131–140 of 367 posts
"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 believe that it stopped a lot of folks from being able to invest in Kagi, since this issue was brought up in FAQ sent out by Vlad in May.
> Q: Can I still invest if I am not an accredited investor?
> A: Not through this round. If we organize a different vehicle in the future (e.g., crowdfunding), we will let you know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do have a Safari extension on iOS, which directs searches to kagi.com
I love kagi but I hate this. It's not their fault, it's just a limitation of the os but it's such a hassle when you have to solve a Google captcha to get kagi results. I'm considering just removing that from my phone and switching back to Google there.
I had to read the headline twice. At first I read it as $670 million, and I was very sad. That’s “VCs gonna enshittify it in 3 years” money. But then I saw the “K” and grinned. This is proper bootstrap money, and makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission. Congrats. I am really pulling for you, Vlad.
Kagi is such a funny company. I remember as an early internet payment provider. I subscribe to kagi search.
"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 think a small operation is exactly the sort of outfit to do it. Makes you focus on what is important. The absolute worst way you can arrange a search engine project is as some sort of manhattan project with a humongous budget and an army of professors and experts. History is littered with bold and ambitious Google killers that went nowhere. You can throw almost any amount of money at an operation, and it will gobbl…
A small operation in terms of number of developers yes. But not being able to subsidise user growth means they will never be able to build their own full web index as the fixed cost of doing that is too high for a small number of users.
As a consequence, they will always be at the mercy of Google/Bing. The range of things they can innovate on will always be limited. And the situation can only get worse as people start to expect more AI functionality.
I doubt that you can build a sustainable niche product if the effort you have to put into it is just as big as if you're building for billions of users. Having few users is not what defines a niche. Niches are defined by specialisation.
"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'm happily paying $10/mo for Kagi, I find it genuinely better* than Google already. And yes, it's genuinely amazing that it's a pipsqueak startup that's pulling this off. * For core search, that is, obviously there's vast slabs of services like maps, translate, etc etc where they're not even trying to compete.
This changed with ads. Suddenly search engines were used to find people searching.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a small operation is exactly the sort of outfit to do it. Makes you focus on what is important. The absolute worst way you can arrange a search engine project is as some sort of manhattan project with a humongous budget and an army of professors and experts. History is littered with bold and ambitious Google killers that went nowhere. You can throw almost any amount of money at an operation, and it will gobbl…
Also search is now kinda in the strategic inflection point where Google has to change so it will create opportunities for smaller players.
If ever there was a moment where horizontal scaling looked promising, this is it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a small operation is exactly the sort of outfit to do it. Makes you focus on what is important. The absolute worst way you can arrange a search engine project is as some sort of manhattan project with a humongous budget and an army of professors and experts. History is littered with bold and ambitious Google killers that went nowhere. You can throw almost any amount of money at an operation, and it will gobbl…
>I think a small operation is exactly the sort of outfit to do it. A small operation in terms of number of developers yes. But not being able to subsidise user growth means they will never be able to build their own full web index as the fixed cost of doing that is too high for a small number of users. As a consequence, they will always be at the mercy of Google/Bing. The range of things they can innovate on will alw…
What do you reckon the cost of doing this would be?
Just doing the napkin math for say a Mojeek sized index (couple of billion docs) doesn't seem to justify a particularly astronomical budget.
Neeva - cofounded by an ex-Google exec also provided a paid search experience with similar features. They have since shut down and in their blog post pointed out that the issue they faced was not convincing people that they should pay for search but rather the fact that distribution of their service is difficult (i.e. being browser defaults, at work, on people's phones). What's Kagi doing differently to be able to su…
They reach the top of HN front page. Because I've never heard of Neeva before, but I'm a Kagi paying user.