We are still in closed beta (mostly to control cost and gradually improve user experience), with much more left to do. There are some examples of what Kagi can do in my twitter feed. [1]
Main idea of Kagi is to offer a paid search product, where user is also the customer and is central to everything that happens. Btw. Kagi is pronounced ka-gi (similar to yogi), I get asked that a lot so there it is...
If you want to beta test, feel free to sign up and we will do our best to send an invite within a week.
First, price point is 2-4x what I expected. Not saying I wouldn’t be a customer but at $5 unlimited it would be a no brainer for me.
Related: I would love to see family pricing. $12-13 price point is just right for me to share with my family with up to six people or some such.
Privacy is important. Is it possible to provide a payment system that is anonymous? Cash in the mail? BTC or similar? What is your policy on logging searches?
Will your results ever feature ads? Affiliate links? Will you ever attempt to create Kagi Plus social network?
$10 a month is getting into the territory of streaming video services and those require a hell of a lot of bandwidth and infrastructure to maintain.
For business or corporate use though $10 a month / user seems totally applicable.
What subscription models exist in the crypto world right now, i.e. to automatically charge me every month?
Also feedback regarding your current website:
So there is merely one sentence: It says
"Premium search engine where everything on the page matters."
Yet, to the left and the right of this sentence are wiggling clouds that don't matter at all and distract the reader. Not ideal.
Personally I'd almost say I can live fine with not pleasing extreme nitpickers but I think they'll fix it.
The important point for me is unlike Google and DDG almost every result on Kagi does contain the thing you search for and if not you can report a bug and get a reply from a real human who will update the behavior. I've seen it multiple times after I joined their chat.
Thanks for the invite.
Please start monetizing : we want to support this effort ( I understand it is a difficult decision ). Would subscribe if reasonable.
Register a new HN handle here for comms about Kagi.
I see gimples of the future where my search engine behaves/looks differently depending if I am researching IT issues or looking for clothing.
Good luck.
I think one of the best things about HN is that there are few "corporate" accounts, and founders continue to communicate from their personal accounts.
Support indexing internal stuff for enterprises. Let's say I have a kagi enterprise account and my company had integrations setup. When I search for something, I would get results from internal wiki, email , sharepoint, etc... along with internet results. One stop shop for search.
I hope you read this and give it serious consideration. You wanna kill google? This is how!
We don't want to kill Google :) Google serves a purpose in the world and it did help enable the modern society to exist, with all its marvels and flaws. Heck, it even enables Kagi to exist!
Think of Kagi as a small premium brand, providing a very different search experience.
Enterprise search is something that we are remotely thinking about, but frankly we want to focus on providing the best possible consumer experience first, so that individuals and families around the world can enjoy a user-centric, ad-free search experience.
Would you mind telling us a little of the story about Kagi the company behind the product?
It’s really interesting to hear that you’re using Crystal. Where are you guys based and how have you bootstraped?
Good luck and keep at it, this is a really interesting project.
We are running on a tight budget, completely bootstrapped by funds from my previous exit. Trying to control cost and all that while establishing product-market fit, which is the reason the beta is closed for now.
Instead of starting with technology, I started by selecting people that I can work with and are crazy enough to accept working on such an ambitious idea. It turned out that they really liked Crystal and, so, here we are. I have over 30 years of dev experience, and in my previous startup I wrote a significant part of the code. But never wrote a line of code in Crystal before so it does make me feel a little uncomfortable. Its performance is truly amazing and that is what I care most about. Our front-end payload is HTML + vanilla JS (which btw is not needed, everything works in no-js), and probably about 100k on average, very lightweight.
I am based in SF Bay Area, and we are a fully remote team.
Thanks for your interest!
Can you Guarantee the privacy of searches and that you will never sell search history data?
I think that a class of people, who ask kind of questions that need absolute guarantee of anonymity (I am thinking terrorists, drug dealers, traffickers etc) are:
- Looking for a different thing (because anonymity is not the same as privacy)
- Are probably looking at tools that cost much more than Kagi does
We are not even interested in serving that market.
Having said that:
- Kagi does not store search queries nor by definition it is then possible to associate something that does not exist with an account
- In general, Kagi does not store or mine user data in any way. Our privacy policy is pretty detailed, I recommend checking it out https://kagi.com/privacy
The strongest guarantee I can realistically give you that the above is true, is that our business model is simply not dependent on mining or selling user data. And the premise of our entire business would fall apart if the opposite turned out to be true. In other words the alignment of incentives here is as good as it gets.
We are not interested in your identity or searches, we are interested in providing the best search product for you, so we can keep you as a paying customer as long as we can. The moment either of the above is not true, you will walk away. It is wonderful to be in this position from a product/business perspective.
What do you mean with that?
> Can you Guarantee the privacy of searches and that you will never sell search history data?
I think that’s literally impossible to do?
FWIW, selling data would probably not be worth it, and ruin them. It’s supposed to be pretty expensive (early discussions are around $10-$20 a month) while only having a tiny amount of users (10s of thousands). At least for me, that aligns their incentives properly. And of course, they are bootstrapped without any VC money.
If it is possible can you share what is your tech stack specially your database ?
Did you get any angry letters and/or lawyery threats to stop crawling a specific site?
Question: I have a little "vanity website" of my oen. Is there a way to make sure it gets included (in full or maybe just some pages) in Kagi searches?
k-ay-gi as in lady
k-aa-gi as in laggy
Which one is it?
I usually wouldn't ask these kinds of questions but I think this is the one of the hardest problems to get right - to impact such a wide number of people. No-one has even come _close_ to taking a dent out of Google in the last 20 years.
I've tested it since December.
What made them think they could do it I don't know but they already outclass Google by a wide margin.
The shortest and most precise explanation I can give is:
Kagi is to mainstream search engines today what Google was to mainstream search engines 20 years ago.
And that maybe settles your question too?
> No-one has even come _close_ to taking a dent out of Google in the last 20 years.
Unluckily for power users (and maybe ordinary users) and luckily for would-be Google competitors Google has rested on their laurels, told everyone the problem was webspam while their quality declined down the the levels of earlier search engines. Edit: Kagi shows the problem is not webspam but Googles insistence on 1.) not letting people block domains 2.) not respecting peoples queries.
Competing with Google a decade ago would be hard.
DDG still isn't anywhere near peak Google quality and yet they've seen (actual) exponential growth for years. That wouldn't have happened if Google still was leagues ahead.
Until December I started in DDG and used !g to see if Google had a different result that was better. Often it did not.
Since December I have used Google twice to verify something from Kagi or to look up something Kagi couldn't find (I'll try to get a bug report underway freediver, I just need to recreate using non personal data.)
The advantage Kagi has over Google is the different business model. Google would never for example introduce a "non-commercial" filter as it would go against their advertising-based business model. Kagi doesn't give a shit about ads and will do whatever that keeps its users paying and so has a non-commercial "lens" (as they call it). I'm not sure how good or accurate it is, but it's at least there which is already more than I can say about Google.
Kagi has a feature to prioritize or exclude some domains. Google doesn't have that despite their size, resources and decades of search experience. That makes it pretty clear to me that Google's weakness has nothing to do with experience or resources and thus a new entrant could potentially compete without either.
I usually have something in mind when I search, and Google doesn't offer any customization for me to put it in. Instead, it shows me what it prefers.
For example, I frequently need to switch languages and/or regions. You can't do that with Google (except maybe logging in and switching some settings but lmao, I need a switch). No matter what I do, Google reads my IP range and "decides" what results I should view. Very frequently, this means I literally can not find the thing I am looking for.
For many people - I assume anyone who isn't American - Google simply isn't working very well. We use it, yes. But DuckDuckGo has a Region switch that already makes it 10x more useful than Google and usually offers far superior results. A new search engine could expand on that, offering more customizations.
I'd go so far that for every human, except 350 million Americans who never switch language or region, Google is ALREADY the inferior search engine and people use it because it is what they know.
The fundamental premise that enables it is the focus on the user. It allows truly wonderful things to happen in the product (and we sometimes forget that search is still a product). Aligning the incentives between us and the user (which is also the customer) is really freeing from a product management perspective.
We are still users of Google products - we utilize the paid search API for results and GCP for infrastructure (hello Google!). We think there are some things that can be built with these truly amazing assets, that Google's business model simply does not permit, and we are thankful for the opportunity.
In the meantime we also built our own index which focuses only on noncommercial content and are going to invest more in this direction in the future. We call it "the more humane web".
Another thing is that we do not need to get _very_ far in the market. There is no shareholder pressure, just angry (or happy!) users. This is not, nor will ever be, a Google scale product.
This is a paid search product of premium quality (or so I'd like to believe it is shaping to be) for a tight number of individuals (and families!) who are a little different and want something different for their search experience. Few tens of thousands of subscribers will make Kagi sustainable and I hope we will have what it takes to get there. That is all I can wish for right now.
Thanks for considering!
What a great thing that data leaks and power abuse don't ever happen. /s
> What makes you think you can do better than a company with over 20 years experience
The severe decline in quality? I've been using DDG for a while now; in about 2 years I've looked at Google results maybe 5 times and was disappointed every time. If you think Google is the best you can get right now you're missing out. Your argument is based on the assumption that a company with more experience cannot possibly be bested at what they're doing.
> google could implement site muting in an instant if they wanted
Google could do a lot of great things, but unused potential is worthless. Remember how Google got big precisely because they did what competitors could do but didn't?
At this point I don't think it would be that hard to provide a useful alternative, especially with a business model where the customer is the searcher and not the advertiser. I'm not sure that all of those engineers are having an additive affect on the UI. Quite the contrary, I imagine many are working toward improving the experience for advertisers, who are the customers.
When Google search came, they started their search engine by providing a clean search page with no ads, at a time when all the others had cluttered, ad-filled, shitty pages.
Users picked Google because it was the better experience back then. Today, if a search engine comes along that gives you great search results and privacy, it will become very popular quickly, because a lot of us are fed up with Google and want them to go away completely.
There have been some speculation that it's down to SEO and google trying to make as much money as they can.
It's possible that a company which does not derive their income from search ADS could create a better search engine.
If someone can make a better search, I am all for it, even if its just for limited topics.
If the answer is a) then Kagi or another disruptor could undoubtedly produce better search results, and probably in a short period of time, with a small number of decent engineers as there is now a vast body of research and praxis to build on that didn't exist when google was starting up. If the answer is some variant on b) then they're on a hiding to nothing.
By hiding ads, you’re forcing everyone else to pay for your search. I’m glad I use DDG, and I?3 signed up for Kagi’s beta.
Regional results (especially since the last update) feel as automatic as google. While I still hope they’ll add my suggestion of a bang for region switches, most queries I do don’t need one, and it properly switches between English and German.
All of the DDG bangs. Seriosuly, search without bangs is nothing I’d ever want to go back to.
Built-In Domain Blacklist. Goodbye Pinterest. Forever.
General results are great. More relevant results than either DDG or Google and a great presentation (like showing snippets from accepted or upvoted SO answers)
And I have not even played around with advanced filters like lenses (which people in their discord seem to love).
Negatives: So far, I’d say only that the widgets are less usable than DDGs.
I had low expectations, but I’m really very positively surprised.
My only complaint is that occasionally I run a search and get zero results, like the page is literally blank (I try the search again and it is still blank). I then try the search on Google and get what I'm looking for. I guess this happens because Kagi's index is smaller, but I don't really know.
Interestingly enough I haven't actually seen that much cross-language results (also DE/EN), even for ambiguous queries.
DDG calls [0] them bangs, and as I have been using them in recent years, I use that term everywhere now.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19961216050944/http://www.kagi.c...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160413151203/https://www.kagi....
[2] https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
Long time since I did shareware in any language, though. Something like £2k total takings, I wasn’t good at business.
What I have not seen so far being discussed anywhere, though, is the Willingness to Pay [3] for a search engine alternative, say like Kagi. What do you think is an acceptable monthly subscription price? What do you think is an expensive price? What do you think is a prohibitively expensive price?
Here is my take on those questions: 5$, 10$, 20$.
UPDATE: I'll summarize all answers and post the results here for reference.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782186
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136
% Customers who find the price acceptable
^
|
100% |------|
| |------|
80% | |
| |------|
60% | |
| |
40% | |
| |-------------|
20% | |
| |
-------|------|------|------|------|-->
0$ 5$ 8$ 10$ 12$ 20$
Price per month
Although I hate dumb subscriptions for stuff that should be paid once and for all I have a history of not only saying I would pay for certain thing but also doing it.
And with Kagi, if they keep respecting my queries and have a sane price: it is a no brainer.
This also isn't a reflection of what I percieve the work in building a search engine to be but more my subconcious perception of what I'm getting.
For a full equivalent to Google's services including Maps, Docs, Drive, etc, I'd be happy to go much higher up to 50$.
So upper end might be higher for an "apple like" slice of the user base.
10-20$ a month for a meaningfully better search engine is pennies compared to the possible value it could provide (if it provides search results of sufficient quality). Every search I have to spend a couple minutes refining saved would make it worth it.
edit: I guess even the range of answers here, compared to implied value of the service, is an indication how much people (me included) value their data.
[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much...
From the FAQ: "We plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, unlimited plan at around $20/mo as well as make bundles (to include Kagi email and other services), family plans and annual payment discounts available."
I have to say I support a lot of these initiatives, but I can't help but think altogether they're creating a division of the web into premium services the rich can afford, and low quality services for the masses. Most of the world doesn't have the silicon valley salaries where $10/month is considered low. I feel like there should be an ideological consideration as well to make better services accessible to as many people as possible. Just my 2 cents.
Netflix charges almost double this and they have 100's of millions of subscribers worldwide; my guess is that a premium search engine only needs a small fraction of that number of users to become a worthwhile and profitable service.
Can't say if I would pay for it or not - haven't used it yet - but if that was the price of dumping google searches I for one would be OK with it.
Note I actually like the service and I signed up for the beta, but I understand the GPs point about building two "webs" one for the masses and one for the "well off" that can afford these tools. However as one other poster said, you have to bootstrap a service somehow and if it gets popular enough there could be the ability to reduce fees to give it mass appeal.
When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight
If I may, there is huge complexity at hand here. It is one thing to offer a meditation app for $2/mo, where its peak complexity is changing colors on the screen. It is entire different to be able to offer the entire internet searchable in less than 500ms in the palm of your hand. The ability to offer that at $20-30/mo with robust privacy protection is frankly a miracle.
Second factor, is that Kagi is bootstrapped and our priorities are quality of services offered, not the number of users. And knowing what I know, it is simply not economically viable to do this at a lower price point and hope for sustainability of the business.
Finally, the price is only one side of equation, the other is value. The question is will you be getting enough value for your money? For me, the ability for my children to use a search engine without being bombarded with ads from an early age has a lot of value. I already pay $15/mo for YouTube Premium for the same reason. I understand that not every parent is in this position to choose, but many are.
Having said all that I do not pretend that Kagi is designed to be for everyone, like Google is. It is a premium service for a reason - the cost of providing the quality that we provide is simply what it is, and we clearly said no to the ads from the get-go. Remember that the main reason most of the mainstream web is free are ads.
The ideological consideration you refer to is something I agree with, but that role is on governments to fullfill IMO. I do not think they will anytime soon so I am doing what I can. Access to information like access to water should be part of public infrastructure and we miss the latter in the modern society (as public libraries are not enough anymore). We can easily get into the realm of politics here so I choose to stop :)
The alternative is to have your search paid for by someone else, in which case all the incentives are aligned towards tracking and manipulating you for their benefit and away from providing decent search results for your benefit.
The marginal cost per user for a service like this is tiny, but there's a huge fixed cost to running the whole thing. If few people use it, it will cost a lot.
I agree that it's not good for things to split into premium paid services only affordable by the well off and rubbish free services for everyone else. However the solution isn't to abandon building services like this with funding models that correctly align incentives. It's for there to be a culture change towards understanding and valuing those well aligned incentives. This will bring more users, more services, more competition and much lower costs for users.
Are you assuming it or do you know for a fact? That's normally not how startups work.. as long there is an increasing paying demand for their product, I don't see why they are going to reduce their price, quite the opposite actually.
For me at least it saves me whole minutes and lots of stress on about half my queries which means at $20 it pays for itself in half a month and as a free bonus I get better results for the rest of the month as well, an ad free experience, no tracking and the opportunity to support a Google competitor.
What do you mean? Like cars, houses, restaurants, groceries and almost literally everything else on the planet? :)
> Hey! You're coming from Some country where this could be too expensive.
> I believe in Purchasing Parity Power, and I want to make this affordable.
> If you need it, use the code SOMECODE for an extra XX% off the regular price.
I'm fine with paying, but it should respect purchasing power in each country. And I'd even go that far and offer the service free in some really poor countries.
Huh, I thought I'd catch them out by disabling all javascript but they actually didn't use any for this webpage. Nice.
What an incredible one-liner, along multiple value axes.
just got my invite after a couple days of signing up, will be trying it out, but so far no stackoverflow/github issue clones, and they allow setting "preferred" and "muted" domains, I might pay whatever they ask
I'm keen to know their business plan however. Hope they don't get acquihired for the algorithms, never to offer these features again...
Wait I know why, because somewhere they have retarded KPI that will go down if people stop clicking on ads from spam websites that only show ads. Who would imagine
Disclaimer : haven't done a deep project yet ( new software stack or deep bug fix for example ).
Would pay for a neutral search engine, right now ( and I have no subscriptions atm, not even NF ).
I absolutely hate those sites that scrape other well-known sites (like StackOverflow, Quora, Reddit) and add ads and SEO spam. They are increasingly better at being on the top of the search results, and I cannot get rid of them.
No thanks. I don't want that some hidden ToS change or future acquisition expose all my searches in the future, even if current search engine operates in a good fate.
I suppose it's the fault of online payment infrastructure more than them. Sure, they could do it the Mullvad way and accept envelopes with cash and an UID but that probably wouldnt scale.
The time I save by not having to sift through all the utter nonsense that Google, Bing and even DuckDuckGo showes in my face any given day will easily be worth $10 a month alone and on top it is sanity preserving, privacy respecting and has no ads.
Its kind of like a polished version of https://search.marginalia.nu just with a much larger index.
The best explanation I can give is maybe:
Kagi is to other search engines today what Google was to other search engines 20 years ago: Outstanding quality, better than anything else I have tried - and rapidly improving - no nonsense (again like old Google) and nifty extra features (again like old Google).
(Note: I haven't tested Neeva yet so I cannot say if Kagi is better than them. But compared to all the rest I have tried the last ten years it is in a differen league.)
Makes me feel old.
[1] https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0%BC%D0%...
https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
Since I haven’t seen the co-founder mention it, I hope he might make a little Easter egg or add it to the FAQ somewhere to pay homage to Kagi. That company made me my first money as a teenager with software.
I would really love to pay you for this service. Chomping at the bit. However, I and many others would be much more willing to do this if we don't have to rely on your privacy policy (i.e., pinky swear) to keep our data private.
I think the simplest thing for you to do would be to implement a an option that allows paying with cryptocurrency (ideally Monero), and which doesn't require an email address. Just generate a subscriber number or username, allow login with user + pass (+ TOTP/HOTP) and allow me to fill my account with crypto!
Someone below mentions a token-based scheme for injecting noise; that's more elegant in some ways but of course more complicated to implement.
thank you for your work!
Kagi pay for api access to both Google and Bing.
This is what Kagi says in the FAQ.
"Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers." [1]
Also wish for Orion browser to come to android aswell
Check out their Orion browser too, been playing around with it.
The logo is a g which is in the Google ballpark. why not K?
The designer insisted that Kagi logo is "anchored" in the letter "g" and we had to agree. Besides, can't let Google own letter "g" too, can we? ;)
hypocrisy lvl 10000
> Kagi includes data from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yelp, Wikipedia and others
come back after the reset Murica, this way of dealing with things is kinda outdated
is this yet another nonsense YC pump&dump thing?