With the trend that the tech industry seems to be taking towards enshitification (I might be quite cynical...) Kagi proves that is possible to make profitable business differently!
Their target was to break even around 25K paying customers. Would be interesting to hear if that is still the goal and where they currently stand but TFA doesn’t cover that topic.
As a Kagi customer, I hope their choice to allocate nearly a third of their investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts doesn’t lead to their demise.
hehe! I see it as great marketing, possibly decreasing churn (although Kagi subscribers seem among the most enthusiastic I've seen around!) and just generally continuing with the tred of goodwill towards users (the opposite of the usual treatment of users from big tech)
It’s likely to lead to more real world discussions of the product, someone is bound to ask what the shirt is about, or you might feel more motivated to talk about it while wearing it.
Especially ones that do not have their name. As someone who has heard about Kagi, but not actually visited their site or used it, I had no idea they had a dog mascot.
If I saw one of those shirts in the wild, and I hadn’t just read this post and seen the pictures of the shirts, I would have had no idea it was a Kagi shirt.
Having received many t shirts from companies and conferences, I mostly don't wear them if the branding is really over the top. As described, a Kagi shirt would be something I'd actually wear
But isn't the goal of the t-shirt a gift for the first 20k paying users? The goal for them doesn't seem to be about what they get back from giving away the t-shirt.
Based on their public data, they have 20,000+ paying users, and 1500 users paying for the family plan, which if all of the users are on the cheapest $5/month plan (which, many probably are on the $10/month plan like myself, as that gives you unlimited searches) would give them $100K+ each month.
Sounds pretty sustainable already to me, unless they have a really large team and/or really inefficient infrastructure, neither which seem true to me.
The expensive parts of the infrastructure are not their own, and the expense will scale by number of requests.
Back of the envelope:
The Bing API costs about $0.015 per query at the most cost effective tier. Kagi's highest revenue per query pricing is $5/300 queries = $0.166 / query. That's pretty slim margins, and only made worse by the $10 tier.
Now, they can of course start doing exclusively their own crawling, indexing and ranking and avoid paying some larger search engine for API access. But for that to be cheaper, they need orders of magnitude more scale
Kagi has a bunch of different sources, it doesn't seem like all results come from the same source, so without any particular insight into how each query works behind the scenes, I'd gather it be very hard for any of us to come up with an average cost per query like you tried to do.
Sure, that's why I explicitly stated it was a back of the envelope calculation. It wont be right to the penny, but it will certainly have the right order of magnitude.
I'll assert that even a back of the envelope calculation is more useful than your initial "they must be sustainable unless the infra is inefficient, and it feels like it isn't" statement. Do you have an actual number rather than feelings? Is that number significantly lower than this estimate?
Vlad from Kagi here. We are very close to breakeven currently, with 4+ years runway with current spend and it gets better every day. Budget for shirts was allocated months ago.
Kagi is slightly different than other SV startups in how we approach things because of the freedom given by being (nearly) completely bootstrapped and built with sustainability in mind since day one. Some companies buy ads to attract new customers, we buy tshirts to show gratitude to existing. We also reinvest any savings we make into lowering the price and increasing the value of the product (check our product velocity in release notes [1]). Our customers propelled us to where we are through word of mouth, it makes sense to keep investing in nurturing that relationship. And having 20,000 doggos walk around the earth soon is fun.
Winning in search is a marathon, not a sprint. We might as well enjoy the run.
There was a hilarious blog post on here a few months ago from some guy who collects database company T shirts. A lot of them are quite bad but a few are really good. IIRC his favorite was from Snowflake.
I think I might still like the Snowflake one (3) the best though. Although rereading the article he says there is writing on the back of the Snowflake one which makes me not like it as much. There are very few stylish shirts I enjoy that have writing on the back of them.
For reference, that "some guy" is Andy Pavlo, a professor of databases at Carnegie Mellon. He has a lot of neat writeups online, like this annual review of new database systems [0]. He puts up lectures on the internet for free too.
Having been to Dr. Pavlo's office - or at least, one of them - I can attest to there being multiple cardboard boxes filled with gifted shirts from different companies. One of my favorite designs was actually from CMU's DB group itself - it has a little "this database kills fascists" tag on it, with a skull motif :D
I’ve used Kagi as my default search engine for months and wasn’t aware it had a dog mascot either! I’ll probably turn the shirt into some word-of-mouth marketing at my gym, so I wouldn’t say my free shirt is a terrible investment.
For anyone else wondering, they raised $670,000 from 42 small investors in June 2023. Non-traditional fundraise. I agree that spending that money on t-shirts is weird. As a new Kagi subscriber I don't want a t-shirt. I want a thriving search engine.
Suggestion for Kagi: If you haven't made the t-shirts yet, offer users to request/reserve one first. That way you won't ship to those who don't want it (though you won't ship to some who do, so maybe save some t-shirts on the side for those willing to contact you to ask if there's any left after the deadline)
Reading the blog post it sounds like users will get a credit toward a free shirt/stickers. They will still need to pay shipping, which should be enough to keep people from getting it just for the hell of it. After a period of time, if there are unclaimed shirts they will open them up to those users beyond the first 20k.
While it sounds like they will print 20k no matter what, it doesn’t seem like they will randomly ship them out to users. They really can’t, as they don’t have the addresses of all their users.
"Sizes are first come first serve" so I suppose they estimate how many of each size they need and then let people get a shirt as long as their size is available.
Is kagi’s financial status that dire? Call me stupid, but I’m excited to get the shirt and feel warmly about the fact that the leadership at Kagi might actually be thinking about their early users the way described in the blog post. The $200k probably will not pay itself back from the shirts themselves, but I’m definitely going to shill kagi much harder now.
I didn't see published costs on the link, but it did mention the shirts were produced in Serbia... I imagine at a substantially lower cost than your assumption of full retail per shirt..
They might think it's free advertising, but I only wear t-shirts to bed or on the weekends and vacations. Most of the time I wear button-ups or polos. Them sending me a free t-shirt isn't going to get them as much advertising as they hoped for.
It feels more to me like they're giving a month (and a bit?) free service in the form of a T-shirt. At this point, their 2023 raise was "only" about three months of gross revenue. Shipped, the tshirts are probably, eh, $13 USD?
I don't really have an opinion about whether this is an effective advertising spend or not. I hope they follow up. I don't need another free T-shirt but I'll probably wear it, I like the doggo.
My results got so much worse since they started using the brave API for search results I had to cancel. Was a great product but I am back on self hosted search.
As a pretty new subscriber, can you tell me a bit more about this? Using bing under the hood is part of what eventually made me leave DDG. And I'm not particularly excited about using brave services.
That's your choice, but not all of us want to wear our politics on our search engine. I don't support what the Brave founder did, but there are probably 100+ people there that don't think that way and are just working and living their lives, and since Brave doesn't have any stance one way or another, it's just another company with a service to me. So is Kagi
I don't fucking care about politics and I am tired of it being brought up when I am explicitly talking about the quality of search. So please stop injecting your "Just take the L because of my political agenda attitude" and talk about the product. The whole discussion got so political on their discord and forum that you can't even talk about the degraded quality before some left or right wing nut comes around going "AKSCHUALLY".
I do care about the search results and they got worse and are not deterministic anymore since they started using brave. Maybe it's omething else they changed in the code but I expect to at least see the first results of a previous search on the page when I search for it again a few days later. Especially when it was a helpful result. It's useless for me now.
I started subscribing in like October and haven't been searching much since the new year cause I've been really busy. I think I have also noticed this quality degradation, and also the results taking much longer. I'm not gonna say it's useless but I understand. So I can dislike it for that reason with you.
As far as politics... for a lot of people not relying on a single particular global megacorp (who tend to extend the soft-power of a given state or economic bloc) for access to information is a semi-political choice. There is very much an inescapable concern of "who chooses what I get to see and what are their incentives" that can't really be reduced to "I don't care about politics". It cannot be separated from politics, which is why people have such strong feelings about it. I'm not sure that's what people really mean though, I think they talk past each other a lot on this topic. No disrespect meant to you and I appreciate your comments.
I really like the idea that they'd hedge and not give any single index overwhelming leverage over what Kagi users are fed, and conveniently for me (who does care a bit about the who of the thing) if they stick to that approach it should provide more diversity of contemporaneous political messaging... so it can also please the (I think somewhat tedious) "no politics" crowd at the same time. So that seems good?
Tradeoffs maybe, and give them some more time to figure it out, incorporate more indices?
Agreed, the quality has slipped somewhat but I do believe the choice was in part due to the way cheaper offering by Brave, as after the change (or with it), they brought back $10/mo unlimited. Looking at brave's pricing, they do it based on reqs/sec + limit/month and it's way cheaper ($5/mo sub = 20mil searches, $0.00000025 a search if maxing it out) - This is based on the data for AI plan which is $5/mo rather than $3/mo as Kagi does run some AI stuff atop the results [1].
I feel I've seen more AI Spam recently although when I do I've just ended up downvoting the site immediately, and that has generally fixed the issues as there seems to be a few repeat offenders. That could totally be up to the Kagi postprocessing being tweaked though.
Why is their logo the letter g instead of k? Have they considered the risk of a trademark violation lawsuit from their competitor, Google?
As one of the 20K paying members, I feel embarrassed that I hadn't noticed this until now. Because this article presented the idea of wearing a Kagi T-Shirt, I suddenly started to care about what the logo looked like. Also, yes, I am excited to rep Kagi search.
Took me a while too, I think GP and the text about the designer considering where the 'logo' is anchored in designing the, err, 'logo' are talking about the full name as shown at https://kagi.com/assets at the top. I don't know where else that's used though.
It's definitely confusing to call it a logo in talking about designing the logo (let's say icon) though.
Mind you before seeing that about the 'g' I thought the dog was their 'logo'. I'm surprised the designer didn't insist on some simplification, a stronger, single identity; not that I know anything about design or marketing.
I’ve been using Kagi for a month or two now and I still cannot for the life of me find the right tab because of their weird yellow “g” logo. When I think “Kagi” I definitely don’t think “yellow g”. But hey, every interaction I’ve ever had with a UI/UX designer has been… counterproductive, so I guess this is par for the course.
I always figured it was a poke in the/kick to the nads of google who forgot who their customers (the people who bring value to the company) are. Hint it ain't ads being bought by ad buyers.
I find it really confusing in the favicon in my browser when I'm typing searches. It's clearly not Google's brand, but why is it a G? (They have a whole FAQ about this which I did not find convincing.)
The product is great. I love that I can pin, raise or lower the importance of specific websites. I average about 800 searches a month, and I have only had to go to another search engine maybe once or twice a week. This product feels like what the web should be.
I switched to them a few months ago, I was previously using duckduckgo (and Google before that). As most of you have probably noticed Google search results have seriously dropped in quality the last few years, but especially in 2023. I'm no longer able to get meaningful results for almost any topic, especially if it's technical, the only results are AI generated (?) / obvious SEO spam websites. It takes me multiple different search terms and clicking through multiple results to find anything semi relevant, and even then it's a shallow article maybe summarising what I'm looking for. Unfortunately DDG seems to be going the same way.
Whereas Kagi reminds me of the 'old' google search. The results are meaningful and relevant, not diluted with pages of generic article results. They also offer a lot of great customisation options like being able to block or boost certain sites in results. They have some built in lists for common filler sites. I can't comment on the AI variation but I hear that's progressing well.
I wouldn't call myself a power user of Kagi, but even then I'm getting far better results than other search engines, definitely worth the price per month.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just thought I'd share my anecdotal experience.
Does it have an option to exclude commercial websites? That'd be quite useful to me. Pretty much every time I try to find information about a product, all I find are sites trying to sell it to me (but I already have it and want to find information about it, damn it!).
Iirc there is an exclude (or at the very least, weights), though you'd have to do it by hand. Though i do think there is a social feature to install other peoples weights.
Another Kagi user here, yes, the customization of results is way better than any other search engine I've used. Eg, personalization can be manually set to lower or raise weight of results from specific domains. This has become extremely useful to not only filter out bad sites, but increase relevant results when you regularly get information from sites like GitHub etc.
Stats are released about these as well so you can easily copy heavy used fiters [0].
If they do/done a user survey, it would be interesting to see where all paying users are coming from. My guess is that a substantial amount of users come from hearing about Kagi on HN or in HN comments.
I did that a couple months ago, and just signed up for a paid tier after I tried to go back to duckduckgo and started losing my mind. Kagi is better for discovering new content and mediocre places on the internet.
Small warning. If you click the "more" button at the bottom of a list of results, it silently does another search and deducts that from your remaining free searches.
> I wouldn't call myself a power user of Kagi, but even then I'm getting far better results than other search engines, definitely worth the price per month.
This only works as long as Kagi is a niche. The moment any search engine becomes commonplace I think they will inevitably succumb to SEO. Otherwise, they would have to change their methodologies every once in a while to completely flip the ecosystem.
SEO should be called "GEO", it's google optimization. Spam keyword blogsites only work because google prioritizes that stuff. They're driven by ad revenue so they're incentivized to show commerical sites over non commercial ones, etc. ,etc, etc.,etc.
Not necessarily. You'll still be able to nuke the whole domain from your results, permanently. That means you'll see the spam once, and getting a new domain promoted to the top takes time and effectively money.
I also hope that domains which get blocked by lots of people will get reviewed for global downranking, but I don't think that's happening yet?
uBlacklist can only block sites. But Kagi can raise or lower sites in pagerank, and can pin sites on the top. Boosting sites up in the result is more efficient than blocking spam sites one by one.
I managed to filter that, geeksforgeeks.org and towardsdatascience.com out with Kagi. It's quite helpful being able to slightly reduce prioritization on a per site basis so that instead of showing up as top result it'll be buried a bit but still accessible.
hopefully what will happen is no single search engine will be dominant, ensuring that problem can't happen (we'll probably have other problems instead)
I think it also has to do with incentives. If your business model is selling ads then you have a balancing act between user and customer satisfaction.
With Kagi as I understand it, the customer is the user since it’s a premium product that isn’t selling ads. There’s really no good reason for them not to just nuke bad actors.
> The moment any search engine becomes commonplace I think they will inevitably succumb to SEO
Thankfully when I come across a irrelevant domain in Kagi I can just remove it from any future search results completely. If enough people do that, it may show up on the "most commonly removed" list inviting others to also ax it.
I rarely ever have an issue with spam on Kagi just by largely using the standard filters, and I'm confident this will remain the case.
And unrelated but I really like that I can redirect all reddit urls in search results to old.reddit.com, twitter to nitter etc. very helpful in searching on mobile.
There is a good chance that it will remain niche due to the paid and forced-login model. This is a good thing. I hope they will manage to position themselves well as an alternative search engine with clean, unmanipulated results; and be careful about unhealthy (greedy) growth.
They are the biggest search engine; every SEO trick, every spam attack is spearheaded against them. But also being the biggest and the inevitable, they can afford to blunt their search tool somehow in order to show more lucrative sort-of-hits and sell more ads. A moral hazard to do such a thing is always present fr any market-dominating player.
Kagi, in comparison, is tiny, and almost nobody cares to attack their algorithms. Back in 1990s, when Macs were a small minority in the PC-dominated world, they were the safest desktop machines, because almost nobody cared to write malware for them. Now that Macs are a sizable segment of computers in hands of important people, they are targeted by malware all right.
> every SEO trick, every spam attack is spearheaded against them.
Sure, but also they're ignoring extremely basic issues. "every SEO trick" is one thing, "just copy the SO content and still get ranked on the first page" is them not caring. We can worry about them dealing with the complex issues after they address the low hanging fruit.
The question to about the obvious quality drop for Google is, Is this intentional? Perhaps some cost saving or ROI measures? Or the motive always was to just train their AI and we just helped with that?
I've been curious for a while too and I've been trying to de-google myself a tiny bit each year (more or less dropped Chrome in 2023).
Once I actually grab a full time job again I wouldn't mind grabbing my own subscription here to try it out. I'm curious if 300 searches/month is truly enough for me, though. And what would happen if I go over that rate. Am I simply unable to search more for that month?
Fwiw, I initially burned through the free searches in a few days, so definitely not enough IMO. Add the fact that free searches never got refreshed for my account, and I was pretty much unable to properly test the service for months. But bangs still work after the limit, thus I kept it as default given that I heavily use bangs to search other services.
Still I ended up subscribing, and after properly testing, I can recommend. The service is good, the blacklist feature is essential to me now; is just that the free tier is shit.
Yeah, I found the opposite for me, as I expected. I did a little under 400 queries in the last 30 days. I could definitely cut down a lot of redundant or simple searches to get under 400, but given how ubiquitous it is for me to simply so random questions (or simply search around a lot for documentation via search engine) I'd rather not have to worry about it.
On top of that, this is during a month without any job (where I'd search even more on the clock). I hear it's 1.5 cents per query over but I can imagine doing 600+ searches once I'm employed again.
> I was surprised to find that I’m consistently nowhere near 300
Per month?
My current Kagi searches from 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches. For sure I'd do 300 searches in a week, and on a particularly hairy day I might do it in a day.
> 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches
1256 / 23 (days between today and Jan 3rd) = 54.6 searches on average per day.
Some days higher, some lower. Sometimes it can take a couple of tries to get the search right, so you do 5-10 searches in one minute maybe. Doesn't seem farfetched to me.
I'm a happy paying customer. Kagi is the first non-Google search engine I've used where I don't feel the need to constantly cross-check the results with Google.
For all the people gawking at the expense of the free t-shirts: AFAICT those of us who are receiving them are paying customers; it's not like the money is coming right off of the top of their venture funds.
Honestly I think the whole "we are a startup search engine company who decided to spend the time to set up a production chain for t-shirts" is a worse use of resources than the actual money spent.
We are only humans, and we have a mountain to climb. Setting a base camp to pause and reflect on what we already achieved makes climbing that mountain more, not less, likely. Besides, there is no rush. We might as well enjoy the journey.
The shirts probably won't fit people that well. It just seems like a waste of time/money that nobody will really see value in (I'm a paying customer btw). But if it's more for "you" than the customer then that is a better way to frame it.
Maybe that’s by design. If someone sees “Kagi” on the shirt they may look it up, not get it, and move on. If instead the dog acts as an ice breaker, “cute dog,” then the person wearing it can mention what it is, but more importantly, why they like and use it.
I’d also be much more likely to wear a shirt without a URL on it. I’ve been gifted shirts with URLs before, I have never and will never wear them in public.
I still think the 20k shirts is a terrible waste of mine, and I'm unlikely to even claim mine because the designs/colors don't appeal (there's a reason why very few clothes are bright yellow) and I'd still have to pay for shipping.
That sounds pretty plausible. I use Kagi liberally across my work and home computers and phone. I’m sitting just shy of 1000 searches per month, which works out to 30-ish per day.
I signed up a month ago and this is the first time something “not Google” has stuck for me. The results are solid, the interface is clean, and it feels good supporting an ad free product.
I love this, but I really hope that spending so much on shirts doesn't come back to bite them. But, to their credit, this is something that a truly special company would do.
In this age of ongoing enshittification, seeing a company do something special for the customers who are cheering for its success, is actually heartwarming.
IMO, this will boost/cement customer loyalty.
Also, I often want to contribute (financially) to such projects, because I want them to succeed.
However, don't happen to have 3k USD to spare (kagi did a fundraiser via SAFE notes) -- I imagine that, now they've figured out the t-shirt logistics, they could offer other designs in future, as a way to contribute money (like buying merch at a band's concert). I'd buy a couple more doggo tees, if/when they made more designs.
Kagi having a small user base is actually an intrinsic advantage in that there is no SEO spam arms race.
It is not worth it to website operators to spend money/time trying to game Kagi’s algorithms.
Because of this, as a paying user, I hope they can find a sustainable business with a relatively small number of paid users, where they can make nice profits and have nice salaries for their employees based of selling a service to a relatively few people who value it.
Also do note that there isn't really a "Kagi's algorithm", since every Kagi user will received customized results based on how the set their account.
To game Google, you do stuff on your website content ; try various keywords regularly with authenticated and unauthenticated requests and see how your actions on your website affects your position on the requests' results.
With Kagi, you can't do unauthenticated requests, so the results you'll get will be unique to your account. So what you'll see is not what another random user will get.
I guess you can still create new raw account each time, and maybe use the free-tier, but it's going to be a lot of work on your side without any assurance that the results are going to be the same on most user's results.
Furthermore, now that the team learned their lessons about monitoring usage more closely[^1], it's going to be quite hard to play this game without being noticed.
> Also do note that there isn't really a "Kagi's algorithm", since every Kagi user will received customized results based on how the set their account.
Of course, there is a "Kagi algorithm" that takes the website's contents and ranks it according to the search. The algorithm, of course, takes into account user preferences, but there is a massive amount of commonality. Yes, that ranking algorithm probably can be games, just like Google's algorithm is gamed now with SEO spam.
However, because of the size, there is no real incentive to spend time/money gaming it, but it is misleading to suggest that there is no algorithm.
Nice. Good to see more competition in this space. I wonder if they’re profitable yet. Fun fact: Qwant, a French search engine had almost 20 million users and nearly failed before a revamp in 2021. Search is tough.
Fortunately Kagi has got nothing in common with Qwant.
Qwant is, from the beginning, a scam to grab public funding.
They made tons of promises but actually never delivered on them.
Worst, they even lied on what the product could do, pretending to provide results from their own index while returning results from Bing.
If it wasn't enough, there's also stories of management misconduct on employees.
Some stuff is public and partly told on the Wikipedia page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Controversies
It's a classic "we'll make a French/European [X]" with [X] being Google, Facebook, AWS...
There's at least one project like that every year for two decades now.
Every time it's a failure from the outside, but the founders are quite successful in pocketing millions of public funding from France/Europe.
Meanwhile, Kagi is "let's make a search engine for power users willing to pay for it".
They're not here to take on Google. They're not here to grab public funding.
They're making a product for which people are willing to pay.
They deliver on absolutely everything they say. Proof is in the pudding.
I'm a happy Kagi user/customer for a few months now, but what I find the most satisfying is not the website itself, it's how they are building it.
While every big company is falling for the _enshitification_ of their products, seeing Kagi doing the exact opposite, and yet being clear that their goal is to take our money each month, is honestly quite refreshing.
I've long been suspicious that google doesn't want you to get an answer too quickly, or you'll go off google and back to whatever you were previously doing, thus they furnish you fewer ads and make less ad revenue.
Curious to know if kagi or any of its users have tried to quantify how much more quickly they get answers to search queries.
Even if it only saves 10 minutes a month, it could be worth switching.
It's highly likely the site they go to will have Google's ads on it so they aren't really losing out. AdSense has 90% market share according to a couple sources I read (which I searched for using Kagi).
How does that work? They have a contractual obligation to report to Microsoft and Google how many individual IPs have accessed Kagi domains and pay accordingly?
No, they just pay for their APIs per search. It costs Kagi about 1¼¢ per search.[1] Each user searches 20 times per day on average.[2] So it costs Kagi $7.50/month just to physically provide one person with search results, ignoring any overhead like buildings and employees. To keep the lights on they have to charge at least more than that.
In the early days, as a user you could see how much your searches were costing them vs what you paid. One month I threw them an extra $10 or $20, as I was costing them more than I paid, even at $10/month.
The goal should be profitability and sustainability, not user count. It’s not a social media site where the number of users should matter.
The hardest hurdle is getting people to pay anything. Even 1 cent would be difficult, as it requires a sign up and adding payment information.
Paying for a search engine makes no sense to me. Startpage is just as appealing and free. There is also Yandex, which is identical to Google's old search engine. By the end of 2023, the search quality of Duckduckgo and Bing have dropped. DuckDuckGo is also now directing me to scroll through rubbish on the front page "Explore our features", so I moved to Startpage completely.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadWith the trend that the tech industry seems to be taking towards enshitification (I might be quite cynical...) Kagi proves that is possible to make profitable business differently!
Congrats!!
Back in 2022 they had this blog post on their economics: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan...
Their target was to break even around 25K paying customers. Would be interesting to hear if that is still the goal and where they currently stand but TFA doesn’t cover that topic.
If I saw one of those shirts in the wild, and I hadn’t just read this post and seen the pictures of the shirts, I would have had no idea it was a Kagi shirt.
Shouldn't gifts and similar things come after the business is properly sustainable?
Sounds pretty sustainable already to me, unless they have a really large team and/or really inefficient infrastructure, neither which seem true to me.
Back of the envelope:
The Bing API costs about $0.015 per query at the most cost effective tier. Kagi's highest revenue per query pricing is $5/300 queries = $0.166 / query. That's pretty slim margins, and only made worse by the $10 tier.
Now, they can of course start doing exclusively their own crawling, indexing and ranking and avoid paying some larger search engine for API access. But for that to be cheaper, they need orders of magnitude more scale
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
I'll assert that even a back of the envelope calculation is more useful than your initial "they must be sustainable unless the infra is inefficient, and it feels like it isn't" statement. Do you have an actual number rather than feelings? Is that number significantly lower than this estimate?
Kagi is slightly different than other SV startups in how we approach things because of the freedom given by being (nearly) completely bootstrapped and built with sustainability in mind since day one. Some companies buy ads to attract new customers, we buy tshirts to show gratitude to existing. We also reinvest any savings we make into lowering the price and increasing the value of the product (check our product velocity in release notes [1]). Our customers propelled us to where we are through word of mouth, it makes sense to keep investing in nurturing that relationship. And having 20,000 doggos walk around the earth soon is fun.
Winning in search is a marathon, not a sprint. We might as well enjoy the run.
[1] https://kagi.com/changelog
Cool. Didn't realise that.
That's really good news as it proves the "search engine people pay for" concept is workable, unlike what many people seemed to think. :)
Edit: apparently his favorite was from mongo: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2016/07/my-favorite-datab... which I have to agree with, that is a good shirt.
I think I might still like the Snowflake one (3) the best though. Although rereading the article he says there is writing on the back of the Snowflake one which makes me not like it as much. There are very few stylish shirts I enjoy that have writing on the back of them.
Having been to Dr. Pavlo's office - or at least, one of them - I can attest to there being multiple cardboard boxes filled with gifted shirts from different companies. One of my favorite designs was actually from CMU's DB group itself - it has a little "this database kills fascists" tag on it, with a skull motif :D
[0]: https://ottertune.com/blog/2022-databases-retrospective
https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round
While it sounds like they will print 20k no matter what, it doesn’t seem like they will randomly ship them out to users. They really can’t, as they don’t have the addresses of all their users.
I've got to say those t-shirts look great.
I don't really have an opinion about whether this is an effective advertising spend or not. I hope they follow up. I don't need another free T-shirt but I'll probably wear it, I like the doggo.
> When the merch store goes live in about 8 weeks
It may be a part of a bigger commitment / batch. They'll sell more in the future with some extra income, so that should even out anyway.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-...
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
When what this change made and what does it do?
What's your self-hosted choice of the moment?
I do care about the search results and they got worse and are not deterministic anymore since they started using brave. Maybe it's omething else they changed in the code but I expect to at least see the first results of a previous search on the page when I search for it again a few days later. Especially when it was a helpful result. It's useless for me now.
As far as politics... for a lot of people not relying on a single particular global megacorp (who tend to extend the soft-power of a given state or economic bloc) for access to information is a semi-political choice. There is very much an inescapable concern of "who chooses what I get to see and what are their incentives" that can't really be reduced to "I don't care about politics". It cannot be separated from politics, which is why people have such strong feelings about it. I'm not sure that's what people really mean though, I think they talk past each other a lot on this topic. No disrespect meant to you and I appreciate your comments.
I really like the idea that they'd hedge and not give any single index overwhelming leverage over what Kagi users are fed, and conveniently for me (who does care a bit about the who of the thing) if they stick to that approach it should provide more diversity of contemporaneous political messaging... so it can also please the (I think somewhat tedious) "no politics" crowd at the same time. So that seems good?
Tradeoffs maybe, and give them some more time to figure it out, incorporate more indices?
I feel I've seen more AI Spam recently although when I do I've just ended up downvoting the site immediately, and that has generally fixed the issues as there seems to be a few repeat offenders. That could totally be up to the Kagi postprocessing being tweaked though.
[1] https://brave.com/search/api/
9264 users on the annual family plan at $3/user/month = 27792
10799 users on the annual starter plan at $4.50/user/month = 48595.5
Total: $76387.5
whoof
whoof
whoof
whoof
whoof!
who knows about their overhead costs though
As one of the 20K paying members, I feel embarrassed that I hadn't noticed this until now. Because this article presented the idea of wearing a Kagi T-Shirt, I suddenly started to care about what the logo looked like. Also, yes, I am excited to rep Kagi search.
Google doesn't deserve all uses of the letter g, worldwide, in all media, in perpetuity, exclusively.
Huh what am I missing? I have no idea what this link is trying to say.
It's definitely confusing to call it a logo in talking about designing the logo (let's say icon) though.
Mind you before seeing that about the 'g' I thought the dog was their 'logo'. I'm surprised the designer didn't insist on some simplification, a stronger, single identity; not that I know anything about design or marketing.
I wonder what the breakdown is between people who make the association versus those who don't.
Wouldn't that be a k?
Google is capital G
Kagi is lower case g
Whereas Kagi reminds me of the 'old' google search. The results are meaningful and relevant, not diluted with pages of generic article results. They also offer a lot of great customisation options like being able to block or boost certain sites in results. They have some built in lists for common filler sites. I can't comment on the AI variation but I hear that's progressing well.
I wouldn't call myself a power user of Kagi, but even then I'm getting far better results than other search engines, definitely worth the price per month.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just thought I'd share my anecdotal experience.
Small Web: results that favor noncommercial domains and topics.
Stats are released about these as well so you can easily copy heavy used fiters [0].
[0] https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
This only works as long as Kagi is a niche. The moment any search engine becomes commonplace I think they will inevitably succumb to SEO. Otherwise, they would have to change their methodologies every once in a while to completely flip the ecosystem.
I wonder if kagi's going to have to charge for listings some day, instead of users paying in, if they intend to grow substantially.
I also hope that domains which get blocked by lots of people will get reviewed for global downranking, but I don't think that's happening yet?
With Kagi as I understand it, the customer is the user since it’s a premium product that isn’t selling ads. There’s really no good reason for them not to just nuke bad actors.
Thankfully when I come across a irrelevant domain in Kagi I can just remove it from any future search results completely. If enough people do that, it may show up on the "most commonly removed" list inviting others to also ax it.
I rarely ever have an issue with spam on Kagi just by largely using the standard filters, and I'm confident this will remain the case.
And unrelated but I really like that I can redirect all reddit urls in search results to old.reddit.com, twitter to nitter etc. very helpful in searching on mobile.
They are the biggest search engine; every SEO trick, every spam attack is spearheaded against them. But also being the biggest and the inevitable, they can afford to blunt their search tool somehow in order to show more lucrative sort-of-hits and sell more ads. A moral hazard to do such a thing is always present fr any market-dominating player.
Kagi, in comparison, is tiny, and almost nobody cares to attack their algorithms. Back in 1990s, when Macs were a small minority in the PC-dominated world, they were the safest desktop machines, because almost nobody cared to write malware for them. Now that Macs are a sizable segment of computers in hands of important people, they are targeted by malware all right.
Sure, but also they're ignoring extremely basic issues. "every SEO trick" is one thing, "just copy the SO content and still get ranked on the first page" is them not caring. We can worry about them dealing with the complex issues after they address the low hanging fruit.
Google isn't incentivized to be a good search engine.
They are incentivized to be just good enough that you don't go elsewhere while increasing the number of ads / paid results.
Once I actually grab a full time job again I wouldn't mind grabbing my own subscription here to try it out. I'm curious if 300 searches/month is truly enough for me, though. And what would happen if I go over that rate. Am I simply unable to search more for that month?
Still I ended up subscribing, and after properly testing, I can recommend. The service is good, the blacklist feature is essential to me now; is just that the free tier is shit.
Also you can enable browsing history and use bookmarks to autofill stuff without having to use a search engine.
On top of that, this is during a month without any job (where I'd search even more on the clock). I hear it's 1.5 cents per query over but I can imagine doing 600+ searches once I'm employed again.
Per month?
My current Kagi searches from 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches. For sure I'd do 300 searches in a week, and on a particularly hairy day I might do it in a day.
> 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches
1256 / 23 (days between today and Jan 3rd) = 54.6 searches on average per day.
Some days higher, some lower. Sometimes it can take a couple of tries to get the search right, so you do 5-10 searches in one minute maybe. Doesn't seem farfetched to me.
For all the people gawking at the expense of the free t-shirts: AFAICT those of us who are receiving them are paying customers; it's not like the money is coming right off of the top of their venture funds.
But Kagi is missing an opportunity for a huge brand awareness campaign from this.
People who are already really happy with Kagi would become brand ambassadors.
Why isn’t the name ‘Kagi’ found anywhere on the t-shirt design?
People who want to know where it’s from would have to go out of the way to ask the tee wearer.
I’d also be much more likely to wear a shirt without a URL on it. I’ve been gifted shirts with URLs before, I have never and will never wear them in public.
https://kagi.com/stats
I still think the 20k shirts is a terrible waste of mine, and I'm unlikely to even claim mine because the designs/colors don't appeal (there's a reason why very few clothes are bright yellow) and I'd still have to pay for shipping.
I wish them their best with platform growth.
"LA weather" gets you to Louisiana, "SF weather" gets you to Santa Fe. Californians in shambles.
[1] https://kagifeedback.org/
In this age of ongoing enshittification, seeing a company do something special for the customers who are cheering for its success, is actually heartwarming.
IMO, this will boost/cement customer loyalty.
Also, I often want to contribute (financially) to such projects, because I want them to succeed.
However, don't happen to have 3k USD to spare (kagi did a fundraiser via SAFE notes) -- I imagine that, now they've figured out the t-shirt logistics, they could offer other designs in future, as a way to contribute money (like buying merch at a band's concert). I'd buy a couple more doggo tees, if/when they made more designs.
It is not worth it to website operators to spend money/time trying to game Kagi’s algorithms.
Because of this, as a paying user, I hope they can find a sustainable business with a relatively small number of paid users, where they can make nice profits and have nice salaries for their employees based of selling a service to a relatively few people who value it.
To game Google, you do stuff on your website content ; try various keywords regularly with authenticated and unauthenticated requests and see how your actions on your website affects your position on the requests' results.
With Kagi, you can't do unauthenticated requests, so the results you'll get will be unique to your account. So what you'll see is not what another random user will get. I guess you can still create new raw account each time, and maybe use the free-tier, but it's going to be a lot of work on your side without any assurance that the results are going to be the same on most user's results.
Furthermore, now that the team learned their lessons about monitoring usage more closely[^1], it's going to be quite hard to play this game without being noticed.
[^1]: https://status.kagi.com/clrnl9zwl97290beoine8zlvzx
Of course, there is a "Kagi algorithm" that takes the website's contents and ranks it according to the search. The algorithm, of course, takes into account user preferences, but there is a massive amount of commonality. Yes, that ranking algorithm probably can be games, just like Google's algorithm is gamed now with SEO spam.
However, because of the size, there is no real incentive to spend time/money gaming it, but it is misleading to suggest that there is no algorithm.
Qwant is, from the beginning, a scam to grab public funding. They made tons of promises but actually never delivered on them. Worst, they even lied on what the product could do, pretending to provide results from their own index while returning results from Bing. If it wasn't enough, there's also stories of management misconduct on employees. Some stuff is public and partly told on the Wikipedia page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Controversies It's a classic "we'll make a French/European [X]" with [X] being Google, Facebook, AWS... There's at least one project like that every year for two decades now. Every time it's a failure from the outside, but the founders are quite successful in pocketing millions of public funding from France/Europe.
Meanwhile, Kagi is "let's make a search engine for power users willing to pay for it". They're not here to take on Google. They're not here to grab public funding. They're making a product for which people are willing to pay. They deliver on absolutely everything they say. Proof is in the pudding.
I'm a happy Kagi user/customer for a few months now, but what I find the most satisfying is not the website itself, it's how they are building it.
While every big company is falling for the _enshitification_ of their products, seeing Kagi doing the exact opposite, and yet being clear that their goal is to take our money each month, is honestly quite refreshing.
Curious to know if kagi or any of its users have tried to quantify how much more quickly they get answers to search queries.
Even if it only saves 10 minutes a month, it could be worth switching.
even if its only 10 searches a day, it needs something. I am never going to use it unless I can try it out for a while.
[1]: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan...
[2]: https://kagi.com/stats
The goal should be profitability and sustainability, not user count. It’s not a social media site where the number of users should matter.
The hardest hurdle is getting people to pay anything. Even 1 cent would be difficult, as it requires a sign up and adding payment information.