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Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#91

Post by lumost »

nine_k wrote: post #78

> But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. > At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal Oh. I'd say that if I switched to Kagi as to the main search engine, I would increase the number of searches I make. And I definitely do many dozens a day. Their…

They can change the model later, add caching, improve performance, and use better hardware. Just getting a native search engine off the ground is impressive.

They may be running a flask app reading data direct from s3 feeding through a giant ML model right now - which wouldn't be the application architecture they'd use if they served 100x the traffic.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#92

Post by cam_l »

NobodyNada wrote: post #87

I’ve been using Kagi for about a week and it’s been awesome! Absolutely no complaints so far...except that I still don’t know how to pronounce it. > - How do you pronounce Kagi? > It is Kah-gee, and it means “key” in Japanese. Is that gee with a soft “g”, like the gee in “gee golly”? (An IPA spelling would go a long way here.)

I think there is no soft g in Japanese. Or at least, romanised Japanese soft g is ji.

As an aside, I have done at least thirty searches in my last 15mins reading hn at lunch. I think I would bankrupt kagi.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#93

Post by lumost »

Initial searches look promising, but the proposed costs are vastly too high. In my google history I can easily hit 100 searches per day. If I'm researching something this can hit 1k+ per day.

I'd gladly pay 5/month for search, and 10/month in a stretch. But 300 per month is a non-starter.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#94

Post by nojito »

lumost wrote: post #91
nine_k wrote: post #78

> But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. > At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal Oh. I'd say that if I switched to Kagi as to the main search engine, I would increase the number of searches I make. And I definitely do many dozens a day. Their…

They can change the model later, add caching, improve performance, and use better hardware. Just getting a native search engine off the ground is impressive. They may be running a flask app reading data direct from s3 feeding through a giant ML model right now - which wouldn't be the application architecture they'd use if they served 100x the traffic.

They can but a paid search engine is doomed to fail.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#96

Post by freediver »

nine_k wrote: post #78

> But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. > At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal Oh. I'd say that if I switched to Kagi as to the main search engine, I would increase the number of searches I make. And I definitely do many dozens a day. Their…

> Their reported beta-testers usage is 30 / day. At their current expense level, that would be $116.25 / mo.

30 searches/day comes to around $11/mo. We expect the quantity of usage will drop with time because

a) we make a better product that helps you find stuff more quickly (so quality of usage goes up)

b) lot of users are still searching more then normal because of novelty of product, testing etc.

Of course we could be wrong :)

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#97

Post by freediver »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #85
function_seven wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience matches yours. When I was using DDG, it was mostly sufficient. I'd fall back on Google a few times a month. I haven't yet done that with Kagi. I just entered my CC details into Kagi (using Orion, natch). I hope more people follow suit. I really want this model to succeed.

Kagi's quite good for general purpose searches, but there's a number of specific queries where it falls down: timezones ("9AM SF in Tokyo") and currency conversions ("100000 JPY in USD") are two big ones for me. It would be great if Kagi could open source the engine that powers these queries, so people could contribute their own features.

We plan to do exactly that. Our constraint is not the lack of vision but the lack of resources. Opening widgets API to users would be a great thing to scale this effort (provided there are enough users to build them).

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#98

Post by beanders »

I just signed up for Kagi and installed the Orion browser to take it for a spin.

First search query, the third result was a particular brand of fish tank that I had forgotten, then forgot I had forgotten, months ago while planning out my home office build.

Thanks to you, I will have a great office with a cool fish tank, and a great browser/search to go with it!

In all seriousness, really great work.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#99

Post by freediver »

inopinatus wrote: post #62
freediver wrote: post #4

Founder here, it was quite a journey very excited to be launching beta today with payments. The idea of paying for web search was unimaginable three years ago when we started this. AMA!

Point of feedback for your consideration, I was surprised that Orion+ did not include source code. Binary-only releases seem to me an enemy of both privacy and tinkering, and represent a showstopper for the (admittedly likely quite narrow) segment of possible customers I personify. Open source is mentioned aspirationally in the FAQ; however, I don't personally need a FOSS license, just an individual right to read, mo…

Kagi is still a tiny company (We are not ready (in terms of not having enough resources) to maintain an open source project, of a size of a web browser. Much bigger companies fail at running open source projects and properly engaging community, and we'd rather not try at all, than do it in a bad way. I hope this changes in the future.

Re: Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

#100

Post by zamadatix »

kova12 wrote: post #73

Here is a concern that I have with kagi... Let's say I want to search for something privately. I can VPN and use private mode, and it would be extremely hard to link that search to me. Definitely not in an NSA style dragnet, someone must be tracking me personally to know what I search for. But with a search engine requiring payment it's super easy to deanonymize everyone in single swoop. And if it can be done, it wil…

If you're dropping in a VPN in private mode to avoid active adversarial tracking on a search despite the claims of the search provider then it's probably best to also avoid your primary search engine anyways.
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