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

Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

blog.kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 209 posts

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#111

Post by nine_k »

freediver wrote: post #96
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…

> Their reported beta-testers usage is 30 / day. At their current expense level, that would be $116.25 / mo. 30 searches/day comes to around $11/mo. We expect the quantity of usage will drop with time because a) we make a better product that helps you find stuff more quickly (so quality of usage goes up) b) lot of users are still searching more then normal because of novelty of product, testing etc. Of course we coul…

Oh. Thank you for correcting me; I made an order of magnitude error!

Under this angle, the operation looks rather promising, because with scale and operation experience the per-search cost is likely to go down.

Good search, OTOH, may make you search more, due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#112

Post by lumost »

dflock wrote: post #109
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?

Their costs are $1/80 searches, and the pricing is subject to change. It's hard to offer a service for $120/yr that costs them $300/month.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#114

Post by mardifoufs »

denkmoon wrote: post #31

What is the point of a new webkit browser?

Aren't most browser chromium based? A part from very niche, barely updated older browsers I can't really think of any.

I may be completely wrong though. In that case, are those other webkit projects able to run on linux/windows? And How hard would it be to port Orion?

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#116

Post by freediver »

lumost wrote: post #107
freediver wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are probably right if we disregard the 20 years of cap-ex investments Google made into having that infrastructure. In order to in-house this we would probably need to own $500M-$1B worth of infrastructure at the very least (web is vast). Yes then the cost per search would be lower.

Maybe it will sound strange, but I do not think of our goal as optimizing for growth and number of users. It is to optimize for sustainability and quality of product. Often these two incentives are opposite of one another. I see us as a small, boutique, premium search brand. I'd rather have us gain more users by improving the quality than by lowering the price.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#117

Post by freediver »

Winsaucerer wrote: post #110
freediver wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 missi…

We'd like to better understand what is going on. Would you be able to post here ? https://kagifeedback.org/d/183-kagi-slow-post-here

Recording a side by side video of DuckDuckGo results and Kagi results with network tab in browser open would be great, if you can.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#118

Post by freediver »

lumost wrote: post #104
nojito wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Thanks for saying this, it is not been discussed enough. The main reason I started Kagi was exactly to protect my own kids from being exposed to ads and tracking from the very young age.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#119

Post by inopinatus »

freediver wrote: post #99
inopinatus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point of feedback for your consideration, I was surprised that Orion+ did not include source code. Binary-only releases seem to me an enemy of both privacy and tinkering, and represent a showstopper for the (admittedly likely quite narrow) segment of possible customers I personify. Open source is mentioned aspirationally in the FAQ; however, I don't personally need a FOSS license, just an individual right to read, mo…

Kagi is still a tiny company ( We are not ready (in terms of not having enough resources) to maintain an open source project, of a size of a web browser. Much bigger companies fail at running open source projects and properly engaging community, and we'd rather not try at all, than do it in a bad way. I hope this changes in the future.

Okay - but just to be clear, I'm not suggesting Orion become an open source project; I am suggesting non-free access to source code as an Orion+ subscription inclusion.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#120

Post by DangitBobby »

ziml77 wrote: post #58

Been using Kagi for a few months now and, unlike when I used DDG, it's rare that I feel the need to fall back to Google. I guess now is where we see if Kagi's model can actually work. Will people pay money for a search engine when all other major players in the space don't transact with users in cash? I definitely hope for their success!

The only time I've felt the need to use Google instead of Kagi was earlier today when they were having service disruptions. Apart from that and some searches that take a little longer, Kagi has been indistinguishable from Google as a default search. I'm very impressed.
Post reply on HN