241–250 of 367 posts
Looks like they significantly missed their goal. From Kagi's investment round invitation email: - SAFE note round with a valuation cap of $40MM (pre-money) - 249 investors maximum - We are looking to raise around $2MM from our users in this way ($5MM max) - Minimum investment amount per investor is $5,000, and maximum is $500,000. So the $670k they now raised are only about a third of what they were aiming for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Looks like they significantly missed their goal. From Kagi's investment round invitation email: - SAFE note round with a valuation cap of $40MM (pre-money) - 249 investors maximum - We are looking to raise around $2MM from our users in this way ($5MM max) - Minimum investment amount per investor is $5,000, and maximum is $500,000. So the $670k they now raised are only about a third of what they were aiming for.
What is MM?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They reach the top of HN front page. Because I've never heard of Neeva before, but I'm a Kagi paying user.
That's hardly a relevant criteria. HN consists of a niche audience of technical users already interested in startups and search technology. The real criteria is whether Kagi will be able to scale beyond a niche market, and establish a sustainable mainstream business. OP's question is valid, but it can't be answered by outsider speculation. Hopefully someone from Kagi is able to address it. This investment is a good s…
Why? Even if they never get close to being as popular as Google, they can still have millions of paying users.
Search is really important to me, and it isn't just about looking up businesses or Wikipedia pages. I read lots of academic papers and just want it to be easy to separate the wheat from the chaffe. Kagi makes that really easy with its lenses. Sure, Brave search has something similar, but I like Kagi's interface better and having to pay them gives me the sense their service won't just be deprecated or significantly changed at the whim of a CEO trying to satisfy advertisers or whatever. Having insight into how many ads and trackers on a page is nice too, as well as being able to demote and block certain domains. It's nice that I can block a domain and it's also blocked on my phone.
What's especially important to me is the ability to wrap my queries in quotes for literal string matches. Granted, no search engine is perfect at this anymore because the web has become so huge, but Kagi seems to be the only search engine I use that gets string matches right more of the time and doesn't give me fake results when there are no actual matches. That's what pisses me off about The Google. And though I once used DDG, I found that the quality of search started getting worse and now it seems like quotes barely even work with that search engine now.
I hope Kagi succeeds. It doesn't need to compete with The Google. Just be good enough for those willing to pay for it.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>... 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 oth…
I know a lot of people here thought Kagi wasn't worth it, but I'm an early adopter who has been a happy customer for some time now. Search is really important to me, and it isn't just about looking up businesses or Wikipedia pages. I read lots of academic papers and just want it to be easy to separate the wheat from the chaffe. Kagi makes that really easy with its lenses. Sure, Brave search has something similar, but…
Can someone help me a little? I tried Kagi and when my 100 searches ran out I stopped using it. I really didn't like the feeling that I needed to meter my searches, it added a barrier to every search I did (should I use Kagi for this or should I just use Google?). It sounds stupid but literally every search I did I had a pang of worry that I was "wasting" a search. I also didn't experience a huge increase in search q…
Regarding search quality, I don't think it's a revolutionary improvement over Google, but for me it's been noticeable during the time I used it, where as Neeva and Brave have been very noticeable downgrades. I think Kagi shines once you lean into the tools they provide and start upranking and downranking different domains.
Keep in mind it's been a couple of months since I last used it and they've added the search result summarizer and some other AI tools since then that might help tip the balance their way.
Can someone help me a little? I tried Kagi and when my 100 searches ran out I stopped using it. I really didn't like the feeling that I needed to meter my searches, it added a barrier to every search I did (should I use Kagi for this or should I just use Google?). It sounds stupid but literally every search I did I had a pang of worry that I was "wasting" a search. I also didn't experience a huge increase in search q…
I felt the same way about query metering and ended up cancelling my Kagi subscription once they raised their prices. I still occasionally check their Discord server for updates and it sounds like they're trying to bring the cost of unlimited search back down to around $15. Regarding search quality, I don't think it's a revolutionary improvement over Google, but for me it's been noticeable during the time I used it, w…
The ranking and lenses seemed very cool to me but I burned through my free tier before I could really use them. Maybe I'll try again at the $10/mo price.