Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good

I'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 with less tech-savvy peers than most mainstream media explainers on this subject!

Edit: wording

Edit 2: Can you imagine a world where Google's Internet Search Index is legally considered an "Essential Facility"!? https://law.stanford.edu/publications/essential-platforms/

This essentially advocates for the same thing defined in Cory Doctorow's The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. That point being, requiring open protocols from big tech will enable competition and innovation. This will return the creative inspiration to the technologists. I completely agree with it, and I hope we are reaching an inflection point where walled data gardens are cracked open.

I've been using Kagi for a while (almost two years now!) and it's been nothing but excellent!

Lenses are very useful (Reddit lens is on every second search), and I personally really like the AI features they are working on.

The quick assist triggered by a question mark at the end of a search query which makes a quick ai-generated summary of the few top results is something I use constantly.

The new more advanced assistant which is able to do searches, which can also be constrained to lenses, and lets you pick an arbitrary model, is also excellent, and basically means I don't need a chatgpt/claude subscription, as Kagi covers it very well.

All in all, great product which I'm happy to pay for.

This is an extremely disappointing post. In the past, I’ve enthusiastically supported and advocated for Kagi.

But Kagi advocating for using force to destroy its competitors is completely unacceptable to me and an admission that they do not believe they have a viable product.

Antitrust law is arbitrary and evil. If you make more money than your competitors, you have undue market power. If you price below your competitors, you are dumping. If you price the same as your competitors, you are colluding. The whole thing is a naked power grab by politicians and inferior companies.

This is a sad day. Kagi is the best thing that’s happened to the internet in the past decade. And now I have to stop my auto renew.