All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.
Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.
> Teclis is an attempt to surface the less known web, the web of creativity and self expression, the more humane web.
> Teclis includes its own crawl as well as results from Kagi Small Web index and results with permission from Marginalia Search.
> Teclis works best with broad queries such as 'machine learning', 'vegan diet', 'religion' etc..
Is there another crawler doing the general-purpose stuff?
I'm not sure antitrust will help you.
For everybody else there’d Google I guess.
I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?
I mean it sounds like that already has a lot of overlap with our Small Web indexing efforts, so that part of our indexing efforts could be an extension of that. A lot if this is still in development though so I can't speak on specifics just yet.
Lip service. You'll have some token index of Wikipedia or something so you can say your results are "a blend of our own index and other sources".
https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search#:~:text=Wikipedia,...
There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.
But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.
That and the fact Universities provided free, fast and unmetered internet access. I doubt they would be running anything if they had to pay $1/hour like regular people had to in their dial-up days.
When large portion of moneyless teenagers grown up into indebted to death adults, there is no wonder they stick to lure at free services rather than unaffordable services.
Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.
I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.
You can get some development and innovations built purely on "free", but without actual professionals who can make a living by developing these systems, they never take off to reach the masses. The best example is social media and the Fediverse.
I remember a colleague around 1998, he said: "how will they ever make money? Its just an empty website?"
LOL
About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.
I’m one of those 70k people and support Kagi, and I also strongly believe in companies succeeding and sustaining themselves on a small scale like this. I think our economy would be healthier if it was made of many, many small companies, not a few massive ones.
But we can’t argue Kagi is anything more than a super niche product, for now. :(
Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site
I stopped using YouTube 10+ years ago, so no clue if it still the case.
Not the least bit surprising to me. I had the misfortune of talking to Kagi's CEO several years ago. Every word out of his mouth was a lie.
Kagi's the one search company I trust less than Google.
I'd also argue that calling a tech CEO a liar is far from extraordinary. It'd be extraordinary if I accused him of honesty.
https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search
You said that you were not surprised that kagi was lying, only that they were not in this occasion. When you accuse somebody of lying it makes sense to provide at least some evidence of that.
At the very least, they are very clear about which indexes they use and how.
"... I thought their aspirations were higher ..."
It sounds like the decision to send search queries (and money) to Kagi was based at least in part on reasons other than the quality of the search results
This is interesting psychology
What if all (cf. only sum of) the money sent to Kagi was actually invested in an alternative way to search the web without using an index created by a corporation or a non-profit with commercial subsidiaries
Defensive HN replies may focus on the quality of the search results from commercial indexes, e.g., "Google is the best. That's why everyone 'chooses' it."^1 But if the consumer is choosing Kagi based on other reasons, e.g., "investing in additional search infrastructure", then clearly there is more to these decisions
For example, some search engines claim to be planting trees or some such. Nothing to do with the quality of the results
1. Apple is being paid 20+ billion for choosing Google as the default in iOS but Apple's choice is not based on the money. Yes, that makes sense
The search infrastructure you're talking about is a natural part of that, but, like any infrastructure, it scales the organization it's supporting. Kagi is tiny so their "original infrastructure" contributions are tiny.
Put another way, you essentially were investing in infrastructure, but you were hoping for major infrastructure and what is happening is small infrastructure. Kagi would probably need to get much bigger to be able to do the infrastructure you're talking about. (And if they were much bigger, it should be natural -- at a certain scale it will make more sense to do your own than work with someone else's.)
