211–220 of 367 posts
I'm surprised that a search engine that isn't powered by AI is able to raise money. From the direction things seem to be going, LLM tech may very well level that entire industry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. 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 astronomi…
>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?
As for the index; this underpins mojeek.com and our API; which customers use for search and/or AI. Common Crawl is ~3.5 billion pages and underpins LLMs. Our index is ~7 billion. Who knows what (else) Google, and Bing, do with their index ;) ?
[0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-threatens-dive...
Kagi is really, really good. Lenses (where you can setup set filters for particular search use cases) are particularly good. Very happy to see them raising, and very happy to give them my $10 each month. Money well spent.
How do you use lenses? Trying to use more kagi features.
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
Same impression here
Flywheel 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?
Flywheel 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?
As a user, I've found Kagi is much better than free search engines. With DuckDuckGo, I often found myself reverting to Google. With Kagi, almost never.
Earlier 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…
Is that a good way to build an index?
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…
Earlier 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…
An index is just hashmap of words and list of urls. So you have to parse the page, and add the urls and word frequencies to the list.
In terms of storage is cheaper, in terms of computing power is more expensive.