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Kagi raises $670k

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Kagi raises $670k

#251

Post by karaterobot »

joshstrange wrote: post #237

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've been using it since the beta, and am still paying for it. I shared your concerns at first, but in practice I've never run into the limit. In fact, checking my history, I've never actually gotten close to the limit. I pay $10/mo for 1500 searches, and most months I do less than 500 searches.

I don't think the search quality is anything special. I have never figured out how to use Lenses, and I don't even care to try them again. I like it for privacy, and I like that you can give weight to different websites, and even block ones you don't want to see again. I know there are Google plugins for blocking sources as well.

I don't have any tips. I think Kagi is about as good as DuckDuckGo, and the advantage it has is that it costs money. I'm at the point where I don't even trust a nominally privacy-focused search engine like DDG not to drift into the unethical. For some reason—maybe naivety—I think a company that takes money in exchange guaranteeing my privacy is theoretically more reliable, if only because it would be too audacious to outright lie about that.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#252

Post by justusthane »

solardev wrote: post #248
ravenstine wrote: post #245

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…

What is a Kagi lens? Is it different from Google Scholar?

It's basically a way to restrict search results to particular websites. So you could create a "programming" lens including Stack Overflow and Github, for example, and a search using that lens would only return results from those sites.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#253

Post by solardev »

frankthedog wrote: post #243
Mashimo wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is MM?

Finance language for million. Mil Mil aka thousand thousand. Mil is Latin for thousand hence why CPM is cost per thousand, not cost per million impressions.

Heh, too bad finance doesn't use SI units. Instead of billionaires we'd have gigadollarbros.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#254

Post by marginalia_nu »

DeathArrow wrote: post #220
neurostimulant wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>so maybe it'll cost lower to build a search engine index compared to an internet preservation project? 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.

A hash table is not a good backing structure for a search engine.

Hash tables almost guarantee worst case disk read patterns. You use something like a skip list or a b-tree, since that's makes much better use of the hardware, and on top of that allows you to do incredibly fast joins.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#255

Post by solardev »

justusthane wrote: post #252
solardev wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a Kagi lens? Is it different from Google Scholar?

It's basically a way to restrict search results to particular websites. So you could create a "programming" lens including Stack Overflow and Github, for example, and a search using that lens would only return results from those sites.

So how would that apply to academic searches? Do you manually create a lens for the journals and arxiv etc.?

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#256

Post by slipperlobster »

coopykins wrote: post #23

I'm a happy customer, so good for them. One thing I started to use a lot since they removed the usage limit is their summarizer. I made a little bookmarklet to quickly see a summary of the current page I'm browsing: https://gist.github.com/Julioevm/68275ea1324046caedfdfb2ba0e...

What's the best way to use this bookmarklet in Firefox?

Nevermind, I'm dumb. Just create a new bookmark and post the raw contents of the file into the URL field.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#257

Post by carlosjobim »

imiric wrote: post #153
TeMPOraL wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting that the "niche technical audience" has something marketers and influencers and other kinds of pushers don't: competence and credibility . And (not relevant here, but to plenty other products) control or influence over procurement process in SMBs, corporations, universities and government facilities. Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are the personal IT support departments of some s…

I think you're overestimating the impact technical users have on the survival of a business. Word of mouth and technical influence inside SMBs and corporations can only do so much, especially for a business that doesn't have a corporate sales strategy. > Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are the personal IT support departments of some subset of our family, friends, and their friends. How has that inf…

> How has that influence worked out for you so far? By that logic, all our family and friend circles would be running Linux, using OSS, and be more mindful of their privacy.

Asking normal people to use Linux and OSS is a bit too much, but I think that Macbook sales have had at least a bit of help by being endorsed by the technical crowd.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#258

Post by carlosjobim »

detourdog wrote: post #140
sph wrote: post #62

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.

Kagi is not convenient in the sense of browser search engine awareness. They do plug-in type thing. Needs work from the browsers for better integration.

They've made their own browser for MacOS and iOS, so at least they've threaded that path.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#259

Post by marginalia_nu »

DeathArrow wrote: post #206
marginalia_nu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well Cuil has already been mentioned, there's A9.com and Quaero; on the open source side there's mozDex, notably Jimbo Wales failed twice with Wikia Search and then Knowledge Engine.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#260

Post by RGBCube »

redbell wrote: post #199
function_seven wrote: post #41

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.

> At first I read it as $670 million Same here! I think this is because our eyes-brain system is optimizing the read operation by scanning the words and maps them against a list of words we already familiar with, thus, sometimes it got the wrong meaning. This trick was used by some brands to mislead people to buy some products with a familiar brand name.. like “Adibas” and “Reedok”. > makes me hopeful that Kagi will…

> “Reedok”

Huh?

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