I am initial user of Kagi. It was great until they started the pricing. I quit as I dont see simply search service is worth their pricing. I have DuckDuckGo alternative which is free. Then you.com come along which I now pay monthly. Kagi need to offer more if they want that kind of pricing. Or offer a low end versions that cost like Bitwarden.
Kagi raises $670k
201–210 of 367 posts
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
We have Adult Search option available for API customers. This will be rolled out on mojeek.com very soon.
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What do you reckon the cost of doing this would be? That is indeed the key question. I tried to find out before commenting but the information I found is very vague. Internet Archive spends millions per year, but their index is updated far too slowly for a search engine. I have no idea what it costs to create a Google-size index. Do you think the Mojeek index is good enough to compete with Google?
Internet archive snapshot the whole page while google only index the first few kb of text data on every page (forgot the number, was it 100kb max per page?), so maybe it'll cost lower to build a search engine index compared to an internet preservation project? Assuming they'll need to index 820 billion pages (the number of pages preserved in the internet archive), at 100kb each, and assuming they use a database with…
This seems like a good use case for some sort of spam filtering. Maybe the web is that big, but what percentage of it is data someone will ever care about? I wonder if you could make a good-enough search with agressive filtering of pages before they enter the index.
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's Kagi doing differently to be able to succeed? Define success? It outperforms every other search engine in terms of quality of results and at least from what I understand, they're not too far off from breaking even on their salaries. Neeva was a VC funded abomination and it showed, they even had deals with "big brand" companies like LastPass to offer bundles, but their core product sucked. Neeva search result…
> Define success? Its not hard to define success. It means having more revenue than their cost, and paying all employees market rate salary(including the founder himself).
If that's your view of success then many of the web's biggest services aren't successful
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#205So happy to see this at the top of Hacker News. Rounds < $1 million need to be celebrated more. Rooting for Kagi.
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#206"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…
> History is littered with bold and ambitious Google killers that went nowhere.
What are some examples of those?
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#207Flywheel Effect.
Don't free search engines have a competitive edge because for every search performed, the clicked result better informs future search results.
As such, the more users searching - the more it improves the search engine results quality.
And since Kagi is a paid offering, they will inevitably have less searches performed - leading to lower quality search results?
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#208I am glad there's alternatives to Google and Bing. I think the (open) web is troubled from a content, quality and funding perspective. The old web was the volunteer web. People produced useful content and it was interesting (Digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon and delicious) I like reading personal tech blogs from the volunteer web. I get a lot of value from them. I don't want the web to get worse so I subscribe to Wikipedia…
> I am glad there's alternatives to Google and Bing.
Kagi is just Bing under the hood with an OpenAI summarizer and a lot of tuning. It is fully reliant on the quality of search results it can fetch from Bing's databases.
I know there exists Qwant (a french company) which claim to have an independent engine, but they keep turning their Bing backend on for a lot of searches. Only truly independent engine from Google/Bing with relevant results that i know of is Brave Search. Not a great company, but they do know how to make a good search engine, and are practically alone in the space fighting against the Bing-based alternative search engine business model.
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#209"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…
Thanks Colin!
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#210I am initial user of Kagi. It was great until they started the pricing. I quit as I dont see simply search service is worth their pricing. I have DuckDuckGo alternative which is free. Then you.com come along which I now pay monthly. Kagi need to offer more if they want that kind of pricing. Or offer a low end versions that cost like Bitwarden.
I thought the same thing. Then I went back to Google and was _incredibly_ surprised how bad the results were. I tried out Bing, Brave Search, and Duck Duck Go. Nothing is better than Kagi, so here I am paying $25/mo for search.