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?
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.
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.”
