Ever since they upped the search limit (before it's pay per search), I've been a happy camper.
On the other hand, it did teach me the true cost of searches, and I use a lot more !bangs now, like !mdn or !archwiki (although the search powering both of these are probably funded by donations)
> On the other hand, it did teach me the true cost of searches
It really does change the dynamic of how you search, if you know that the next search will cost you 1.25¢. Right now I use Ecosia, so I'm actually more motivated to do extra searches, to increase the number of trees they plant. Kagi is the other way around, search has a cost, so be mindful about what you search for. It's a great way for them to have a sense of their load, while also perhaps being ever so slightly more sustainable.
You can cut out the middle man for those searches, at least on the desktop versions of Firefox and Chrome. You can add a new search engine in the browser settings and add a keyword. If you've done that you can type that keyword in your address bar, followed by the search term you want.
The recent price reductions [0] were fantastic. But investors always smells fishy to me. Granted I don’t understand much of it, so my nose might be off.
I was thinking the same, but then again, the investment is rather low, so it is a lot easier to dump that investor, if values don't align in the future. I might be reading it all wrong, but it also seems like the money comes from 42 different investors, making it even easier to part ways.
It's kind of reassuring to see Kagi get funding that is significant for an individual/small business, but not the kind of wild VC money that sloshed around these last several years, and a minimum investment that even I could manage (if I were an accredited investor).
This is money expecting "more of this, just a bit better" rather than "giant exit, who cares what happens to the product afterwards"
Hint: non-wealthy people can become an Accredited Investor by passing the Series 7 or Series 65 (Investment Adviser), the latter of which can be done all on your own. I'm considering the Series 65, because it will also give me better retirement investment options as a US citizen (and taxpayer) residing in the EU.
That's great news. I don't particularly care about the search engine, for me, it's about the browser. Orion is really great, I hope they don't stuff it up!
The irony is, I think I could get more delivered with a $670k cheque than I could with a $6.7 million one. With the latter, you would grow too big, management would creep in, you would overengineer, you might spend too much time working behind closed doors etc.
Later on you would need cash to scale this business, but for early stage product development I think $500k to $1 million is the sweet spot.
I imagine that their hosting costs must be quite big and not very elastic. Crawling takes compute and bandwidth, storage cost will be high, as you need to store data in low latency storage, then indexing which is more compute costs.
They may have access to talent pool willing to work for their vision at significantly reduced rates, but unless they effectively sell themself to big cloud provider, they can’t significantly reduce the infrastructure cost.
Also since Kagi is a paid product, I imagine that the amount of external funding needed is inherently less than a startup that is built on the "scale first, monetise later" model.
"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. Everybody is fed up with Google and Bing. There's a great opportunity here to disrupt the industry and destroy a trillion dollars in market cap.
That $30 million might not have yielded a great search engine but it did produce Cuil Theory, a branch of mathematics with the potential to change the world:
We beg to differ on the need to raise large sums. Like Kagi we are on a marathon not a sprint. We have built a no-tracking and completely independent crawler search engine and infrastructure from the ground-up having raised £3m from angels only. Cuil, Blekko, Quaero and Neeva who raised 10s/100s of $m may have come and gone; meanwhile we have been slowly building since 2004, with a user and API customer base that is also growing healthily.
Per TFA, this money was mostly raised from Kagi's existing customers.
They aren't building a web crawler. Kagi is a search "client" (it is one way to build on a shoestring budget, alright), augmented by an in-house small-scale just-in-time crawler.
> From here, we take your query and use it to aggregate data from multiple other sources, including but not limited to Google, Bing, and Wikipedia, and other internal data sources in order to procure your search results.https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html
I like Kagi's general vision for LLMs + Search. There's a real chance small competitors can compete with Google with clever use of LLMs' zero-shot summarization, categorization, intent recognition, and answering abilities.
Especially when google continues to be worse off year after year. Just search for my damn keywords, like you did 10 years ago, especially when I have already put quotes around them because you Re useless!
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.
As a subscriber to both ChatGPT and Kagi, agreed. You may be interested to know that Kagi also has https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt. It's been pretty good in my tests so far, nothing magical just fast and similar to a search input field.
> I have to admit though, ChatGPT did make me consider dropping the subscription. Mr Chat has weakened the value of Kagi to me.
I felt the same, but I do still need web search, and I do still want it to be as good as possible, so it's still worth it to me.
And actually, as I type this I'm less sure about how much ChatGPT has reduced the value of web search for me. I start with ChatGPT for almost everything that's not "news". But I still frequently do web searches branching out from what I learned via ChatGPT. It's fewer total searches than I've done before, but each one might be more valuable. And since I'm flowing from one tool to another, not having to wade through ads and bad ui and SEO spam also becomes even more valuable.
There's a huge difference between typical VC funding and what this is. Kagi is already a self-sustaining business with a working and effective search engine. This is extra funding on top that they have available for improving Kagi. That's great. You don't need 30 million for that.
Perhaps the business is already sustainable and that $670k will just let them hire an additional person to speed things up a bit?
There's a lot of wasted effort in this industry. Slack has 1500+ employees just to make a chat app. Granted, it's a damn good chat app, but Mozilla is maintaining a browser with half as many people, with not everyone focused on Firefox at that.
My friend is now in a project where he billed for three weeks until all the issues with his dev account were sorted out. It remains unclear when he will be able to start actually working.
I spent two years building a web app + gRPC server that perhaps could have been just the latter.
I could go on. Point is, you can blow through $30mln easily but that doesn't mean you have to.
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.
There's also interesting things happening in the server space that doesn't get talked about enough. Not only are the latest generation of Epycs very good, the price of RAM and especially SSDs has absolutely plummeted.
If ever there was a moment where horizontal scaling looked promising, this is it.
Yeah, there's a lot of truth in this, and it matches my experience, with the caveat that the 3-4 guys need to stay very clear eyed and pragmatic with their technology choices. Kind of covered by the "talented" part but I've seen so many otherwise talented people fall into holes because of this, and I'd guess it applies doubly for building a search engine.
>I think a small operation is exactly the sort of outfit to do it.
A small operation in terms of number of developers yes. But not being able to subsidise user growth means they will never be able to build their own full web index as the fixed cost of doing that is too high for a small number of users.
As a consequence, they will always be at the mercy of Google/Bing. The range of things they can innovate on will always be limited. And the situation can only get worse as people start to expect more AI functionality.
I doubt that you can build a sustainable niche product if the effort you have to put into it is just as big as if you're building for billions of users. Having few users is not what defines a niche. Niches are defined by specialisation.
> A small operation in terms of number of developers yes. But not being able to subsidise user growth means they will never be able to build their own full web index as the fixed cost of doing that is too high for a small number of users.
What do you reckon the cost of doing this would be?
Just doing the napkin math for say a Mojeek sized index (couple of billion docs) doesn't seem to justify a particularly astronomical budget.
>What do you reckon the cost of doing this would be?
That is indeed the key question. I tried to find out before commenting but the information I found is very vague. Internet Archive spends millions per year, but their index is updated far too slowly for a search engine. I have no idea what it costs to create a Google-size index.
Do you think the Mojeek index is good enough to compete with Google?
> Do you think the Mojeek index is good enough to compete with Google?
As a back-end for something like Kagi, it's sure getting there. Most of what sets Google apart is their exceptional level of user profiling. The actual indexing technology is likely on par with most of their competition.
Of course very little of that enters into API queries.
Internet archive snapshot the whole page while google only index the first few kb of text data on every page (forgot the number, was it 100kb max per page?), so maybe it'll cost lower to build a search engine index compared to an internet preservation project?
Assuming they'll need to index 820 billion pages (the number of pages preserved in the internet archive), at 100kb each, and assuming they use a database with 0.3x text data compression efficiency, they'll need at least 24600 TB to store those text data. Assuming $300 per 16TB disk, then they'll need to spend at least $7,380,000 for disk alone. This is a lot of money just for storage and we haven't included stuff like replication and backup, indexing metadata overhead, etc.
They changed that limit somewhere in the mid-2000s. Just as well, there's some CMS's out there where there's several hundred kilobytes of inline JS and CSS before any body text.
A search engine doesn't index the HTML code. You're looking at a few Kb per document. You also don't need multiple historical snapshots of the document like WM retains.
So you're looking at maybe 20 bn docs, 4 Kb each. 100 Tb, before compression.
True, but then Google doesn't just download the page source and index that. They run JavaScript in some cases to get to the actual content. This must come at a significant cost. Their index is enormous as well:
"The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size."
Sure, download and run the javascript, but then you can snapshot the DOM, grab the text, and discard all the rest. The HTML and js is of little practical value for the index after that point.
Google's index is likely very large because they don't have any real economic incentives to keeping it small.
>... but then you can snapshot the DOM, grab the text, and discard all the rest
Yes, absolutely, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But first you have to figure out what you can discard beyond the HTML tags themselves to avoid indexing all the garbage that is on each and every page.
When I tried to do this I came to the conclusion that I needed to actually render the page to find out where on the page a particular piece of text was, what font size it had, if it was even visible, etc. And then there's JavaScript of course.
So what I'm saying is that storing a couple of kilobytes is probably not the most costly part of indexing a page.
You don't need to store it indefinitely though, and there's not much point in crawling faster than you can process the data.
The couple of kilobytes per document is the actual storage footprint. Sure you need to massage the data, but that almost entirely CPU bound. You also need a lot of RAM for keeping the hot parts of the index.
> When I tried to do this I came to the conclusion that I needed to actually render the page to find out where on the page a particular piece of text was, what font size it had, if it was even visible, etc. And then there's JavaScript of course.
Are there open source projects devoted to this functionality? It’s becoming more and more a sticking point for working with LLMs. Grabbing the text without navigation and other crap but while maintaining formatting and links, etc
There are many software libraries that can output just the text from HTML or run JS. For C# there's HTML Agility Pack and PuppeteerSharp, for example. I did use them for web scrapping.
For my specific purposes it has always been good enough to apply some simple heuristics. But that wouldn't have been possible without access to post rendering information, which only a real browser (https://pptr.dev) can reliably produce.
You don't index HTML code, but you have to process HTML and eventually run Javascript to get the text content. Then you have to compute the word frequencies.And that means you have to use more compute power.
This seems like a good use case for some sort of spam filtering. Maybe the web is that big, but what percentage of it is data someone will ever care about? I wonder if you could make a good-enough search with agressive filtering of pages before they enter the index.
A hash table is not a good backing structure for a search engine.
Hash tables almost guarantee worst case disk read patterns. You use something like a skip list or a b-tree, since that's makes much better use of the hardware, and on top of that allows you to do incredibly fast joins.
That's true, but I was referring to a hash table as a mere mental model, not an actual implementation. A better name would be a dictionary instead of hash table.
Google started becoming an answer engine from ~2015 with the introduction of "People Also Ask", and arguably earlier than that [0]. Mojeek.com is a (information retrieval) search engine, and we resist the temptation to also become an answer engine. So you might say we do not compete with Google. afte all we have a very different business model and proposition.
As for the index; this underpins mojeek.com and our API; which customers use for search and/or AI. Common Crawl is ~3.5 billion pages and underpins LLMs. Our index is ~7 billion. Who knows what (else) Google, and Bing, do with their index ;) ?
>Google started becoming an answer engine from ~2015 with the introduction of "People Also Ask", and arguably earlier than that [0]. Mojeek.com is a (information retrieval) search engine, and we resist the temptation to also become an answer engine. So you might say we do not compete with Google.
I'm sure you know your users well after so many years in the search engine business, but having read your article I must say I find your approach risky. You seem to be betting on search engines and answer engines continuing to be complementary rather than substitutes.
But we are not the ones making this decision. Users will be making the decision in light of the newly available AI capabilities, and they will be making it with complete disregard for the health of the web, as is their nature :)
The "funny" thing is that big publishers are as happy right now as I haven't seen them in the past 25 years, because it is so completely obvious that chat AIs will destroy the web unless big tech starts making big payments to big publishers. As you rightly say, small businesses and publishers will be collateral damage.
But how do you make sure you're not collateral damage as well?
It's basically the safest position you could be in.
An LLM to digest results of a classic search index is greater than the sum of its parts. An LLMs that is not permitted to brush up on the relevant literature before answering a question generally doesn't produce very good answers, is prone to hallucinations etc. A pure LLM design isn't even a serious contender in the answer engine space.
Why would publishers allow you to crawl their sites if you're not sending them any traffic?
The big publishers certainly won't let you do that as they are selling their data to Google, Microsoft, Facebook and whoever else has the money to train a fully fledged LLM, which is certainly not everyone.
Because it lets them sell data to other parties than Google and Facebook? That's actually pretty great. Only having a 1 or 2 customers kinda sucks.
A search engine partnering with an answer engine may not send traffic, but the answer engine is a potential customer for the websites the search engines direct them to.
>Because it lets them sell data to other parties than Google and Facebook?
Only indirectly by charging search engines for access to content. It would be an entirely different business model that requires a complex set of agreements between publishers, search engines and LLM providers.
Granted it's not impossible and certainly worth considering if you have search engine expertise but no money to train an LLM.
You're ignoring that Kagi runs on subscriptions, so this funding is not all there is. If the subscription covers basic user costs (which it should, because they just adjusted the pricing) or at least covers most of them then the 670K can be used for growth.
Such a waste. MacOS users might be open to paying (for Kagi in general) because they're used to paying for a bunch of things other OSes get included or as freeware, but still, the market share is small (depending on the source, 10-30%). And even if many of those would enjoy a Mac-native app, there are at least some, like myself, that refuse to use single platform tools. I have a bunch of devices on a bunch of different OSes, I'm not going to use a very special browser on one of them, losing sync, history, muscle memory when switching. That's the reason I can't stay on Arc even if I quite like some of it's goals and structure.
You always need to start somewhere, Kagi is now (just) a 15 person team. There are enough Macs (200M+) and iPhones (1B+) in use to justify selecting this as the first ecosystem to target for the browser. Really it comes down to resource management and allocation in the early stages.
Well Cuil has already been mentioned, there's A9.com and Quaero; on the open source side there's mozDex, notably Jimbo Wales failed twice with Wikia Search and then Knowledge Engine.
I'm happily paying $10/mo for Kagi, I find it genuinely better* than Google already. And yes, it's genuinely amazing that it's a pipsqueak startup that's pulling this off.
* For core search, that is, obviously there's vast slabs of services like maps, translate, etc etc where they're not even trying to compete.
This demonstrates to me how distorted searching has become. The early days of the web. The standard thing was to show someone yahoo which was a human curated list of sites. The other site was a search engine from one of the colleges I think it was Lycos.
This changed with ads. Suddenly search engines were used to find people searching.
At their current pricing, about 10k paying users would get them 600K/year in revenue. Which is what they just raised. Enough for a small team and modest infrastructure. You don't need a lot to serve 600K users.
All they need to do is nail enough value add for those users. The wider goal of disrupting Google/Bing is a different game. But getting a small company to 10K paying users might be doable given enough of a value add.
Of course they are based in the Bay area, so this kind of money doesn't have a huge runway there.
Kagi has been around since 2018. They're privately bootstrapped (not by a VC firm). 670K is not the only money that's gone into the business. 670K is how a bootstrapped company responsibly raises money.
I have no idea how you could justify a $30 million budget. $670k seems much more reasonable to me. I can imagine where this budget goes, the numbers make sense.
Have you tried kagi? Because I have and it is pretty good. I was sold when they summarized several "listicles" (ie your typical Top10 blog spam) into one concise listing. "Yes these results would pop up for your search ... but you probably don't want to look at them".
As someone who has already replaced Google with Kagi, as far as I'm concerned they've already done it.
I've never paid Google for anything (apart from with my data) but I've been paying Kagi for almost a year now. The model is different. From what I've seen so far, it's better.
The amount of money you burn through is not a good indicator of whether you'll end up with a good product or viable business at the end, IMHO
> I am glad there's alternatives to Google and Bing.
Kagi is just Bing under the hood with an OpenAI summarizer and a lot of tuning. It is fully reliant on the quality of search results it can fetch from Bing's databases.
I know there exists Qwant (a french company) which claim to have an independent engine, but they keep turning their Bing backend on for a lot of searches. Only truly independent engine from Google/Bing with relevant results that i know of is Brave Search. Not a great company, but they do know how to make a good search engine, and are practically alone in the space fighting against the Bing-based alternative search engine business model.
I'm not sure what percentage of the results are Bing (perhaps the majority), but I think it's inaccurate to say that Kagi is just Bing under the hood:
> Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing and vertical sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.
> I'm not sure what percentage of the results are Bing (perhaps the majority)
Zero right now (we dropped Bing completely after their API price hike). We need to update the documentation to reflect this, thanks for pointing it out.
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.
That's likely true for search queries that can be phrased as or somehow represent a question (that can be answered with the information contained in the training data, usually limited to 2021 atm). For all others, probably not so much. Try GPT4's web plugin. It's not a pleasant experience.
There's a gap in the market for a search engine whose incentive structure doesn't cause it to become corrupted.
Kagi has lots of LLM-based features: Quick Answers in results, results summaries, Ask Questions About This Document, the Universal Summarizer[0], FastGPT[1].
LLMs are a great new interaction paradigm for interrogating a corpus of documents, but not such a good way of finding which documents to interrogate (and unless you do, it's not all too useful for information retrieval).
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 Vlad (the person you asked), but I use Lenses almost all the time. They have changed how I search for user generated content completely. I used to add "site:reddit.com" to at least 2/3 of my searches and the Forum Lense does the same for me while including many other discussion boards. I love it.
As an example: I'm playing Diablo 4 at the moment and getting info about the convoluted systems can be a chore. For example: I didn't know that I have to do at least a Tier 3 Nightmare Dungeon to unlock Sigil Crafting. None of the usual pages mentioned that. The Forum Lense saved me a lot of time because users discussing it mentioned it quite a lot.
Competition is free if you don't care about your privacy or your personal data. Many don't, sure, but it seems enough do care such that Kagi has continued to grow and improve over time. A tall order for what? They already have plenty of paying customers and it's a self-sustaining business already. What more do you want?
Welp. Until now their search and their browser were supported by me and people like me, but now they are supported by investors who will want ROI. As history shows, the best way to get ROI is to become free and mine user data. Congrats to the team on paycheck though!
even if they were all users (they aren't), it's relevant how exactly? If Saudis who are 2nd biggest Twitter investors use Twitter it doesn't make its business model better.
It's relevant because they aren't just VC bros or Saudis. It's just 670k. I'm not sure why you're so worked up about it or why you think Kagi shouldn't get additional funding.
You think being publicly traded would be better? That just gives a business perverse incentives detached from the quality of the business's products/services.
Private investment is what means perverse incentives. You care about your big donors now. If you take 50k from a guy you want to give him what he wants in return so he gives again. It's about ROI. The bigger the amount the more strings attached.
Public trading means clear protocol for ROI and it allows to have many small investors who can have as little say as you specify (non voting shares etc). Comes with requirement for a lot of documentation and transparency too. So accountability. If business I like wants to grow and needs money this is the route I want it to take
Publicly traded means that your primary customers are Blackrock and Vanguard, the whole concept of individual investors is just investment firms fooling people into thinking they have some influence over a company.
I find the data on their pricing interesting. It says 300 searches per month is enough for 99% of users. I'm pretty sure I use more than 300 searches every day.
Edit: 300/day is too much, apparently I use about 100/day according to my search history.
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'm a fairly heavy user. I used around 1000 searches last month. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from my own usage habits about how other people use the internet or how many searches they'd need.
I'm sure they're right, my dad doesn't need 300 search per month. What I question is whether or not 300 search is sufficient for their average user.
The person who is willing to pay for a search engine is also going to be a person care more about search and use it more. My best guess is that 1000 searches per month is right on the edge of what their average user can get by with. It's fair enough, they do need to make money, and I have no problems believe that 300 is about right for the average internet user. It just gives a false impression of your expected cost as a potential customer.
The pricing was interesting to me too. If the average user searches 3-4 times a day, most programmers are definitely outside that average. And I think programmers and other techies are the ones most likely to care enough about online privacy and search engine personalisation to pay for this. I myself seem to average around 40 searches per day, so I'd end up paying $18 per month.
They explained their reasoning on HN before. The number refers to the average user of online search in general, not the average Kagi user (who tends to be more technical and uses search more).
Just that it was a smaller number than would you are expected to sell your soul for with VC cash. Only raising what you need to grow "naturally" and retaining control is a good thing in my book, but that isn't what a lot of people want to do in that situation.
and it seems like many actual users of Kagi (and Orion?) have contributed, so this isn't a (completely) a "big VC firm will enshitify this". This gives me hope. I wish I would qualify to invest in things like this...
If you have the money to participate and lie about having/earning more money then you qualify.
There is no constitutional way to prevent you from investing based on net worth, so the law places consequences on the companies offering investments.
And the only time this affects the company is if they were relying on a regulatory exemption that also allows unaccredited investors, in which case you should have just participated as an unaccredited investor and they were supposed to verify.
Otherwise, the law says “self-certify”, which is the state sanctioned term for lying.
It doesn't need to be a protected class and is not how I would argue
If a fine or sanction from the government was applied to the investor themselves based on net worth, I would argue 5th amendment and 14th amendment equal application of laws, and 1st amendment's freedom of speech citing the Citizen's United case where money movement is speech
I think that would be resilient in most circuits and certainly scotus
$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..."
The typical formula is that it costs double a person's salary for the total budget. So really you're saying 5.5 years and 2 people is a low number so maybe you build a team of 4 and then the runway is an excruciatingly short 2.75 years.
I think this is because our eyes-brain system is optimizing the read operation by scanning the words and maps them against a list of words we already familiar with, thus, sometimes it got the wrong meaning. This trick was used by some brands to mislead people to buy some products with a familiar brand name.. like “Adibas” and “Reedok”.
> makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission
I really hope so but no one can guarantee this would be the case if the company get bigger with more money being thrown there.
In its first years, Google’s tagline was “don’t be evil“ but they couldn’t deliver the promise.
This made me happy, too. I've been delaying becoming a paying customer because I wanted to see if they were going the VC route first. This is a signal to me that they aren't, so I've signed up.
By the way, to "bootstrap" a business is short for "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" (yes, it's an old phrase) and means not raising any money.
Just a to bootstrap a computer is to start it when it has no code loaded or running. Nowadays it's in ROM so the term is rather obscure but we used to toggle a little bootstrap program in from the front panel or, if you were lucky, load it in from paper tape. That program was very short, just enough to get some more code loaded and start it.
> to "bootstrap" a business is short for "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" (yes, it's an old phrase) and means not raising any money.
Today I learned! Technically Kagi was bootstrapped up to this point (I've invested $2MM+ of my own money to get us this far). This is the first external fundraise (as noted in the annoucement) and what makes it very special to me is that people participating in the round are Kagi users who were already a part of our journey.
Neeva - 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 succeed?
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 sign, though. I'm rooting for them. We need more competition in this space, and a proper business not hijacked by advertisers is always a good thing.
True, it could be. I'm just not sure it can survive as such when its main competitors are billion-dollar corporations.
But maybe there's room for smaller search engines with alternative business models to compete with each other. marginalia.nu is another promising startup.
You're forgetting that the "niche technical audience" has something marketers and influencers and other kinds of pushers don't: competence and credibility. And (not relevant here, but to plenty other products) control or influence over procurement process in SMBs, corporations, universities and government facilities.
Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are the personal IT support departments of some subset of our family, friends, and their friends. They come to us asking for advice, or to set their computers/phones up, or to fix them after they "caught viruses". However begrudgingly we do that, it puts us in a position of power - they listen to and trust in what we say, and accept uncritically what we do to their machines. And, our interests are mostly aligned with theirs - even if we don't care about particular friend-of-a-friend's happiness, we'll still do them good so they don't have to come back with more issues any time soon.
This is how Google Chrome spread. This is how Firefox still survives. This is how several brands of anti-malware software spread - a mistake that's now difficult to undo. This is how AdBlock Plus became a thing, and how uBlock Origin is now replacing it. All these trends and more, I participated in first-hand. People still remember and follow advice I gave them over a decade ago (which isn't always good - see the anti-malware stuff).
And so is the case with Kagi, to a degree. I'm paid user for 1.5 years now, happy with the service. I recommend it in relevant discussions, I mention it to people who spot it - but since it's a paid product, it is a tough sell with general population. Still, I try to spread the word, like I do with any other good and non-user-abusive tool.
That said, this news makes me somewhat reluctant to recommend Kagi. I'll keep using it because it provides me immediate value for reasonable price, but taking investment often is a Faustian bargain. In this case it's not as clear as with regular VC backing, so I guess we'll see where this goes.
I think you're overestimating the impact technical users have on the survival of a business. Word of mouth and technical influence inside SMBs and corporations can only do so much, especially for a business that doesn't have a corporate sales strategy.
> Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are the personal IT support departments of some subset of our family, friends, and their friends.
How has that influence worked out for you so far? By that logic, all our family and friend circles would be running Linux, using OSS, and be more mindful of their privacy. IME my attempts at convincing others to use the tools that I use has mostly been met with lukewarm response, or even arguments in favor of the tools that they already use. Convincing someone to change their computing habits is not just a matter of being considered an expert in the field.
Google Chrome spread because it had the resources and influence of a billion-dollar corporation, and the marketing budget to reach millions of users. Firefox is barely surviving, and most of it is due to its corporate contracts, not because of its technical audience.
> How has that influence worked out for you so far? By that logic, all our family and friend circles would be running Linux, using OSS, and be more mindful of their privacy.
Asking normal people to use Linux and OSS is a bit too much, but I think that Macbook sales have had at least a bit of help by being endorsed by the technical crowd.
And iPhones and iPad, too. They are what you recommend to your family members after one too many requests to "fix" a "virus" on their Windows PC or Android device.
> HN consists of a niche audience of technical users already interested in startups and search technology.
Isnt that how firefox got popular, techies started to use it and then convinced others to switch. Of Course in the end it was no match against Google marketing for Chrome.
Kagi is not convenient in the sense of browser search engine awareness. They do plug-in type thing. Needs work from the browsers for better integration.
I didn't realise Neeva had shut down. I tried it for about a week, but stopped using it because it wasn't as snappy as Google. In fact, I always seem to return to Google from every other search engine I try because of its snappiness — decades of tuning seems to have paid off.
Kagi is the first alternative search engine that I actually use regularly instead of Google.
I used DDG for years, but more than half my queries ended up being prepended with !g because their results just weren't very good. With Kagi, I fall back on Google maybe once a month, and usually Google doesn't end up finding anything better.
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.
I love kagi but I hate this. It's not their fault, it's just a limitation of the os but it's such a hassle when you have to solve a Google captcha to get kagi results. I'm considering just removing that from my phone and switching back to Google there.
You can switch default search engine to DDG or Ecosia, Kagi extension will still redirect you away. Or use extensions like xSearch or xEngine, they seem to be better at redirecting
That's exactly what I do. I feed searches to Ecosia and the Kagi extension handles the rewrite. Works well on Mac and iOS. I only use Google explicitly with the !g operator (which I use sparingly, and often get the same results or slightly worse) or for Google Images (which are better for now)
I tried Neeva and immediately hated it - it felt slow and clunky. I tried Kagi and immediately loved it enough that I've been paying ever since they let me. I think the big thing that Kagi is doing differently to Neeva is just being good.
I know right! I can't remember the last time I had to click through to the second page of Kagi unless my search was a futile one in the first place (ie: I hadn't understood the problem enough to know what to search for)
> What's Kagi doing differently to be able to succeed?
Define success? It outperforms every other search engine in terms of quality of results and at least from what I understand, they're not too far off from breaking even on their salaries.
Neeva was a VC funded abomination and it showed, they even had deals with "big brand" companies like LastPass to offer bundles, but their core product sucked. Neeva search results were often worse than Google. That's not the case with Kagi.
Its not hard to define success. It means having more revenue than their cost, and paying all employees market rate salary(including the founder himself).
Unfortunately, it's a common bar for the continued existence of companies. I'd say successes if the company still offers a service in 5 or 10 years. Unless the operators an employees are all independently wealthy, you need to break even
Everyone has their own definition of success. For many, a "successful" tech startup is one that eventually lands a $100M+ buyout, or gets millions of paying customers, or some other metric that's far beyond "simply" arriving at a sustainable business that you (and I) mentioned.
Neeva did only one thing right: they cared about privacy, but otherwise they really did not do a good job. Their search results were worse than google, their load times were even slower than google, they tried making too much money too quickly, and they jumped towards fads too quickly.
They have their own browser, the Orion browser, to funnel people onto their search engine.
Their search engine is also better than google for me for most use cases already, it has a clean and smart design with well thought out features that add value.
I hate that Orion is not cross platform and limited to apple ecosystem.
With that said it is native and my default choice for macOS and iOS.
No telemetry, ad blocker built in, performant and supports extensions from chrome and firefox - on iOS too.
Hands down the best native tree style tabs of any browser on the market on top of that and easy tab syncing.
It’s still in development but it’s stable enough for me to be my main browser.
These two products show some serious technical ability from a small team. I bet on companies who invest in and show technical ability over those with VC money, big names focused on marketing and growth.
That's a paltry amount, why would they need to raise so little, don't they have the cash flow to cover it? I guess VCs arent in the mood to be so generous with their money anymore with the competition for capital so intense. We've probably reached the culling stage of the current cycle.
How do you pronounce this? Is it a soft <g>? Whenever I see Kagi on HN I smile, because my daughter has a soft toy (a sea horse) that she has named Kagi (she pronounces it kha-gee, with a hard g). Good luck!
I use FF on my apple devices, it's easy to set the default search engine there. I can customize my preferred search engine on the settings app, but Kaigi is not there.
The only options for me is:
- Google
- Yahoo
- Bing
- Duckduckgo (my current option)
- Ecosia
Kagi has successfully raised $670K in a SAFE note investment round, marking our first external fundraise to date. This was made possible with the participation of 42 accredited investors, most of whom are actual Kagi users.
That is a dense paragraph.
1) What is a "SAFE note"? Google tells me:
A "Simple Agreement for Future Equity" note is a way that startups can raise capital. The SAFE note is a legally binding agreement that allows an investor to buy a specific number of shares for an agreed-upon price at some point in the future, usually when the startup has a subsequent funding round.
2) What are "accredited investors"? Let's assume US.
Net worth over $1 million, excluding primary residence (individually or with spouse or partner)
Or:
Income over $200,000 (individually) or $300,000 (with spouse or partner) in each of the prior two years, and reasonably expects the same for the current year
To be clear, I don't like them from the perspective of equity crowdfunding, which has an alarmingly high percentage of low-information, follow-the-crowd, "dumb money" retail investors.
SAFEs muddy the waters. It's just another thing that already overwhelmed retail investors need to take into account when considering whether to invest.
As long as there isn't a secondary market on which to trade, then no, they aren't any worse. And right now, there isn't a good secondary market in the USA.
For context, you're reading this on Hacker News, a forum hosted by YC.
What Google didn't tell you is that SAFEs were invented by YC ten years ago in order to provide better angel/seed investing framework than the then-current bespoke convertible notes.
"Accredited investor" is basically someone who is supposed to be sophisticated enough that they won't first give you (a startup) some money, then later on say they didn't know that your startup was risky and sue you. Accepting investments only from accredited investors is a way to shield yourself from that scenario.
Both terms are used fairly often on HN (and really throughout the startup communities anywhere).
Anyone 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.
My friend Tom Connolly who wrote the first editor for Kaleidoscope (before Mac OS X came out, you could style your own buttons etc) used it, and that's how I found out.
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 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.
> 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
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)
Are they? Google could manually remove the worst SEO sites from the index and like reduce the spam you get for dev queries with like 95%.
It takes time to build up rank and like 10s to remove the site.
There is an extension that does this client side for Firefox. Try it. (I don't remember the name. I only have it on desktop).
The only explaintions are that Google is too dysfunctional to do anything or they are doing it on purpose to increase revenue. Otherwise there is no way the SEO would suddenly become this bad.
> Are they? Google could manually remove the worst SEO sites from the index and like reduce the spam you get for dev queries with like 95%.
Do you think they don't have a huge team doing just that? Easier said than done.
> The only explaintions are that Google is too dysfunctional to do anything or they are doing it on purpose to increase revenue. Otherwise there is no way the SEO would suddenly become this bad.
> Do you think they don't have a huge team doing just that? Easier said than done.
How can the Stackoverflow mirrors, that kinda hide that they are mirrors, rank so high then? If there was any team at Google doing manual review, the Google engineers would spam them with mails complaining that those site ruins their copy-pasta coding flow.
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.
OK I had never heard Kagi before this and I didn't realize it was that kind of post so I was confused.
If it's a Google alternative, wouldn't it be difficult because I imagine Google has so much lock in by now? Like I imagine they have special deals with like cloudflare or whatever so that Google's spiders are allowed but spiders from random companies that got less than a million dollars spiders aren't allowed? Is it even legal to webcrawl anymore if you don't have a team of lobbyists stationed at DC and Brussels just constantly pleasuring every politician? Probably they would say you are doing cyberfraud or wirecrime or interstate proxyterror of some kind, whose rules are buried in a stack of hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations?
> OK I had never heard Kagi before this and I didn't realize it was that kind of post so I was confused.
If it's a Google alternative, wouldn't it be difficult because I imagine Google has so much lock in by now?
You are absoluetly right. This is what this paragraph from the announcement addresses.
“Looking ahead, we are cognizant that when building Kagi, we are running a marathon and not a sprint. Altering entrenched habits in the society, such as the reliance on personal data and even pieces of what makes us human as currency for essential online activities like search and browsing, is a gradual process that will take time.”
They aren't trying to replace Google, they are an alternative for privacy-minded individuals who use/rely on searching a lot and want a better experience than Google provides.
Google will have its lock in but there's a market share of people like me (and many others here on HN) which have been let down by the constant enshittification of Google's search and will pay for an alternative providing the experience we were used with Google some 10-15 years ago.
Kagi is being smart, they don't need to become a multi-billion company, it's a small team (last I've seen it was about 15 people), providing a good enough product to have paying customers. I've been using it since Nov/2022 and been pretty happy to pay the US$ 10/month for a better and more private search product.
> Looking ahead, we are cognizant that when building Kagi, we are running a marathon and not a sprint.
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.
> why is a company raising $670k such big news here
because "news" is something that is "new" (in this case raising a tiny amount) as opposed to what everybody else is doing (raising 100x or 1000x that amount)?
there is of-course an availability and reporting bias (there are countless of small firms raising small amounts in various sectors) but kagi is reasonably known in this audience so the news is interesting
This sounds like good news for Crystal, too. Thanks to more resources, a company powered by Crystal is more likely to hire developers, publish code, sponsor open source projects, and generally be a showcase for the language.
> Crystal powers 90% of the Kagi search backend (reminder being Python). Highlights are great performance and concurency handling. Biggest downsides at this moment are compilation speed (does not take advantage of multi CPU cores) and debugging tools.
366 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadOn the other hand, it did teach me the true cost of searches, and I use a lot more !bangs now, like !mdn or !archwiki (although the search powering both of these are probably funded by donations)
It really does change the dynamic of how you search, if you know that the next search will cost you 1.25¢. Right now I use Ecosia, so I'm actually more motivated to do extra searches, to increase the number of trees they plant. Kagi is the other way around, search has a cost, so be mindful about what you search for. It's a great way for them to have a sense of their load, while also perhaps being ever so slightly more sustainable.
Ecosia and Kagi aren't targeting the same market. Ecosia, for example, isn't as serious about privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713050
0 - https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes
I was thinking the same, but then again, the investment is rather low, so it is a lot easier to dump that investor, if values don't align in the future. I might be reading it all wrong, but it also seems like the money comes from 42 different investors, making it even easier to part ways.
This is money expecting "more of this, just a bit better" rather than "giant exit, who cares what happens to the product afterwards"
Hint: non-wealthy people can become an Accredited Investor by passing the Series 7 or Series 65 (Investment Adviser), the latter of which can be done all on your own. I'm considering the Series 65, because it will also give me better retirement investment options as a US citizen (and taxpayer) residing in the EU.
Later on you would need cash to scale this business, but for early stage product development I think $500k to $1 million is the sweet spot.
They may have access to talent pool willing to work for their vision at significantly reduced rates, but unless they effectively sell themself to big cloud provider, they can’t significantly reduce the infrastructure cost.
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. Everybody is fed up with Google and Bing. There's a great opportunity here to disrupt the industry and destroy a trillion dollars in market cap.
But not for $670K.
It's more about curation (and I guess some machine learning) than completely new tech.
http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory/
We beg to differ on the need to raise large sums. Like Kagi we are on a marathon not a sprint. We have built a no-tracking and completely independent crawler search engine and infrastructure from the ground-up having raised £3m from angels only. Cuil, Blekko, Quaero and Neeva who raised 10s/100s of $m may have come and gone; meanwhile we have been slowly building since 2004, with a user and API customer base that is also growing healthily.
They aren't building a web crawler. Kagi is a search "client" (it is one way to build on a shoestring budget, alright), augmented by an in-house small-scale just-in-time crawler.
> From here, we take your query and use it to aggregate data from multiple other sources, including but not limited to Google, Bing, and Wikipedia, and other internal data sources in order to procure your search results. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-protection.html
> We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
I like Kagi's general vision for LLMs + Search. There's a real chance small competitors can compete with Google with clever use of LLMs' zero-shot summarization, categorization, intent recognition, and answering abilities.
Especially when google continues to be worse off year after year. Just search for my damn keywords, like you did 10 years ago, especially when I have already put quotes around them because you Re useless!
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 the value of Kagi to me.
They have their own AI summarizer engine though: https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
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.
I felt the same, but I do still need web search, and I do still want it to be as good as possible, so it's still worth it to me.
And actually, as I type this I'm less sure about how much ChatGPT has reduced the value of web search for me. I start with ChatGPT for almost everything that's not "news". But I still frequently do web searches branching out from what I learned via ChatGPT. It's fewer total searches than I've done before, but each one might be more valuable. And since I'm flowing from one tool to another, not having to wade through ads and bad ui and SEO spam also becomes even more valuable.
There's a lot of wasted effort in this industry. Slack has 1500+ employees just to make a chat app. Granted, it's a damn good chat app, but Mozilla is maintaining a browser with half as many people, with not everyone focused on Firefox at that.
My friend is now in a project where he billed for three weeks until all the issues with his dev account were sorted out. It remains unclear when he will be able to start actually working.
I spent two years building a web app + gRPC server that perhaps could have been just the latter.
I could go on. Point is, you can blow through $30mln easily but that doesn't mean you have to.
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.
If ever there was a moment where horizontal scaling looked promising, this is it.
A small operation in terms of number of developers yes. But not being able to subsidise user growth means they will never be able to build their own full web index as the fixed cost of doing that is too high for a small number of users.
As a consequence, they will always be at the mercy of Google/Bing. The range of things they can innovate on will always be limited. And the situation can only get worse as people start to expect more AI functionality.
I doubt that you can build a sustainable niche product if the effort you have to put into it is just as big as if you're building for billions of users. Having few users is not what defines a niche. Niches are defined by specialisation.
What do you reckon the cost of doing this would be?
Just doing the napkin math for say a Mojeek sized index (couple of billion docs) doesn't seem to justify a particularly astronomical budget.
That is indeed the key question. I tried to find out before commenting but the information I found is very vague. Internet Archive spends millions per year, but their index is updated far too slowly for a search engine. I have no idea what it costs to create a Google-size index.
Do you think the Mojeek index is good enough to compete with Google?
As a back-end for something like Kagi, it's sure getting there. Most of what sets Google apart is their exceptional level of user profiling. The actual indexing technology is likely on par with most of their competition.
Of course very little of that enters into API queries.
Assuming they'll need to index 820 billion pages (the number of pages preserved in the internet archive), at 100kb each, and assuming they use a database with 0.3x text data compression efficiency, they'll need at least 24600 TB to store those text data. Assuming $300 per 16TB disk, then they'll need to spend at least $7,380,000 for disk alone. This is a lot of money just for storage and we haven't included stuff like replication and backup, indexing metadata overhead, etc.
They changed that limit somewhere in the mid-2000s. Just as well, there's some CMS's out there where there's several hundred kilobytes of inline JS and CSS before any body text.
So you're looking at maybe 20 bn docs, 4 Kb each. 100 Tb, before compression.
"The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size."
https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/search/howsearchworks/how-...
Doesn't mean you have to be as big as Google to do something useful of course.
Google's index is likely very large because they don't have any real economic incentives to keeping it small.
Yes, absolutely, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But first you have to figure out what you can discard beyond the HTML tags themselves to avoid indexing all the garbage that is on each and every page.
When I tried to do this I came to the conclusion that I needed to actually render the page to find out where on the page a particular piece of text was, what font size it had, if it was even visible, etc. And then there's JavaScript of course.
So what I'm saying is that storing a couple of kilobytes is probably not the most costly part of indexing a page.
The couple of kilobytes per document is the actual storage footprint. Sure you need to massage the data, but that almost entirely CPU bound. You also need a lot of RAM for keeping the hot parts of the index.
Are there open source projects devoted to this functionality? It’s becoming more and more a sticking point for working with LLMs. Grabbing the text without navigation and other crap but while maintaining formatting and links, etc
For my specific purposes it has always been good enough to apply some simple heuristics. But that wouldn't have been possible without access to post rendering information, which only a real browser (https://pptr.dev) can reliably produce.
Is that a good way to build an index?
An index is just hashmap of words and list of urls. So you have to parse the page, and add the urls and word frequencies to the list.
In terms of storage is cheaper, in terms of computing power is more expensive.
Hash tables almost guarantee worst case disk read patterns. You use something like a skip list or a b-tree, since that's makes much better use of the hardware, and on top of that allows you to do incredibly fast joins.
As for the index; this underpins mojeek.com and our API; which customers use for search and/or AI. Common Crawl is ~3.5 billion pages and underpins LLMs. Our index is ~7 billion. Who knows what (else) Google, and Bing, do with their index ;) ?
[0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-threatens-dive...
I'm sure you know your users well after so many years in the search engine business, but having read your article I must say I find your approach risky. You seem to be betting on search engines and answer engines continuing to be complementary rather than substitutes.
But we are not the ones making this decision. Users will be making the decision in light of the newly available AI capabilities, and they will be making it with complete disregard for the health of the web, as is their nature :)
The "funny" thing is that big publishers are as happy right now as I haven't seen them in the past 25 years, because it is so completely obvious that chat AIs will destroy the web unless big tech starts making big payments to big publishers. As you rightly say, small businesses and publishers will be collateral damage.
But how do you make sure you're not collateral damage as well?
An LLM to digest results of a classic search index is greater than the sum of its parts. An LLMs that is not permitted to brush up on the relevant literature before answering a question generally doesn't produce very good answers, is prone to hallucinations etc. A pure LLM design isn't even a serious contender in the answer engine space.
The big publishers certainly won't let you do that as they are selling their data to Google, Microsoft, Facebook and whoever else has the money to train a fully fledged LLM, which is certainly not everyone.
A search engine partnering with an answer engine may not send traffic, but the answer engine is a potential customer for the websites the search engines direct them to.
Only indirectly by charging search engines for access to content. It would be an entirely different business model that requires a complex set of agreements between publishers, search engines and LLM providers.
Granted it's not impossible and certainly worth considering if you have search engine expertise but no money to train an LLM.
Sure. But Google/Bing has shown lack of interest in innovating for power searchers. I believe they'll continue doing so.
And even so, this space is big, I'm sure there are many niches that would fit a scrappy, subscription based player.
You're ignoring that Kagi runs on subscriptions, so this funding is not all there is. If the subscription covers basic user costs (which it should, because they just adjusted the pricing) or at least covers most of them then the 670K can be used for growth.
They're focusing on 2 things: a search engine AND a Mac-only web browser.
Such a waste. MacOS users might be open to paying (for Kagi in general) because they're used to paying for a bunch of things other OSes get included or as freeware, but still, the market share is small (depending on the source, 10-30%). And even if many of those would enjoy a Mac-native app, there are at least some, like myself, that refuse to use single platform tools. I have a bunch of devices on a bunch of different OSes, I'm not going to use a very special browser on one of them, losing sync, history, muscle memory when switching. That's the reason I can't stay on Arc even if I quite like some of it's goals and structure.
You always need to start somewhere, Kagi is now (just) a 15 person team. There are enough Macs (200M+) and iPhones (1B+) in use to justify selecting this as the first ecosystem to target for the browser. Really it comes down to resource management and allocation in the early stages.
What are some examples of those?
So long story short, my opinion is the exact polar opposite of what you said.
* For core search, that is, obviously there's vast slabs of services like maps, translate, etc etc where they're not even trying to compete.
This changed with ads. Suddenly search engines were used to find people searching.
All they need to do is nail enough value add for those users. The wider goal of disrupting Google/Bing is a different game. But getting a small company to 10K paying users might be doable given enough of a value add.
Of course they are based in the Bay area, so this kind of money doesn't have a huge runway there.
As someone who has already replaced Google with Kagi, as far as I'm concerned they've already done it.
I've never paid Google for anything (apart from with my data) but I've been paying Kagi for almost a year now. The model is different. From what I've seen so far, it's better.
The amount of money you burn through is not a good indicator of whether you'll end up with a good product or viable business at the end, IMHO
But are they depending on results from Google, Bing etc. or are they crawling the web themselves.
I think the (open) web is troubled from a content, quality and funding perspective.
The old web was the volunteer web. People produced useful content and it was interesting (Digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon and delicious)
I like reading personal tech blogs from the volunteer web. I get a lot of value from them.
I don't want the web to get worse so I subscribe to Wikipedia and at one point medium.
I kind of think the secret to quality is to commission high quality authors.
Kagi is just Bing under the hood with an OpenAI summarizer and a lot of tuning. It is fully reliant on the quality of search results it can fetch from Bing's databases.
I know there exists Qwant (a french company) which claim to have an independent engine, but they keep turning their Bing backend on for a lot of searches. Only truly independent engine from Google/Bing with relevant results that i know of is Brave Search. Not a great company, but they do know how to make a good search engine, and are practically alone in the space fighting against the Bing-based alternative search engine business model.
> Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing and vertical sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.
Zero right now (we dropped Bing completely after their API price hike). We need to update the documentation to reflect this, thanks for pointing it out.
There's a gap in the market for a search engine whose incentive structure doesn't cause it to become corrupted.
- [0]: https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
- [1]: https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt
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.
Very happy to see them raising, and very happy to give them my $10 each month. Money well spent.
or just
!help lenses
As an example: I'm playing Diablo 4 at the moment and getting info about the convoluted systems can be a chore. For example: I didn't know that I have to do at least a Tier 3 Nightmare Dungeon to unlock Sigil Crafting. None of the usual pages mentioned that. The Forum Lense saved me a lot of time because users discussing it mentioned it quite a lot.
One thing I started to use a lot since they removed the usage limit is their summarizer.
I made a little bookmarklet to quickly see a summary of the current page I'm browsing:
https://gist.github.com/Julioevm/68275ea1324046caedfdfb2ba0e...
Nevermind, I'm dumb. Just create a new bookmark and post the raw contents of the file into the URL field.
ref: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#why-doe...
Eh... This is a tall order when competition is 'free'. Anyways, I wish them good luck as competition is inherently good.
Specially so for technical queries or prior art queries it really feels like a 2007 google crawler, which is actually a complement.
To be clear, I don't think Kagi will be next google. But I do think they have a chance to survive if they don't ruthlessly over extend their scope.
Welp. Until now their search and their browser were supported by me and people like me, but now they are supported by investors who will want ROI. As history shows, the best way to get ROI is to become free and mine user data. Congrats to the team on paycheck though!
Public trading means clear protocol for ROI and it allows to have many small investors who can have as little say as you specify (non voting shares etc). Comes with requirement for a lot of documentation and transparency too. So accountability. If business I like wants to grow and needs money this is the route I want it to take
You don't need to organize fundraising events etc you just do your thing and if you do it well you get extra money.
But of course it is all assuming Kagi cannot profit enough from is users. Which apparently it cannot.
Edit: 300/day is too much, apparently I use about 100/day according to my search history.
The person who is willing to pay for a search engine is also going to be a person care more about search and use it more. My best guess is that 1000 searches per month is right on the edge of what their average user can get by with. It's fair enough, they do need to make money, and I have no problems believe that 300 is about right for the average internet user. It just gives a false impression of your expected cost as a potential customer.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilo-
I'm going to go have a coffee.
https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=seinfeld_06_01_191×tamp=0...
If you have the money to participate and lie about having/earning more money then you qualify.
There is no constitutional way to prevent you from investing based on net worth, so the law places consequences on the companies offering investments.
And the only time this affects the company is if they were relying on a regulatory exemption that also allows unaccredited investors, in which case you should have just participated as an unaccredited investor and they were supposed to verify.
Otherwise, the law says “self-certify”, which is the state sanctioned term for lying.
What? Of course there is. Low net worth isn’t a protected class. We don’t do it that way because the purpose of the law is to protect small investors.
If a fine or sanction from the government was applied to the investor themselves based on net worth, I would argue 5th amendment and 14th amendment equal application of laws, and 1st amendment's freedom of speech citing the Citizen's United case where money movement is speech
I think that would be resilient in most circuits and certainly scotus
Investment = you are not personally liable and no need to return the money if u fail. It's not ur money.
Bootstrap = you are responsible to pay it back.iys ur money once u get it.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
> We are not affiliated with the legendary Kagi - the shareware payments platform. … We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance.
Now let's go and blow that money in Vegas.
/s
Same impression here
Same here!
I think this is because our eyes-brain system is optimizing the read operation by scanning the words and maps them against a list of words we already familiar with, thus, sometimes it got the wrong meaning. This trick was used by some brands to mislead people to buy some products with a familiar brand name.. like “Adibas” and “Reedok”.
> makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission
I really hope so but no one can guarantee this would be the case if the company get bigger with more money being thrown there.
In its first years, Google’s tagline was “don’t be evil“ but they couldn’t deliver the promise.
OpenAI’s original mission evaporated as soon as ChatGPT became a thing.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979981
Huh?
By the way, to "bootstrap" a business is short for "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" (yes, it's an old phrase) and means not raising any money.
Just a to bootstrap a computer is to start it when it has no code loaded or running. Nowadays it's in ROM so the term is rather obscure but we used to toggle a little bootstrap program in from the front panel or, if you were lucky, load it in from paper tape. That program was very short, just enough to get some more code loaded and start it.
Today I learned! Technically Kagi was bootstrapped up to this point (I've invested $2MM+ of my own money to get us this far). This is the first external fundraise (as noted in the annoucement) and what makes it very special to me is that people participating in the round are Kagi users who were already a part of our journey.
This investment is a good sign, though. I'm rooting for them. We need more competition in this space, and a proper business not hijacked by advertisers is always a good thing.
But maybe there's room for smaller search engines with alternative business models to compete with each other. marginalia.nu is another promising startup.
Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are the personal IT support departments of some subset of our family, friends, and their friends. They come to us asking for advice, or to set their computers/phones up, or to fix them after they "caught viruses". However begrudgingly we do that, it puts us in a position of power - they listen to and trust in what we say, and accept uncritically what we do to their machines. And, our interests are mostly aligned with theirs - even if we don't care about particular friend-of-a-friend's happiness, we'll still do them good so they don't have to come back with more issues any time soon.
This is how Google Chrome spread. This is how Firefox still survives. This is how several brands of anti-malware software spread - a mistake that's now difficult to undo. This is how AdBlock Plus became a thing, and how uBlock Origin is now replacing it. All these trends and more, I participated in first-hand. People still remember and follow advice I gave them over a decade ago (which isn't always good - see the anti-malware stuff).
And so is the case with Kagi, to a degree. I'm paid user for 1.5 years now, happy with the service. I recommend it in relevant discussions, I mention it to people who spot it - but since it's a paid product, it is a tough sell with general population. Still, I try to spread the word, like I do with any other good and non-user-abusive tool.
That said, this news makes me somewhat reluctant to recommend Kagi. I'll keep using it because it provides me immediate value for reasonable price, but taking investment often is a Faustian bargain. In this case it's not as clear as with regular VC backing, so I guess we'll see where this goes.
> Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are the personal IT support departments of some subset of our family, friends, and their friends.
How has that influence worked out for you so far? By that logic, all our family and friend circles would be running Linux, using OSS, and be more mindful of their privacy. IME my attempts at convincing others to use the tools that I use has mostly been met with lukewarm response, or even arguments in favor of the tools that they already use. Convincing someone to change their computing habits is not just a matter of being considered an expert in the field.
Google Chrome spread because it had the resources and influence of a billion-dollar corporation, and the marketing budget to reach millions of users. Firefox is barely surviving, and most of it is due to its corporate contracts, not because of its technical audience.
Asking normal people to use Linux and OSS is a bit too much, but I think that Macbook sales have had at least a bit of help by being endorsed by the technical crowd.
Isnt that how firefox got popular, techies started to use it and then convinced others to switch. Of Course in the end it was no match against Google marketing for Chrome.
Why? Even if they never get close to being as popular as Google, they can still have millions of paying users.
Did not have enough time to actually use them though.
I used DDG for years, but more than half my queries ended up being prepended with !g because their results just weren't very good. With Kagi, I fall back on Google maybe once a month, and usually Google doesn't end up finding anything better.
https://browser.kagi.com
Define success? It outperforms every other search engine in terms of quality of results and at least from what I understand, they're not too far off from breaking even on their salaries.
Neeva was a VC funded abomination and it showed, they even had deals with "big brand" companies like LastPass to offer bundles, but their core product sucked. Neeva search results were often worse than Google. That's not the case with Kagi.
Its not hard to define success. It means having more revenue than their cost, and paying all employees market rate salary(including the founder himself).
Everyone has their own definition of success. For many, a "successful" tech startup is one that eventually lands a $100M+ buyout, or gets millions of paying customers, or some other metric that's far beyond "simply" arriving at a sustainable business that you (and I) mentioned.
Their search engine is also better than google for me for most use cases already, it has a clean and smart design with well thought out features that add value.
I hate that Orion is not cross platform and limited to apple ecosystem.
With that said it is native and my default choice for macOS and iOS.
No telemetry, ad blocker built in, performant and supports extensions from chrome and firefox - on iOS too.
Hands down the best native tree style tabs of any browser on the market on top of that and easy tab syncing.
It’s still in development but it’s stable enough for me to be my main browser.
These two products show some serious technical ability from a small team. I bet on companies who invest in and show technical ability over those with VC money, big names focused on marketing and growth.
> Are you affiliated with the legendary Kagi shareware platform?
> No. That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events. We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance.
https://kagi.com/faq#pronounce
[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
1) What is a "SAFE note"? Google tells me:
2) What are "accredited investors"? Let's assume US.SEC tells me: https://www.sec.gov/education/capitalraising/building-blocks...
Or:SAFEs muddy the waters. It's just another thing that already overwhelmed retail investors need to take into account when considering whether to invest.
https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/safe-securities
Agree, but are SAFEs any worse than a normal convertible?
What Google didn't tell you is that SAFEs were invented by YC ten years ago in order to provide better angel/seed investing framework than the then-current bespoke convertible notes.
You can read all about it here: https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/
"Accredited investor" is basically someone who is supposed to be sophisticated enough that they won't first give you (a startup) some money, then later on say they didn't know that your startup was risky and sue you. Accepting investments only from accredited investors is a way to shield yourself from that scenario.
Both terms are used fairly often on HN (and really throughout the startup communities anywhere).
https://www.akamaidesign.com/studio/
UPDATE: his web design and hosting service was very advanced for its time!
https://www.akamaidesign.com/
Weirdly, this seems to be an entirely different thing. I guess the name and/or domain got sold to a completely distinct operation.
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.
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)
Are they? Google could manually remove the worst SEO sites from the index and like reduce the spam you get for dev queries with like 95%.
It takes time to build up rank and like 10s to remove the site.
There is an extension that does this client side for Firefox. Try it. (I don't remember the name. I only have it on desktop).
The only explaintions are that Google is too dysfunctional to do anything or they are doing it on purpose to increase revenue. Otherwise there is no way the SEO would suddenly become this bad.
Do you think they don't have a huge team doing just that? Easier said than done.
> The only explaintions are that Google is too dysfunctional to do anything or they are doing it on purpose to increase revenue. Otherwise there is no way the SEO would suddenly become this bad.
This is not based in reality.
How can the Stackoverflow mirrors, that kinda hide that they are mirrors, rank so high then? If there was any team at Google doing manual review, the Google engineers would spam them with mails complaining that those site ruins their copy-pasta coding flow.
I've seen Krita reach HN's front page. Not "Krita 5 just released". Literally just sigifing Krita's existance.
If it's a Google alternative, wouldn't it be difficult because I imagine Google has so much lock in by now? Like I imagine they have special deals with like cloudflare or whatever so that Google's spiders are allowed but spiders from random companies that got less than a million dollars spiders aren't allowed? Is it even legal to webcrawl anymore if you don't have a team of lobbyists stationed at DC and Brussels just constantly pleasuring every politician? Probably they would say you are doing cyberfraud or wirecrime or interstate proxyterror of some kind, whose rules are buried in a stack of hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations?
You are absoluetly right. This is what this paragraph from the announcement addresses.
“Looking ahead, we are cognizant that when building Kagi, we are running a marathon and not a sprint. Altering entrenched habits in the society, such as the reliance on personal data and even pieces of what makes us human as currency for essential online activities like search and browsing, is a gradual process that will take time.”
Google will have its lock in but there's a market share of people like me (and many others here on HN) which have been let down by the constant enshittification of Google's search and will pay for an alternative providing the experience we were used with Google some 10-15 years ago.
Kagi is being smart, they don't need to become a multi-billion company, it's a small team (last I've seen it was about 15 people), providing a good enough product to have paying customers. I've been using it since Nov/2022 and been pretty happy to pay the US$ 10/month for a better and more private search product.
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.
So it's more what they're doing rather than how much they raised.
because "news" is something that is "new" (in this case raising a tiny amount) as opposed to what everybody else is doing (raising 100x or 1000x that amount)?
there is of-course an availability and reporting bias (there are countless of small firms raising small amounts in various sectors) but kagi is reasonably known in this audience so the news is interesting
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32687071:
> Crystal powers 90% of the Kagi search backend (reminder being Python). Highlights are great performance and concurency handling. Biggest downsides at this moment are compilation speed (does not take advantage of multi CPU cores) and debugging tools.