Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta • Hacker News Board

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#101

Post by freediver » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 3:57 AM UTC

ashton314 wrote: post #86

freediver wrote: post #4

Founder here, it was quite a journey very excited to be launching beta today with payments. The idea of paying for web search was unimaginable three years ago when we started this. AMA!

What makes processing searches so expensive? I see elsewhere in this forum that it’s $1/80 searches. I’m just curious what part of your infra is costing you so much.

Great question! Mostly paid APIs we use (probably 80%), rest is infrastructure.

But I will counter with this. It costs $0.0125 to run a web search over the entire web, producing meaningful, relevant and rich results, and all that in less than 500ms, any time of day, from anywhere. That is 1.25 cents to do all of the above. And the value you can get from that one search can often be 1,000,000x more.

That has to be one of the best deals in the universe.

(and mind you, with other search engines that cost is still there, it is only paid by their customers - the advertisers)

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#102

Post by nsonha » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 3:57 AM UTC

Finally uBlock origin on iOS, not just that, chromium AND firefox extensions? The only other browser that does this is Waterfox on desktop, none on Android.

I havent actually tested uBlock because whatever the built-in is, it works well enough that I didnt get ads on youtube. Other extensions I tried (eg workona) didn't work but that's a good start. This was on an iPad.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#103

Post by freediver » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:05 AM UTC

thewebcount wrote: post #63

freediver wrote: post #4

Founder here, it was quite a journey very excited to be launching beta today with payments. The idea of paying for web search was unimaginable three years ago when we started this. AMA!

Thanks for making this Vlad! I’ve been testing it out for the last few months and it’s really coming along. As a developer who used the old Kagi.com before you bought it, I’m curious about what inspired you to pick that particular domain? Did you know Kee?

You are welcome and glad you like it!

No, I did not know Kee or anyone from old Kagi.com team. They went bankrupt in unfortunate turn of events. The opportunity presented itself and I acquired the domain. I liked it because Kagi means 'key' in Japanese and at the time this idea of a 'key to the web', and replacing big-tech infrastructure for consuming the web with something "decent" was forming in my head.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#104

Post by lumost » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:06 AM UTC

nojito wrote: post #94

lumost wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can change the model later, add caching, improve performance, and use better hardware. Just getting a native search engine off the ground is impressive. They may be running a flask app reading data direct from s3 feeding through a giant ML model right now - which wouldn't be the application architecture they'd use if they served 100x the traffic.

They can but a paid search engine is doomed to fail.

5 years ago I would agree, however we now have.

- Technology which can extract frightening amounts of information from search history, location data, and other data sources. It's not 2012 anymore when a google or FB ui just showing the places you had been was enough to get me to give over that kind of data.

- Ad based search engines literally filling the search page with ads.

- SEO spam so severe that the non-ads are generally terrible pages anyway.

Given all of this, and a young daughter who will be browsing the internet in another year or two - I'd be willing to pay for a search engine.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#105

Post by freediver » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:08 AM UTC

thematrixturtle wrote: post #68

freediver wrote: post #4

Founder here, it was quite a journey very excited to be launching beta today with payments. The idea of paying for web search was unimaginable three years ago when we started this. AMA!

Any plans to revisit the pricing? I've in the Kagi beta for months and it's way better than DDG, but it's hard to justify US$120/year when Google is free.

Unfortunately the price is a function of the search cost, not our wishes. Even at $10/mo it is still unclear whether we can make it to sustainability (this is why we launched payments while still in beta, to find out).

Search cost is non-zero. It was hidden from users for 20 years, and it may come as shock, but it is real.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#106

Post by theK » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:12 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #78

> But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. > At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal Oh. I'd say that if I switched to Kagi as to the main search engine, I would increase the number of searches I make. And I definitely do many dozens a day. Their…

I would think that this cost metric will change to their benefit with scale. Lots of constant factors go into these calculations that are significant when you are small-ish but become insignificant when you scale enough

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#107

Post by lumost » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:13 AM UTC

freediver wrote: post #101

ashton314 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes processing searches so expensive? I see elsewhere in this forum that it’s $1/80 searches. I’m just curious what part of your infra is costing you so much.

Great question! Mostly paid APIs we use (probably 80%), rest is infrastructure. But I will counter with this. It costs $0.0125 to run a web search over the entire web, producing meaningful, relevant and rich results, and all that in less than 500ms, any time of day, from anywhere. That is 1.25 cents to do all of the above. And the value you can get from that one search can often be 1,000,000x more. That has to be one…

I suspect that your estimate of google search infrastructure costs may be high by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Have you considered what the cost would be if the external APIs were in-housed? As an early-stage startup, you likewise are paying extra for compute, and expedient but often inefficient systems.

Is there a path to a <$5/mo unlimited plan? IIRC Google made less than $10 per year per user up until the mid 2010s.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#108

Post by talim » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:14 AM UTC

Happy to see they changed their pricing model. Previously it was something like $6/mo for 80 searches or something like that, which made it a non-starter for me. Honestly, I'd likely be willing to pay more than $10/mo for unlimited use assuming I'm satisfied with the quality of its results, but a pay-per-use model would trigger a "I'm paying for this search" thought every time I go to run a search and that small amount of friction would kind of ruin the product for me even if I ended up paying a bit less that way.

Looking forward to trying it out with this new pricing model.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#109

Post by dflock » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:14 AM UTC

lumost wrote: post #93

Initial searches look promising, but the proposed costs are vastly too high. In my google history I can easily hit 100 searches per day . If I'm researching something this can hit 1k+ per day . I'd gladly pay 5/month for search, and 10/month in a stretch. But 300 per month is a non-starter.

Where are you getting $300 a month from? Afaik, it's 50 free searches per month, then $10 per month for unlimited?

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#110

Post by Winsaucerer » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:14 AM UTC

freediver wrote: post #101

ashton314 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes processing searches so expensive? I see elsewhere in this forum that it’s $1/80 searches. I’m just curious what part of your infra is costing you so much.

Great question! Mostly paid APIs we use (probably 80%), rest is infrastructure. But I will counter with this. It costs $0.0125 to run a web search over the entire web, producing meaningful, relevant and rich results, and all that in less than 500ms, any time of day, from anywhere. That is 1.25 cents to do all of the above. And the value you can get from that one search can often be 1,000,000x more. That has to be one…

Assuming you experience good growth in your business, is there room for you to reduce your dependency on external API's, while maintaining the good quality search results you seem to be generating?

And to add to what others have been saying, I've been finding your results to be quite high quality, absolutely better than DDG and probably better than Google for me too. I subscribed immediately. The only thing I'm missing is I'm still getting slow result times from Australia. Just now, for a test search:

Connected to: ASIA-SOUTHEAST Network latency: 501ms