If I become a paying member, can I set kagi as my default search engine on my Apple devices?
With the xSearch[1] app you can.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-safari/id157990206...
Kagi raises $670k
81–90 of 367 posts
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#82$670k ain’t much runway is it?
they also have paying users!
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#83Neeva - 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…
At least for iOS/Mac but 99.999% sure for other browsers as well, they could write an extension that rewrites " https://www.google.com/search?q=some%20search " into their own search url right? Then keep Google as default search engine. Installing an extension sounds like a hurdle people paying for search are willing and able to jump over.
Kagi already has a browser extension that does one thing only--switches your default search engine to Kagi.
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#84Neeva - 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…
At least for iOS/Mac but 99.999% sure for other browsers as well, they could write an extension that rewrites " https://www.google.com/search?q=some%20search " into their own search url right? Then keep Google as default search engine. Installing an extension sounds like a hurdle people paying for search are willing and able to jump over.
They do have a Safari extension on iOS, which directs searches to kagi.com
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#85"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 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 gobble it up. I think search in particular is very prone to bloated R&D budgets and various forms of mission creep.
Yet the underlying reality is that software development scales very poorly with organization size, and the larger your organization is, the harder it is to steer and the more difficult it is to make the right calls. A squad of 3-4 motivated and talented guys is absolute peak get-shit-done.
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be one search every 3 min, if you sleep 8hrs a day...
Yeah I just checked my search history, I did 100 searches yesterday. That's probably more like what I do on an average day. That's roughly 10 searches per hour, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
I can see that, certainly in bursts. Some days it's research, some days it's reading docs, some it's heads down and very little searching.
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#87Anyone here old enough to remember when Kagi was a payment gateway? At least, I think it was. It was the first one I used, back when I used to make "shareware" software. Ah, those were the days.
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#88Earlier 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 can't it be a sustainable niche business?
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#89I 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.
$670k investment is not "bootstrap money". It's literally the opposite of bootstrapping. What is the value in this attempted narrative? Is it the entrepreneur equivalent of "I don't work with big data, only 500 billion row sets but..."
Re: Kagi raises $670k
#90That's great news. If there ever was an opportunity for newcomers to enter the search engine market, it is now.
15 years ago, the idea of competing with Google would have been laughable. Not only did they have all the money, their search engine was so incredibly good that it's hard to imagine what a new market entrant could have brought to the table.
Today, Google's results are so hilariously bad that I have no doubt the majority of HN users could easily come up with ranking algorithms that would outperform Google's by a large margin. It's not that the problem is so difficult; the quality of results clearly indicates they aren't even trying.
So please, go ahead and punish Google, Bing, and Co for what they have allowed to happen during the past decade or so.