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Kagi and Wolfram

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#211

Post by primitivesuave »

swyx wrote: post #88

TIL that Wolfram Research has 1000 employees. what do they... do? what is Wolfram's revenue? i'm completely out of the loop. This is the size of Automattic - which makes Wordpress. is Wolfram on that scale? idk.

The headquarters are in Champaign, IL which is a small town with a much lower cost of living than Silicon Valley - so salaries are 20-40% lower than Automattic or other comparable mid-sized firm. The main revenue driver is Mathematica (now called the Wolfram Language) which has several lucrative and long-standing academic licensing deals in place. I don't think the other endeavors (Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram cloud, book publishing) have been nearly as profitable.

(I worked at Wolfram Research around a decade ago, when it was ~500 employees)

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#212

Post by freediver »

karaterobot wrote: post #193

Kagi has tried a few different AI solutions, and now this integration with a different search engine. I think what I want is just a redoubled focus on improving search results (not quick answers) while maintaining or improving confidentiality. If they announce that my monthly payments are going up, and I suspect it's because they're paying for partnerships with services I don't view as core to the product value that…

Neither, we are passing all the savings (we get better search API deals as we grow, AI is getting cheaper...) into making the product better, at no additional cost for the user, to ensure we are still around next year.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#213

Post by freediver »

sdo72 wrote: post #33

Why am I starting to see a lot of promotional statements within HN? Are there any bot or some army of manual labor around?

Kagi founder here. Also a long time HN user and as such I too share your concern that we get too much exposure here. I do not know what to say but that I am eternally grateful to HN, as it is what enabled Kagi's existance. We have no marketing budget and majority of our users come from HN, so I can confirm that the comments you see here are authentic.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#214

Post by lstamour »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #206
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you guys are living in a dreamworld. I'm totally fine with a site that has "tracking" like Google analytics to help content makers and businesses alike make decisions. And have visited many a site with valuable content that might have been tracking me at the same time. This eliminates tons of valuable content.

> eliminates tons of valuable content They aren’t eliminating it, just downranking it. Given Kagi’s search quality, ad and tracking density seems to negatively correlate with site quality.

And the type of tracking they’re referring to is more like selling-your-data-to-third-parties tracking, not Google or New Relic or something. Maybe sales funnel tracking and interstitial popovers. Your average Adblock doesn’t distinguish between tracking methods and goals but trying to block all pages that load Google Analytics would probably lead to an incredibly small pool of websites, which would worsen the results.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#215

Post by freediver »

jamessb wrote: post #102
dotnet00 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was actually an outage due to this (their first major outage!) a few weeks ago. Someone was scraping via their API a little too hard, which had unexpected effects on upstream systems. So 100x human search volume is likely to be an issue unless you discuss it with the devs first.

The page with the post-mortem for that outage now gives a 404 error, but was archived by the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20240121000935/https://status.ka... (It was discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019119 )

We switched to a differnt monitoring system and the URL changed to https://status.kagi.com/clrnl9zwl97290beoine8zlvzx

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#216

Post by metabagel »

mminer237 wrote: post #25
ec109685 wrote: post #18

How do new search engines like Perplexity and Kagi avoid getting rate limited or hitting captchas as they build and maintain their indexes? Sites have to make exceptions for Google, but likely wouldn’t care enough to allow other search engines in.

I believe Kagi just pays to use Google's and Microsoft's indexes.

I don’t think that’s correct.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#217

Post by [deleted] »

karaterobot wrote: post #193

Kagi has tried a few different AI solutions, and now this integration with a different search engine. I think what I want is just a redoubled focus on improving search results (not quick answers) while maintaining or improving confidentiality. If they announce that my monthly payments are going up, and I suspect it's because they're paying for partnerships with services I don't view as core to the product value that…

[deleted]

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#218

Post by metabagel »

karaterobot wrote: post #193

Kagi has tried a few different AI solutions, and now this integration with a different search engine. I think what I want is just a redoubled focus on improving search results (not quick answers) while maintaining or improving confidentiality. If they announce that my monthly payments are going up, and I suspect it's because they're paying for partnerships with services I don't view as core to the product value that…

I think that in 5 years nobody will want to use a search engine which doesn’t have AI capabilities. The stuff which turns you off may be critical to Kagi’s survival.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#219

Post by alright2565 »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #204
dewbrite wrote: post #28

> To ensure result quality, we automatically downrank pages with advertising and tracking, which are often associated with low-quality or machine-generated content. That is one of the most compelling things I've ever heard about a search engine. How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?

you guys are living in a dreamworld. I'm totally fine with a site that has "tracking" like Google analytics to help content makers and businesses alike make decisions. And have visited many a site with valuable content that might have been tracking me at the same time. This eliminates tons of valuable content.

Honestly, I don't care to visit those businesses. Their sort of maximize-engagement attitude is the exact opposite of what I want.

I'd much rather get information from an individual or small group who is intrinsically motivated and is not just looking for the lowest bar of quality that won't make folks immediately bounce.

I also want to note that just putting Google Analytics on there doesn't kill the site's ranking. There are some sites that are just infested, and those are what get dramatically downranked.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#220

Post by samatman »

ziddoap wrote: post #97
rqtwteye wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to know! This will help in figuring out when reading the news and they describe everything in tennis courts , school buses and football fields. How do you convert from tennis court to school bus?

You forgot Olympic swimming pool as both a length unit and a volume unit.

I once worked out that an Olympic swimming pool would hold about 500,000 human being's worth of blood. The topic was Communism.
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