top | item 29835756

Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

373 points| bcg361 | 4 years ago |kagi.com

221 comments

order

freediver|4 years ago

Founder here. Thanks for submitting it, but I am afraid there is not much to see right now.

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.

[1] https://twitter.com/vladquant

IgorPartola|4 years ago

Couple of things:

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?

Tepix|4 years ago

Is there a way to prove that i had paid yet remain anonymous (ideally without a session attached to me)? You offer pay-per-use or pay-per-month or both?

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.

the-dude|4 years ago

Hi Vladimir,

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.

badrabbit|4 years ago

Cool product. If I was in your innovation team you know what idea I would suggest? Adversarial compatibility!

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!

Lio|4 years ago

Hi Freediver,

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.

gostsamo|4 years ago

How would you solve the issue of self-censorship when the exact identity of a searcher is known?

Can you Guarantee the privacy of searches and that you will never sell search history data?

jamesdoe1336|4 years ago

Hi Vladamir.

If it is possible can you share what is your tech stack specially your database ?

faeyanpiraat|4 years ago

How did you manage to crawl the web without any issues?

Did you get any angry letters and/or lawyery threats to stop crawling a specific site?

nikitaga|4 years ago

Since you seem to be using it – what are your thoughts on the Crystal language? Pleasant? Ready for production?

Pamar|4 years ago

Congratulations for what you accomplished so far.

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?

jonnycomputer|4 years ago

k-ah-gi as in tawdry

k-ay-gi as in lady

k-aa-gi as in laggy

Which one is it?

peakaboo|4 years ago

This is awesome. If it works well, I will pay for it without a moments hesitation.

stanfordkid|4 years ago

How is it better than using a proxy server to access Google?

deanc|4 years ago

If I can be frank, nothing google has done or is doing with my search data bothers me in the slightest. If it uses my data to help target advertising - so be it. It doesn't bother me either as I use uBlock. So whether I pay or not, the only thing I care about is the quality of my search results. What makes you think you can do better than a company with over 20 years experience, 10s of 1000s of engineers working on their product? I took a skim through the features and google could implement site muting in an instant if they wanted - so this isn't going to get you far in the market. The number one thing that makes google better than anyone else at this is I type in some words and they find the information I need - pretty quickly.

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.

Semaphor|4 years ago

Been using them for about a week, very happy with it.

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.

drcongo|4 years ago

I've been in the beta for a while and I find Kagi results to be way ahead of anyone else. I've made it the default search in Alfred so that I have instant Kagi in Safari.

snielson|4 years ago

I've been using Kagi for a couple months and generally like it. It's the default search engine in my browser.

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.

tjungblut|4 years ago

Agreed, I'm also very happy so far and only had to use !g twice so far.

Interestingly enough I haven't actually seen that much cross-language results (also DE/EN), even for ambiguous queries.

trhoad|4 years ago

What's a "bang"?

amatecha|4 years ago

Whoa... this was really confusing to me for a moment. Kagi.com used to be one of the premier digital commerce platforms for software and shareware, especially Mac games, serving customers from 1994 until 2016. [0][1][2] Anyone who registered one of Ambrosia's awesome shareware games used Kagi's services, for example. It's really weird to see the company name and domain return again in this way! Best of luck to the team to live up to this legendary name :)

[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...

zmb_|4 years ago

This brought back memories. The first money I ever made from software as a teenager was through Kagi. It was some Mac utility shareware apps written in REALbasic around the year 2000.

memsom|4 years ago

Yes! This was my first though - I didn't realise they had gone under. I think I bought at least one app via them.

Taniwha|4 years ago

Yeah, that was my thought too

gkasev|4 years ago

There have been a couple of discussions on HN lately [0][1] about the current state of search engine results, be it served by Google, Bing, DDG or other. Also, it seems like there is a lot of work on search engine alternatives as in the case of Kagi and also here [2] to name but a few. Of all alternatives, Kagi seems to be off to a very good start and I personally am a very happy beta user.

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29690877

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willingness_to_pay

gkasev|4 years ago

Not enough answers to be representative, but here is what we have so far:

     % Customers who find the price acceptable
       ^
       |
  100% |------|
       |      |------|
   80% |             |
       |             |------|
   60% |                    |
       |                    |
   40% |                    |
       |                    |-------------|
   20% |                                  |
       |                                  |
       -------|------|------|------|------|-->

       0$     5$     8$    10$    12$    20$

                  Price per month
UPDATE: Upvoting another person's answer is something that I cannot differentiate, so I cannot include it in the summary above.

skinkestek|4 years ago

After testing it for a month I say $10 is a steal for me. $20 I'll probably pay. Above that it depends very much.

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.

_under_scores_|4 years ago

Honestly, I'd say around $2-5. It's not that I wouldn't value better quality search but in a world where search feels like an almost 'invisible' part of browsing the web I'd struggle to pay that much. I guess it's comparable to what I feel is a price I'd be willing to pay for a VPN say compared to a coffee subscription.

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.

Nextgrid|4 years ago

For purely search, 10$ is about the max I would pay.

For a full equivalent to Google's services including Maps, Docs, Drive, etc, I'd be happy to go much higher up to 50$.

Panzer04|4 years ago

There’s a huge difference between what I’d be willing to pay for a good search engine and how much I feel should be charged amid competition (and cost to provide). Existing search engines are good enough for most purposes, but if there was a good enough alternative I’d be willing to pay a pretty substantial markup (and if google continues getting worse or the search engine gets better…)

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.

mmoskal|4 years ago

Interestingly, people are apparently willing to pay $1500 per month to forgo using search engines [0], implying this is what the service is worth to them. I guess here you're asking for price on privacy, as Google is already free to use.

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...

leiferksn|4 years ago

I would say for general purposes (casual everyday searches) - anything between 5$ and 10$ / month would be a good price for me. This is of course dependent on the quality of the results - it has to be a real service and not a marketing platform. Most of the single user licenses for web services like github, dropbox are between 5-10$, so the search engine had better deliver quality results, if it requires payments.

doomrobo|4 years ago

I think $120/yr is good. I pay $120/yr for Dropbox, which is also a service I use multiple times a day and I think it's fair.

Suchos|4 years ago

I already pay over 100$ a month for subscriptions I rarely use. If we get alternative to Google that is simply on par or slightly better, 10$ is nobrainer just for the de-googlification. For something significantly better - like option of paying some extra cash for more processing power - 20$.

machiaweliczny|4 years ago

I could imagine paying even up to $100+ but only for niche use-cases (finance data, fiding experts/employees). I would like ability to create plugins for search usecases and for example take 20% cut, basically allow for search app store. I wonder if it would work.

Jansen312|4 years ago

Around 100 usd on annual subscription basis.

tmsbrg|4 years ago

It seems the trend lately for new services to be built with rather high monthly fees.

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.

ejb999|4 years ago

Not really sure that you need a 'silicon valley salary' to afford $10/month.

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.

freediver|4 years ago

> but I can't help but think altogether they're creating a division of the web into premium services the rich can afford

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 :)

omnicognate|4 years ago

If more people would pay it would cost less. If everyone paid it would barely cost anything at all.

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.

schleck8|4 years ago

20 bucks per month is way too much, i like kagi but there isn't a justification for this price over free alternatives like duckduckgo

gkasev|4 years ago

This is a fair point, high quality services should be available to all. That being said, the idea of paid search is quite novel and you need to target early adopters first. In my mind, this service is priced for early adopters and I only hope that the business is profitable from the very beginning. For me what WhatsApp used to charge for their service (1$ a year) is the epitome of high quality service for the masses. I would be very happy to see a service like Kagi scale to that with time.

muskmusk|4 years ago

> 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

What do you mean? Like cars, houses, restaurants, groceries and almost literally everything else on the planet? :)

vitro|4 years ago

I really like the approach I've seen at https://draculatheme.com when you go to the purchase page of their PRO offering.

> 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.

Semaphor|4 years ago

Note that their pricing discussions are rather open in their discord. They use both Google and Bing API for searches, which isn’t cheap (they said about $12/1000 queries).

mda|4 years ago

Yeah, I am not sure if this will work, you can always install an adblocker and use Google or some bing based stuff instead, what is the value proposition exactly? I don't think their search results are any better honestly.

karimf|4 years ago

Well, services accessible to as many people as possible? Google, Facebook, Instagram? Is there any possible way to do that without using advertisement as the business model?

stavros|4 years ago

I've used Kagi (and you.com) a bit, and I'm amazed at how much better the results were for the few queries I made. It wasn't blogspam any more, I got actual articles from actual sites. Hopefully I'll keep using them, but Google is overdue a disruption.

alphagrep12345|4 years ago

What do you mean by actual article? How is it different from a blog post? And why don't you like blog posts? Just curious :)

contravariant|4 years ago

> Be snappy and responsive on every device even without JavaScript enabled.

Huh, I thought I'd catch them out by disabling all javascript but they actually didn't use any for this webpage. Nice.

freediver|4 years ago

Not just that but all of Kagi Search works without JavaScript! We see JavaScript as a way to enhance product experience, not create it.

jazzyjackson|4 years ago

omg they let me apply from/to dates on search results, I'm in love

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...

machiaweliczny|4 years ago

Yeah I wonder why google doesn't allow to blacklist domain for users. They could basically use it for ranking (eg. include paying, long-lived accounts to prevent abuse). Especially on youtube. They only have blacklisting in news but it's too dumb (eg. I want to block gossip but it's about sport person so instead it thinks I'm not interested in sport).

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

aemreunal|4 years ago

To be fair, Google also lets you filter search results by time ranges. The muted domains sound awesome, though!

nprateem|4 years ago

If I tell you you just need to put a - in front of a domain on Google to mute it will you also pay me whatever I want?

pauldd7|4 years ago

Looks like a great product and I've signed up. One thing from your FAQ Page: You list Kagi as using significantly less CO2 than Google and Bing. Since Kagi is scraping both Google+Bing - wouldn't the Kagi CO2 total of each search be Google+Bing+Other Sources+Kagi?

freediver|4 years ago

To clarify: The CO2 measure is in the FAQ is based only on the amount of data transferred over the internet and Kagi wins here because we have the smallest payload. It does not include energy used to generate it, but Google claims it is carbon neutral since 2008 I think? and Bing is on its way to do so.

the-dude|4 years ago

Test driving for a week now. Fast. Relevant results, haven't reached for alternatives (backups) just yet.

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 ).

_Donny|4 years ago

If this really lets me block certain websites for good, then I'm sold.

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.

daxuak|4 years ago

I'm in the same boat. Right now I do this rather manually, e.g. uBlacklist on chrome.

tut-urut-utut|4 years ago

While they claim they support privacy now, I'm still hesitant to create an account there. I can even use Google to search semi anonymously, given a proper ad-blocker, but creating an account to use a search engine? So I need to be fully logged in and identifiable and all my queries are associated to my accounts without any doubt because I signed in?

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.

no_time|4 years ago

Founder replied to me about the exact same issue in an older thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672560

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.

mikebos|4 years ago

I just got the invite yesterday and used it only two times. No seo spam at first glance, the first result is usable. Keep up the good work!

skinkestek|4 years ago

Another happy user here:

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.)

ben_w|4 years ago

Gosh, I was not expecting my old shareware payment provider’s domain to end up in a new service such as this.

Makes me feel old.

u-rate|4 years ago

People pay for VPNs but continue using the web with their normal accounts, thinking their privacy is protected. A private search engine would be a much better way to protect the privacy.

xvilka|4 years ago

I also recommend to think about something like Nigma[1] (Russian metasearch engine) had done before, something along the lines of Wolfram Alpha - mathematics, physics, chemistry. It's possible to integrate with something like Sage Math for this purpose, should not be hard but would be immensely useful for many.

[1] https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0%BC%D0%...

scelerat|4 years ago

Is this Kagi in any way related to the defunct payment processor which used to bear the same URL?

https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...

karmelapple|4 years ago

Doesn’t seem like it. I didn’t see any reference to it on the website, either, but the last time this appeared on HN I was hoping someone would ask.

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.

Kalanos|4 years ago

Good i was getting so sick of non-premium search engines. Premiumness is what I have been looking for.

NoImmatureAdHom|4 years ago

Thank you for this!

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!

speedgoose|4 years ago

I wonder how it collects the results from “the best search engines on the market”. Bing’s API in Azure has very specific terms of use that do not allow something like Kagi, and Google Search API is not designed to build a generic search engine.

skinkestek|4 years ago

Somebody asked the other day.

Kagi pay for api access to both Google and Bing.

MaxikCZ|4 years ago

Both Kagi search and Orion browser sounds like a dream come true. I hope to get into beta soon.

Also wish for Orion browser to come to android aswell

keenethery|4 years ago

Wish you well on your new venture. The domain name worked well for me for 25 years. Here’s to your future decades. Kee Nethery

RistrettoMike|4 years ago

Sounds awesome, I'd gladly pay for a product like this - I signed up for the waitlist :) Cheers devs!

philippgerard|4 years ago

Same here, I can't wait for an alternative with actually useful search results and good filters. Search is one product I use often every day but I'm stuck with either privacy-respecting options that don't yield useful results, Bing-themes or Google, which used to produce decent results but increasingly is just full of search spam. Good luck with this, I'm happy to pay!

badrabbit|4 years ago

Been using it for a week now, very happy with it. I still had a few times where google had better results but I will pay for kagi (so long as they have flexible payment options)

Check out their Orion browser too, been playing around with it.

adultSwim|4 years ago

My biggest issue with our current search engines is the lack of transparent open governance. My municipal water supply and the Debian project provide examples of better models.

GEBBL|4 years ago

Signed up! Good luck!

The logo is a g which is in the Google ballpark. why not K?

freediver|4 years ago

Good question!

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? ;)

mda|4 years ago

Heh that was the first thing i thought, not a fan of the icon. If you claim to be better why use small mind tricks like this?

rdtwo|4 years ago

Can you show us some examples of where you are better. Pick something that normally spews out seo garbage like “Seattle gardening” and show me what you can do.

jmakov|4 years ago

I must say that going from google, DDG, Quant I'm most satisfied with you.com. This seems to be a similar engine.

foreigner|4 years ago

When the second item on your startup's FAQ is how to pronounce the company name...

kajiryoji|4 years ago

Happy user here, but has anyone tested kagi vs devonagent?

Shadonototra|4 years ago

premium browser using our harvested data..

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?