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Kagi raises $670k

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Kagi raises $670k

#271

Post by justusthane »

wallmountedtv wrote: post #208
samsquire wrote: post #11

I am glad there's alternatives to Google and Bing. I think the (open) web is troubled from a content, quality and funding perspective. The old web was the volunteer web. People produced useful content and it was interesting (Digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon and delicious) I like reading personal tech blogs from the volunteer web. I get a lot of value from them. I don't want the web to get worse so I subscribe to Wikipedia…

> I am glad there's alternatives to Google and Bing. Kagi is just Bing under the hood with an OpenAI summarizer and a lot of tuning. It is fully reliant on the quality of search results it can fetch from Bing's databases. I know there exists Qwant (a french company) which claim to have an independent engine, but they keep turning their Bing backend on for a lot of searches. Only truly independent engine from Google/B…

I'm not sure what percentage of the results are Bing (perhaps the majority), but I think it's inaccurate to say that Kagi is just Bing under the hood:

> Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing and vertical sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#272

Post by iamleppert »

I’d pay money if there was a way I could get access to the actual data store of an index of the web, and tools built on top of it (or a language / DSL / API) that made it easy and fast to build complex queries.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#273

Post by justusthane »

solardev wrote: post #255
justusthane wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.?

I assume so.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#274

Post by drunkan »

pixeladed wrote: post #53

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…

They have their own browser, the Orion browser, to funnel people onto their search engine.

Their search engine is also better than google for me for most use cases already, it has a clean and smart design with well thought out features that add value.

I hate that Orion is not cross platform and limited to apple ecosystem.

With that said it is native and my default choice for macOS and iOS.

No telemetry, ad blocker built in, performant and supports extensions from chrome and firefox - on iOS too.

Hands down the best native tree style tabs of any browser on the market on top of that and easy tab syncing.

It’s still in development but it’s stable enough for me to be my main browser.

These two products show some serious technical ability from a small team. I bet on companies who invest in and show technical ability over those with VC money, big names focused on marketing and growth.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#275

Post by fauigerzigerk »

akiselev wrote: post #192
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #181

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…

Good question (meaning I don't know :)

For my specific purposes it has always been good enough to apply some simple heuristics. But that wouldn't have been possible without access to post rendering information, which only a real browser (https://pptr.dev) can reliably produce.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#276

Post by babypuncher »

qassiov wrote: post #69
pixeladed wrote: post #53

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…

I didn't realise Neeva had shut down. I tried it for about a week, but stopped using it because it wasn't as snappy as Google. In fact, I always seem to return to Google from every other search engine I try because of its snappiness — decades of tuning seems to have paid off.

Kagi is the first alternative search engine that I actually use regularly instead of Google.

I used DDG for years, but more than half my queries ended up being prepended with !g because their results just weren't very good. With Kagi, I fall back on Google maybe once a month, and usually Google doesn't end up finding anything better.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#277

Post by mkeedlinger »

I don't think I've seen this sentiment shared by anyone else, so I'll go ahead and share it:

I need a way to pay anonymously. For me, this usually means via Monero. Searches are simply too personal and too habitually unrestrained for me to trust to anyone who can de-anonymize them.

Honestly, in retrospect I'll acknowledge that my intense quest for privacy is more ideological than practical, and it wouldn't likely be a big deal if my searches were leaked or whatnot, but still. I've wanted to pay for Kagi and looked for a way to multiple times, but until I can do so anonymously, it ain't happening.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#278

Post by tiltowait »

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 initially worried about surpassing my quota at first, but I've never come close to it (I'm on the grandfathered $10/1500 plan).

For me, I notice better search results than Google (not night and day, but noticeable). The ability to block/promote/demote certain sites is fantastic, and I like the URL rules you can create. For instance, I've set Reddit links to open in old.reddit.com, and I've set Youtube links to redirect to an Invidious instance.

It's got some other nice things—I like the universal summarizer a lot, and the search result summarizer has come in handy many times. But mostly, I just like using something that isn't Google without feeling like I'm compromising (which I did feel with both DDG and Brave).

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#280

Post by Alifatisk »

alexruf wrote: post #126
Alifatisk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use FF on my apple devices, it's easy to set the default search engine there. I can customize my preferred search engine on the settings app, but Kaigi is not there. The only options for me is: - Google - Yahoo - Bing - Duckduckgo (my current option) - Ecosia

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

Thanks
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