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I 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.
You're going to have to explain the relevance of the K man.
"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…
So long story short, my opinion is the exact polar opposite of what you said.
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...
The only options for me is: - Google - Yahoo - Bing - Duckduckgo (my current option) - Ecosia
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Google Cloud is far better than the others. Per their own documentation, Kagi servers are hosted on Google Cloud.
There's real restrictions, contractually, that Google has on accessing any data the a customer generates, and of which carry hefty fees for Google.
This is one of the reasons on why some Google products never launch with support for Workspace accounts. There's just too much red-tape that a team doesn't want to deal with.
Source and Disclaimer: I was a Technical Solutions Engineer for Google Cloud.
That'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…
Google is facing incredible adversaries whose only goal is to subvert their search. These adversaries are extremely skilled, motivated, and effective.
You're probably right that many people can do better than Google, until you get enough traction that these adversaries pay attention to you. And then you'll have the exact same problem Google does.
Don't overestimate yourself. Google/Bing are doing a pretty good job considering what they're facing, instead curse out the SEO teams who are subverting them.
(And no, I'm not saying the major search players are without concern or condemnation, but "search quality" is not one of those issues for which they're directly responsible)
I'm surprised that a search engine that isn't powered by AI is able to raise money. From the direction things seem to be going, LLM tech may very well level that entire industry.
The real magic happens when you stick the two together. Let traditional search find the relevant documents, and then interact with them through a LLM. This isn't a shortcoming in model tuning or context window size.
The way I see it, recent AI improvements make the future brighter for new search engines. In a gold rush, there are two types of winners, you can win by beating the rest to the gold, or you can win by being the guy selling maps and pickaxes. Traditional search indices fall squarely in the second camp.
AI actually opens new avenues for profit for traditional search, since while it's notoriously difficult to monetize an internet search engine, suddenly you can make ends meet selling API access to AI start-ups.
I'm not hating but why is a company raising $670k such big news here? Aren't there some companies constantly raising like hundreds or thousands of times that much money, one got sold for $1B that I had literally never heard of it.
I've seen Krita reach HN's front page. Not "Krita 5 just released". Literally just sigifing Krita's existance.
I'm not hating but why is a company raising $670k such big news here? Aren't there some companies constantly raising like hundreds or thousands of times that much money, one got sold for $1B that I had literally never heard of it.
They are specifically drawing attention to the fact that they are aiming to build a long term sustainable business, not grow quickly and exit. Thats likely to be important to their customers.
They needed some cash for investment, but didn't need to maximise investment to push for rapid growth.
I 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.