Kagi search reached 20k paying members • Hacker News Board

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#211

Post by munksbeer » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 2:16 PM UTC

calvinmorrison wrote: post #96

anon-3988 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't call myself a power user of Kagi, but even then I'm getting far better results than other search engines, definitely worth the price per month. This only works as long as Kagi is a niche. The moment any search engine becomes commonplace I think they will inevitably succumb to SEO. Otherwise, they would have to change their methodologies every once in a while to completely flip the ecosystem.

SEO should be called "GEO", it's google optimization. Spam keyword blogsites only work because google prioritizes that stuff. They're driven by ad revenue so they're incentivized to show commerical sites over non commercial ones, etc. ,etc, etc.,etc.

Except that the problem isn't specific to google search. The others are much the same.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#212

Post by subtlemuffins » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 2:23 PM UTC

goplayoutside wrote: post #189

This post has 179 comments and 305 points seven hours after it was posted, why is it on page six?

I guess it has been manually downvoted?

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#213

Post by blitz_skull » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

dmd wrote: post #14

blitz_skull wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh… what? Did I miss something important? That sounds like a profoundly terrible move.

Perhaps you missed clicking on the link?

Perhaps I did click on the link and still find this to be a profoundly terrible business move?

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#214

Post by mminer237 » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

Departed7405 wrote: post #168

ijhuygft776 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a Firefox addon that does that too [0]... and another one made specifically for old.reddit [1] 0. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

Add-ons are terrible because they fingerprint you.Javascript allows for sharing of addons names. Having this niche add-on coupled with your device and browser type, IP, timezone this gives unique fingerprint. This comes from someone who used to have 50+ Firefox add-ons.

"Plugins" like "This browser can natively view PDFs." are detectable via JavaScript. There's no way for a site to see Firefox add-ons.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#215

Post by mminer237 » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 2:31 PM UTC

evanjrowley wrote: post #15

Why is their logo the letter g instead of k? Have they considered the risk of a trademark violation lawsuit from their competitor, Google? As one of the 20K paying members, I feel embarrassed that I hadn't noticed this until now. Because this article presented the idea of wearing a Kagi T-Shirt, I suddenly started to care about what the logo looked like. Also, yes, I am excited to rep Kagi search.

You can't trademark a letter.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#216

Post by jsnell » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 2:39 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #207

jsnell wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expensive parts of the infrastructure are not their own, and the expense will scale by number of requests. Back of the envelope: The Bing API costs about $0.015 per query at the most cost effective tier. Kagi's highest revenue per query pricing is $5/300 queries = $0.166 / query. That's pretty slim margins, and only made worse by the $10 tier. Now, they can of course start doing exclusively their own crawling, in…

Kagi has a bunch of different sources, it doesn't seem like all results come from the same source, so without any particular insight into how each query works behind the scenes, I'd gather it be very hard for any of us to come up with an average cost per query like you tried to do. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Sure, that's why I explicitly stated it was a back of the envelope calculation. It wont be right to the penny, but it will certainly have the right order of magnitude.

I'll assert that even a back of the envelope calculation is more useful than your initial "they must be sustainable unless the infra is inefficient, and it feels like it isn't" statement. Do you have an actual number rather than feelings? Is that number significantly lower than this estimate?

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#217

Post by disqard » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 2:43 PM UTC

shepherdjerred wrote: post #48

I love this, but I really hope that spending so much on shirts doesn't come back to bite them. But, to their credit, this is something that a truly special company would do.

Seconded!

In this age of ongoing enshittification, seeing a company do something special for the customers who are cheering for its success, is actually heartwarming.

IMO, this will boost/cement customer loyalty.

Also, I often want to contribute (financially) to such projects, because I want them to succeed.

However, don't happen to have 3k USD to spare (kagi did a fundraiser via SAFE notes) -- I imagine that, now they've figured out the t-shirt logistics, they could offer other designs in future, as a way to contribute money (like buying merch at a band's concert). I'd buy a couple more doggo tees, if/when they made more designs.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#218

Post by ouraf » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 2:47 PM UTC

I hope Kagi is sustainable and sucessful in the long term. The ability of make "deliberate" and personal ranking changes to search results is less profitable than selling ads, but has a value beyond financial gain that can't be understated

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#219

Post by SlimyHog » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 3:02 PM UTC

thegeekpirate wrote: post #141

anon-3988 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, I really wish I can tell Google to simply filter out learncpp.com and some other websites.

You can with browser extensions, fwiw.

Since the browser extension only works on the FE, this just means you are hiding the site and receiving fewer results on a page.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#220

Post by OJFord » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 3:10 PM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #210

OJFord wrote: post #195

Trying out ChatGPT Plus for the last couple of months has done a lot to warm me up to the idea of paying for Kagi - I've been using it to cover a lot of queries I'd struggle with for longer in a search engine previously - so I'm glad to see they're considering ways of integrating LLMs, I don't think I want to add two $20-25pcm subscriptions for it, though I'll likely continue one. (I use, and have used for at least 1…

Unless you are a _really_ heavy user of ChatGPT, the best way to use it is via the API with a separate application like MindMac or something similar. That way you pay exactly what you use, nothing more.

True, I did think a good solution (depending on usage) could be if Kagi let you BYO API key. Of course then the model choice (as it supports multiple) would have to be limited to what (is a third-party API and) you provide a key for. But then it's less of an up-sell and probably lower margin for them even if it did cost more than the lower tier unlimited search plan.