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

Kagi raises $670k

blog.kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 367 posts

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#191

Post by marginalia_nu »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #181
marginalia_nu wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, download and run the javascript, but then you can snapshot the DOM, grab the text, and discard all the rest. The HTML and js is of little practical value for the index after that point. Google's index is likely very large because they don't have any real economic incentives to keeping it small.

>... but then you can snapshot the DOM, grab the text, and discard all the rest Yes, absolutely, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But first you have to figure out what you can discard beyond the HTML tags themselves to avoid indexing all the garbage that is on each and every page. When I tried to do this I came to the conclusion that I needed to actually render the page to find out where on the page a particular pie…

You don't need to store it indefinitely though, and there's not much point in crawling faster than you can process the data.

The couple of kilobytes per document is the actual storage footprint. Sure you need to massage the data, but that almost entirely CPU bound. You also need a lot of RAM for keeping the hot parts of the index.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#192

Post by akiselev »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #181
marginalia_nu wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, download and run the javascript, but then you can snapshot the DOM, grab the text, and discard all the rest. The HTML and js is of little practical value for the index after that point. Google's index is likely very large because they don't have any real economic incentives to keeping it small.

>... but then you can snapshot the DOM, grab the text, and discard all the rest Yes, absolutely, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But first you have to figure out what you can discard beyond the HTML tags themselves to avoid indexing all the garbage that is on each and every page. When I tried to do this I came to the conclusion that I needed to actually render the page to find out where on the page a particular pie…

> When I tried to do this I came to the conclusion that I needed to actually render the page to find out where on the page a particular piece of text was, what font size it had, if it was even visible, etc. And then there's JavaScript of course.

Are there open source projects devoted to this functionality? It’s becoming more and more a sticking point for working with LLMs. Grabbing the text without navigation and other crap but while maintaining formatting and links, etc

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#193

Post by hgsgm »

andsoitis wrote: post #182
marginalia_nu wrote: post #85

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. Makes you focus on what is important. They're focusing on 2 things: a search engine AND a Mac-only web browser.

A nearly impossible project and a nearly pointless project make a perfect pairing.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#194

Post by hgsgm »

ColinHayhurst wrote: post #32
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…

Congratulations Kagi. We beg to differ on the need to raise large sums. Like Kagi we are on a marathon not a sprint. We have built a no-tracking and completely independent crawler search engine and infrastructure from the ground-up having raised £3m from angels only. Cuil, Blekko, Quaero and Neeva who raised 10s/100s of $m may have come and gone; meanwhile we have been slowly building since 2004, with a user and API…

Do you have an option to filter out or downrank porn when I search for a slightly obscure initialism?

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#195

Post by sofixa »

andsoitis wrote: post #182
marginalia_nu wrote: post #85

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. Makes you focus on what is important. They're focusing on 2 things: a search engine AND a Mac-only web browser.

> Mac-only web browser

Such a waste. MacOS users might be open to paying (for Kagi in general) because they're used to paying for a bunch of things other OSes get included or as freeware, but still, the market share is small (depending on the source, 10-30%). And even if many of those would enjoy a Mac-native app, there are at least some, like myself, that refuse to use single platform tools. I have a bunch of devices on a bunch of different OSes, I'm not going to use a very special browser on one of them, losing sync, history, muscle memory when switching. That's the reason I can't stay on Arc even if I quite like some of it's goals and structure.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#196

Post by rendaw »

pixeladed wrote: post #53

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…

Maybe it's because they were funded too much and then had unrealistic growth goals, and were then pressured into selling?

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#197

Post by xcavier »

function_seven wrote: post #41

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.

I read that headline as precisely the opposite: oh, bugger, they are not doing well and that money won’t help

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#198

Post by codegeek »

weego wrote: post #89
function_seven wrote: post #41

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.

$670k investment is not "bootstrap money". It's literally the opposite of bootstrapping. What is the value in this attempted narrative? Is it the entrepreneur equivalent of "I don't work with big data, only 500 billion row sets but..."

I agree with you. The amount doesn't matter.

Investment = you are not personally liable and no need to return the money if u fail. It's not ur money.

Bootstrap = you are responsible to pay it back.iys ur money once u get it.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#199

Post by redbell »

function_seven wrote: post #41

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.

> At first I read it as $670 million

Same here!

I think this is because our eyes-brain system is optimizing the read operation by scanning the words and maps them against a list of words we already familiar with, thus, sometimes it got the wrong meaning. This trick was used by some brands to mislead people to buy some products with a familiar brand name.. like “Adibas” and “Reedok”.

> makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission

I really hope so but no one can guarantee this would be the case if the company get bigger with more money being thrown there.

In its first years, Google’s tagline was “don’t be evil“ but they couldn’t deliver the promise.

OpenAI’s original mission evaporated as soon as ChatGPT became a thing.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979981

Post reply on HN