find things - if they exists in its index.)

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#103

Post by jpalomaki »

skinkestek wrote: post #36
speedgoose wrote: post #8

I wonder how it collects the results from “the best search engines on the market”. Bing’s API in Azure has very specific terms of use that do not allow something like Kagi, and Google Search API is not designed to build a generic search engine.

Somebody asked the other day. Kagi pay for api access to both Google and Bing.

I'm actually super surprised Google does this kind of deals. I've thought they don't do this, becuase it would help competition to get started. Once you get traction, then it might be possible to drop the Google access.

This is what Kagi says in the FAQ.

"Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers." [1]

[1] https://kagi.com/faq

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#104

Post by deanc »

kuhewa wrote: post #29
deanc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I can be frank, nothing google has done or is doing with my search data bothers me in the slightest. If it uses my data to help target advertising - so be it. It doesn't bother me either as I use uBlock. So whether I pay or not, the only thing I care about is the quality of my search results. What makes you think you can do better than a company with over 20 years experience, 10s of 1000s of engineers working on t…

Google has been getting worse for the past few years, probably in the demands for making a standard product to suit the average person. But now the first page is full of results that exclude one of the search terms. And my strategy for years to find obscure results- of finding the oddest set of relevant terms to describe what I want to find to weed out commonplace results that share a couple terms — has stopped worki…

The quality of cadbury chocolate has been getting worse over the years since Kraft bought them out. I still buy it because it looks like the same product, kinda tastes like it, and ultimately will give me what I want. I don't disagree the quality of Google's results has gone down - but you are talking about changing user behaviour here and for the majority (not you and I) google still does what it needs.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#105

Post by cycomanic »

ejb999 wrote: post #88
tmsbrg wrote: post #79

It seems the trend lately for new services to be built with rather high monthly fees. From the FAQ: "We plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, unlimited plan at around $20/mo as well as make bundles (to include Kagi email and other services), family plans and annual payment discounts available." I have to say I support a lot of these initiatives, but I can't help but think altogether they're creatin…

Not really sure that you need a 'silicon valley salary' to afford $10/month. Netflix charges almost double this and they have 100's of millions of subscribers worldwide; my guess is that a premium search engine only needs a small fraction of that number of users to become a worthwhile and profitable service. Can't say if I would pay for it or not - haven't used it yet - but if that was the price of dumping google sea…

Actually the comparison with Netflix is quite apt. For twice the price I get lots (and I really mean lots) of shows streamed to my house. In contrast here, here I get a search service that is provided by others for free. For the average Joe the value proposition is very different. So you really have to be valuing privacy very strongly and/or have significant disposible income.

Note I actually like the service and I signed up for the beta, but I understand the GPs point about building two "webs" one for the masses and one for the "well off" that can afford these tools. However as one other poster said, you have to bootstrap a service somehow and if it gets popular enough there could be the ability to reduce fees to give it mass appeal.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#106

Post by crumpetting »

freediver wrote: post #39
Lio wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Freediver, Would you mind telling us a little of the story about Kagi the company behind the product? It’s really interesting to hear that you’re using Crystal. Where are you guys based and how have you bootstraped? Good luck and keep at it, this is a really interesting project.

Sure. We are running on a tight budget, completely bootstrapped by funds from my previous exit. Trying to control cost and all that while establishing product-market fit, which is the reason the beta is closed for now. Instead of starting with technology, I started by selecting people that I can work with and are crazy enough to accept working on such an ambitious idea. It turned out that they really liked Crystal an…

I've not seen much production use of crystal, but its cool to see such a nice product using it. I've been quite happy with kagi since I got my invite.

Crystal really is quite neat, I've got a few years experience with go and picking up Crystal has been easy and quick to get productive. Being able to call C so easily (especially when generated with crystal_lib) is pretty amazing and a big boost compared with go.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#107

Post by mda »

GEBBL wrote: post #11

Signed up! Good luck! The logo is a g which is in the Google ballpark. why not K?

Heh that was the first thing i thought, not a fan of the icon. If you claim to be better why use small mind tricks like this?

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#108

Post by vitro »

kajiryoji wrote: post #95
vitro wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the approach I've seen at https://draculatheme.com when you go to the purchase page of their PRO offering. > Hey! You're coming from Some country where this could be too expensive. > I believe in Purchasing Parity Power, and I want to make this affordable. > If you need it, use the code SOMECODE for an extra XX% off the regular price. I'm fine with paying, but it should respect purchasing power in each…

Not sure I found what you mentioned on the page you linked to

Perhaps you are viewing it from a country, that has purchasing power this pricing was designed to. I'm viewing it from Czech Republic and see the message there.

There was a small discussion on HN previously about Dracula theme and this exact aspect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29495524

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#109

Post by kuhewa »

deanc wrote: post #104
kuhewa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been getting worse for the past few years, probably in the demands for making a standard product to suit the average person. But now the first page is full of results that exclude one of the search terms. And my strategy for years to find obscure results- of finding the oddest set of relevant terms to describe what I want to find to weed out commonplace results that share a couple terms — has stopped worki…

The quality of cadbury chocolate has been getting worse over the years since Kraft bought them out. I still buy it because it looks like the same product, kinda tastes like it, and ultimately will give me what I want. I don't disagree the quality of Google's results has gone down - but you are talking about changing user behaviour here and for the majority (not you and I) google still does what it needs.

It may even be improving for most people's needs. But I think it does present a scenario where a niche search engine with a different business model could be successful (and they probably wouldn't need 10k engineers to reach parity with Google's, at least in that niche). Maybe there isn't enough of mes though.

I haven't changed search engines, and Bing won hands down when I did the Bing/Google challenge they promoted in 2012. But it is getting 'bad enough' and I need search results for projects enough where I'd try the beta if invited and would probably stick with it if it's a good experience.

Hell, if they gave me a few more Scopus-like tools for more precise queries on a version of Google scholar, I'd be sold.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#110

Post by mda »

tmsbrg wrote: post #79

It seems the trend lately for new services to be built with rather high monthly fees. From the FAQ: "We plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, unlimited plan at around $20/mo as well as make bundles (to include Kagi email and other services), family plans and annual payment discounts available." I have to say I support a lot of these initiatives, but I can't help but think altogether they're creatin…

Yeah, I am not sure if this will work, you can always install an adblocker and use Google or some bing based stuff instead, what is the value proposition exactly? I don't think their search results are any better honestly.
Post reply on HN