As someone who hasn’t used paid search services, what sort of problems has this solved for other HN users that make it worth it? How does it compare to “AI” based search tools like Perplexity?
Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
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Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
#42I've been using (and occasionally paying) Kagi on and off for a couple of years now. I truly think they're building something interesting and valuable! While I haven't agreed with every product decision they've made, the founder is very good at both understanding his business and also explaining their decisions. This is a well crafted explainer of the search business and the monopoly case-- much better for sharing wi…
i honestly cant imagine paying for a search engine with whats out there for free
You’re getting downvoted but I agree. I didn’t see the value and stopped after a while of paying. It is sad that basically any comment that isn’t pro-Kagi is downvoted but I guess that’s the Reddit-ification of this site.
Most people who complain about Google don’t even use it properly (e.g. PSE).
Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
#43I've used Kagi for a year and it was better than Google for most of the searches. However I think the model will be changed to something more like Perplexity.ai I've switched to Perplexity and for most of the searches it works better than Kagi. They'd need to add something like this to survive in the long run, because for exploratory searches tools like Perplexity are really good.
Perplexity lets a firm switch on SSO and give perplexity to employees without a big barrier to entry. So, we bought it for our employees and if they use it great, if they don't great. Even though we're a small startup, this is true of almost any SaaS we find that lets us control the login to stay regulation compliant. If you like it, and show how it helps your day, and the SaaS let us control the login, we'll "just pay for it".
We will not, however, pay some four or five figure SSO tax for every SaaS. We'd be bankrupted.
Kagi should do this, or at least enable domain-specific OIDC/Oauth2 — the ubiquitous "Sign in with" or "Continue with" buttons like http://xsplit.com/user/auth or http://id.atlassian.com/login since MSFT and Google accounts hit almost all businesses — and then just bill the same as the individual pro price + usage pricing.
As it stands, we reimburse employees who buy Kagi individually, this costs us more than the cost of Kagi, and means it's only one off.
PS. Don't get me started on the MacOS and iOS apps that have no retail price version available. Apple provides no way for a firm to provide employees with IAP subscription apps whether BYOD or managed devices. We can, and do, provide any retail priced app for both BYOD and MDM. It shows up in a catalog on the device, people install it, you get a retail sale. Thank you to those devs who make a retail version available, even if its 2x - 5x the annual cost. Empowering employees with apps is a no brainer if devs just let firms pay them to do it.
Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
#44Who knows what websites and pages are even on the web?
There's no index to the web that I know of apart from Google and DuckDuckGo and maybe this Kagi thing.
I want to explore the web - surely search isn't the only way to use the web?
I imagine it could be fun to explore the web, lists and graphs of interest where I can hop from here to there via list of links or graphs or nodes or something?
Does anyone know of anything like this?
Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
#45Who knows what websites and pages are even on the web? There's no index to the web that I know of apart from Google and DuckDuckGo and maybe this Kagi thing. I want to explore the web - surely search isn't the only way to use the web? I imagine it could be fun to explore the web, lists and graphs of interest where I can hop from here to there via list of links or graphs or nodes or something? Does anyone know of anyt…
Webrings?
There was an attempt to push a return of Webrings I think...
But funnily enough, whilst browsing this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41389642
I commented to my colleagues:
Remember when people would find good websites and share them!
Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
#46I've been using (and occasionally paying) Kagi on and off for a couple of years now. I truly think they're building something interesting and valuable! While I haven't agreed with every product decision they've made, the founder is very good at both understanding his business and also explaining their decisions. This is a well crafted explainer of the search business and the monopoly case-- much better for sharing wi…
i honestly cant imagine paying for a search engine with whats out there for free
When you use Google or another ad-powered search engine, you're saying that it's okay for some company to pay to bias the results away from your best interests.
When you use, say, Kagi, you become the customer; they have a vested interest in providing you with the best experience they can, because they know they're relying on your continued patronage to be able to keep competing with those other free search engines which you already admitted are pretty good.
Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
#47I've been using (and occasionally paying) Kagi on and off for a couple of years now. I truly think they're building something interesting and valuable! While I haven't agreed with every product decision they've made, the founder is very good at both understanding his business and also explaining their decisions. This is a well crafted explainer of the search business and the monopoly case-- much better for sharing wi…
I think its instructive to look at the early history of Google and Facebook. In the early years they did not really turn on the ad revenue levers and just focused on increasing users (i.e. Don't Be Evil) - until a decade after offering their respective services.
Similarly Netflix is just now starting the ad revenue model after years of only subscription based services.
Eventually the temptation for multiple sources of revenue (i.e. subscription AND advertising) will likely be too great due to:
- IPO and Wall Street demands net income growth (i.e. FB/Google)
- Private Equity buys the company and needs to pay back leveraged debt
- The number of customers willing to offer up a credit card for Search stagnates and a lower cost ad tier appears and the ad infrastructure that is built is applied to the paid tiers
Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
#48> The Google Search Index is a unique and irreplaceable resource within the digital ecosystem. Mandating fair access to it or treating it as an essential facility could address the core issues... The article estimates the Google Search Index at 12.5PB. If Kagi thinks that is a big enough moat to be the primary target then, well, I suppose they should know. But I'm also skeptical. You could fit that on about 50 Hetzne…
I don't buy this number. Text-only common crawl is 20TB. Remove spam and dupes, you're around It's the full Google index history with full HTML that is probably 12PB, but the useful part of the search engine is much smaller.
Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
i honestly cant imagine paying for a search engine with whats out there for free
The other three answers to your question were dumb, so I'll try to do better. Kagi has a free trial of 100 searches without requiring a credit card to sign up. Honest to god, try it. Just bookmark it and search once or twice when Google or Bing is giving you meh results. As an engineer... googling for stuff is a good fraction of your job. It's quite reasonable to pay to improve that experience. The only real question…
I don't think it's that amazing for an engineer. Google is much better if you're looking for things related to Intel compilers, for example. Try searching for «intel ipo fuse-ld=lld icx» on both engines.
Note: I am a paying Kagi customer
Re: Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
#50> The Google Search Index is a unique and irreplaceable resource within the digital ecosystem. Mandating fair access to it or treating it as an essential facility could address the core issues... The article estimates the Google Search Index at 12.5PB. If Kagi thinks that is a big enough moat to be the primary target then, well, I suppose they should know. But I'm also skeptical. You could fit that on about 50 Hetzne…
I assume that the major hurdle is not storing an equivalently-sized search index, but building one from scratch. Crawling takes time, and Google has had a many years head start.
Yes OP is hilariously out of touch, the storage would be sub 1% of total costs.