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0 pointsfreediver3y ago0 comments

Kagi founder here. I am of the opinion that things are not and do not have to be perfect. We do not want to market Kagi as a perfect product, without flaws. What you see is what you get. We have a lot of work to do. Google, a trillion dollar company with nearly 200K most talented employees, still gets many things wrong in their results. We are a ten people bootstrapped team, and the web is a vast problem, just to align expectations.

I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall, I believe we also have superior results to Google, please try it for a few days and share your thoughts.

Kagi is in some ways broken and flawed and it is what makes it feel more humane to use.

If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our current resources.

0 comments

9 comments · 3 top-level

srvmshr3y ago· 4 in thread

Most of your arguments regarding resources are in general valid points, but when you are showcasing 3 results as selling points how hard is it to keep them updated. If you're not personally bothered by this showcase -- which is your product advertisment -- you perhaps should be. Going against a trillion dollar company needs a very convincing pitch IMO to average user.

> We are a ten people bootstrapped team.

We are a 2-engineer startup. We give business analytics/market trends on mined webdata (through our B2B dashboards) with a 48 hour live data guarantee. Every time, user queries crunch through about 9 million data points for every day over last 36 months - in real time. Sorry, but it isn't a very good reason to have stale results.

D13Fd3y ago

You're demanding an awful lot out of a $10/mo product here. And I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's still an as-good-or-better search engine than Google with no ads and a focus on privacy.

The fact that it lists ballpark prices rather than exact prices is really not that important in the grand scheme of things.

srvmshr3y ago

I never once mentioned the price point.

My critique was about the accuracy of the results, and staleness of their showcase. If I would be a paying customer - be it $1 or $10/mo - I would expect it to be better than something I get for free. I already mentioned in another comment that Google shouldn't be a baseline to improve on, when so many competing innovative search companies such as DDG, Ecosia, You.com exist. Even DDG, Ecosia aren't visually that spammy either. For Kagi to win, the product strategy should win over by a visible margin.

You like it. To each his own.

ZephyrBlu3y ago

They're not pitching to the average user. Average users won't pay for search.

Also kind of a dick move to compare to your startup to Kagi to justify it sucking. Analytics is very different to search. Your products sound completely different.

srvmshr3y ago

Then you're missing the contradiction. Average user won't pay for search, and paying tech-savvy user may not be convinced. I have nothing against their product - my critique is to improve their product showcase.

I never knew pointing out excuses was a 'dick move' when we are doing the same theoretically (mining web data). In my defense, you could take your opinion elsewhere.

CobaltFire3y ago· 2 in thread

I was a beta user and paid for a while, but my search results were too intermixed with my wife's and my child's. It's absolutely worth it to me, but paying $30 a month for 3 users was a little too much for me to stomach.

To be clear, I pay $20/mo for ProtonMail Visionary so I'm not averse to paying! I just can't see the value at $30/mo when the other family members don't use it nearly as much as I do.

Maybe this is an untenable problem due to your costs and you need those low use paying users. I'm not sure.

To clarify: by intermixed I mean our tuning was different so it became somewhat interesting, as we all wanted to tune the settings differently. It's not a huge thing, but between that and feeling bad for having three people using one sub...

freediverOP3y ago

Good news, reduced price family plans are coming soon (we are aiming January). You'll get three users for $10/mo, four for $12/mo as a base membership. A lot of discussion about it going on right now in our discord server.

CobaltFire3y ago

I'll be signing up the day those are available!

sroussey3y ago

There are startups that index only products and prices, so you could use their API. Maybe it’s a cost issue though.

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0 comments

9 comments · 3 top-level

srvmshr3y ago· 4 in thread

> We are a ten people bootstrapped team.

D13Fd3y ago

The fact that it lists ballpark prices rather than exact prices is really not that important in the grand scheme of things.

srvmshr3y ago

I never once mentioned the price point.

You like it. To each his own.

ZephyrBlu3y ago

They're not pitching to the average user. Average users won't pay for search.

Also kind of a dick move to compare to your startup to Kagi to justify it sucking. Analytics is very different to search. Your products sound completely different.

srvmshr3y ago

I never knew pointing out excuses was a 'dick move' when we are doing the same theoretically (mining web data). In my defense, you could take your opinion elsewhere.

CobaltFire3y ago· 2 in thread

To be clear, I pay $20/mo for ProtonMail Visionary so I'm not averse to paying! I just can't see the value at $30/mo when the other family members don't use it nearly as much as I do.

Maybe this is an untenable problem due to your costs and you need those low use paying users. I'm not sure.

freediverOP3y ago

CobaltFire3y ago

I'll be signing up the day those are available!

sroussey3y ago

There are startups that index only products and prices, so you could use their API. Maybe it’s a cost issue though.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse