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Kagi raises $670k

blog.kagi.com

31–40 of 367 posts

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#31
>Kagi Search requires an account only because it is a paid service which requires an account for the transaction.

ref: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#why-doe...

Eh... This is a tall order when competition is 'free'. Anyways, I wish them good luck as competition is inherently good.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#32
post #6

"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…

Congratulations Kagi.

We beg to differ on the need to raise large sums. Like Kagi we are on a marathon not a sprint. We have built a no-tracking and completely independent crawler search engine and infrastructure from the ground-up having raised £3m from angels only. Cuil, Blekko, Quaero and Neeva who raised 10s/100s of $m may have come and gone; meanwhile we have been slowly building since 2004, with a user and API customer base that is also growing healthily.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#33
post #6

"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…

Per TFA, this money was mostly raised from Kagi's existing customers.

They aren't building a web crawler. Kagi is a search "client" (it is one way to build on a shoestring budget, alright), augmented by an in-house small-scale just-in-time crawler.

> From here, we take your query and use it to aggregate data from multiple other sources, including but not limited to Google, Bing, and Wikipedia, and other internal data sources in order to procure your search results. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html

> We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

I like Kagi's general vision for LLMs + Search. There's a real chance small competitors can compete with Google with clever use of LLMs' zero-shot summarization, categorization, intent recognition, and answering abilities.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#34

I can't seem to tell from the website. But are they depending on results from Google, Bing etc. or are they crawling the web themselves.

According to their Help page they've their own indexes: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-competition.html...

Looks like they'll need to update that first table as Neeva are no longer a functioning search engine.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#36
> business model

Welp. Until now their search and their browser were supported by me and people like me, but now they are supported by investors who will want ROI. As history shows, the best way to get ROI is to become free and mine user data. Congrats to the team on paycheck though!

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#37

I can't seem to tell from the website. But are they depending on results from Google, Bing etc. or are they crawling the web themselves.

Both. They aggregate data from lots of sources, and they have their own index as well. Seems like a winning model, IMHO.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#38
post #6

"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…

I've been using Kagi since I could first get onto the product. As soon as it came out of Beta, I subscribed.

I had no idea how intrusive Google was. I love Google services. Google Cloud is far better than the others. That said, the search is just poison.

I now spend time looking at results, not searching for results.

I have to admit though, ChatGPT did make me consider dropping the subscription. Mr Chat has weakened the value of Kagi to me.

They have their own AI summarizer engine though: https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#39
I find the data on their pricing interesting. It says 300 searches per month is enough for 99% of users. I'm pretty sure I use more than 300 searches every day.

Edit: 300/day is too much, apparently I use about 100/day according to my search history.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#40
post #6

"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…

Stop drinking the VC kool-aid. It's possible to build almost any software business without huge upfront investments.
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