Kagi/Orion status update: First three months

https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months

by darthShadow • 4 years ago

322 191 4 years ago

blog.kagi.com

tjungblut2• 4 years ago

I can't stress how much better Kagi is than Google, I'm a paying user. No more scrolling through tons of ads. Filtering by time and language is great, no more GitHub and Stackoverflow clones in the result. Thank you, I actually haven't realized how small Kagi still is, given how polished that product already is.

ohCh6zos• 4 years ago

I'm in the same boat as you. The results and polish justifies my monthly payment to them.

Given how impressed I am with Kagi search maybe it is time to check out Orion.

Semaphor11• 4 years ago

Eh, ads are not something one has to put up with unless one chooses so, and filtering by language worked well for me with DDG (can’t remember about google, it’s been so long). I do enjoy their actually unique features, though ;)

vorpalhex• 4 years ago

By ads I believe the parent means junk domains "top10cameras2022.com" and not intentional ads.

duiker1014• 4 years ago

Some searches with Google have become absolutely unusable, a flood of paywalled quora and random blogs that blabber without answers just to try and sell you a solution to a problem you don't actually have.

Kagi allows you to remove all that trash and actually find what you need.

samstave• 4 years ago

Does it block pinterest by default? ;-)

-- Aside - why dont we have a keyboard key to switch an entire line from ALL CAPS to all caps or to All Caps... (This would be a great key)

Is there a way something like Kagi can also search google and ddg and ad results to a search then rank the relevant ones based on which ones users click in the results in addition to whatever/wherever Kagi indexes from? (or is that how it works - because the goog crawler is massive and hard to replicate is it not?)

Serious questions, as I do not know...

dpkirchner• 4 years ago

I think that sort of auto-ranking would require more tracking than they want to do.

Semaphor11• 4 years ago

Is there a way something like Kagi can also search google and ddg and ad results to a search then rank the relevant ones based on which ones users click in the results in addition to whatever/wherever Kagi indexes from? (or is that how it works - because the goog crawler is massive and hard to replicate is it not?)

They don’t connect any searches/clicks to user accounts. But you can rank sites yourself like this: https://i.imgur.com/Po7mG7Q.png

malikNF3• 4 years ago

Does it block pinterest by default? ;-)

One of the first things I tried with them. I have the option to down-rank websites I don't like. I can block or lower their ranking.

Melatonic6• 4 years ago

I believe it does search using multiple other engines (google, DDG, Bing?) and lots of other ways as well (archive.org searches) but for ranking you have to choose to do that yourself

malikNF3• 4 years ago

Agreed.

Hated what g! was becoming, so I started using ddg, liked it at first but had to often modify my queries with a g! but I still used it, the experiance was't great, but it somehow worked, then the controversies around ddg started to come out. At the end of the day you gotta keep the lights on, if your users are not your customers then someone else is going to have to help you pay the bills.

Used kagi since it was recommended here on hn. Used it for a week(-ish) and instantly fell in love with it, the lenses feature, the ability to rank search results meant I could block out websites I hated seeing on my search results and boosting the ones I cared about. Now I am a paying customer.

Oh yeh, one more thing, for the past few months I don't remember a single instance of me modifying my queries with !g. Now I promote them every chance I get, I even got called a paid shill on reddit a few weeks back :D .

plugin-baby• 4 years ago

What are the DDG controversies?

Quenhus• 4 years ago

For those still on Google or DDG, here is my uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines. You may also use the list with uBlacklist.

jdiez17• 4 years ago

I think competition in web search is desperately needed and Kagi is promising. I used it during the free public beta and the search results were comparable to Google - sometimes better, sometimes worse. I sincerely hope they continue improving their search engine and other products, and make a well deserved profit from that.

However, this seems a little disingenuous to me:

We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design. This is a software architecture decision (we simply don’t need this) and there is no simple switch one can flip to enable this in case of a court order.

I have no reason to doubt this that their software is like that currently. But I also know that you don't need to change your software architecture to log user queries.

ColinHayhurst• 4 years ago

Yes, but let's not yet again confuse "search engine" with search service (proxy or metasearch if you prefer). I'm biased so will resist the temptation to say more and only point you to the comments which are currently at the bottom of this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32677872

Having said that I congratulate Vlad and his team. Competition and innovation, in browsers and web search, is indeed needed. We welcome, and are willing to support, all new challengers making genuine efforts.

bithavoc2• 4 years ago

I’ve been using Kagi for three months now, and 27 queries per day sounds about right, it could be more but when I open incognito tab on Brave it asks for a login which is super irritating, so about 15 queries a day still go to google. So far Kagi results are so good I forget about it until the end of the month $$$.

burkaman4• 4 years ago

They have an extension to fix the incognito issue, I assume the Chrome one will work in Brave as well? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kagi-search-for-ch...

bithavoc2• 4 years ago

I tried but it doesn't work in Brave, I added the Token but no luck. Thanks for the suggestion through

lalopalota2• 4 years ago

If the extension doesn't work, set the kagi search url to include the token as given in kagi settings.

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

Congrats, Vlad & team. You seem to be off on a good trajectory!

freediver15• 4 years ago

Thanks Viktor!

latchkey• 4 years ago

As someone who used to sell shareware through the original Kagi (that went bankrupt), it is so nice to see the name live on!

https://kagi.com/faq#kagi-old

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

0xCMP• 4 years ago

I pay for Kagi after a recommendation here on hn.

I have been very happy with it and how clean/fast it is to find what I want.

sivakon2• 4 years ago

$19 per month for single user without regional pricing is just insane given localised results (here in Japan) are really bad.

Yeri• 4 years ago

$19? Kagi is $10/month. Family and business plans coming soon.

sivakon2• 4 years ago

Individual Plans

Kagi Unlimited - $19/mo or $180/year ($15/mo) or $288/biennial ($12/mo) - Original Kagi experience, with unlimited searches

duiker1014• 4 years ago

It is currently, but the article linked here mentions that they are considering an increase because the current price is likely to not be sustainable.

insane_dreamer3• 4 years ago

Hadn't heard of Kagi before this, but seriously considering it. $10/mo I might be able to swing. I would not pay $19/mo but that's just me.

dannywarner2• 4 years ago

Three things:

1. You don't know what privacy is. "We believe that Kagi has the most user-friendly privacy policy of any search engine out there. However, privacy and anonymity are not the same things. For example your parents can know everything about you and still fully respect your privacy." Ask any kid if privacy is their parents knowing everything. You're using it as a marketing term.

2. This is illegal public solicitation and an SEC violation: "anyone passionate about Kagi and our vision for the web will have the opportunity to invest as little as $5,000 USD and join the ride with us. It would be structured as a SAFE note and we would use the funds to expand the team and accelerate our product vision."

3. Stop abusing HN to shill your paid search engine. "We are pleased to see that Kagi is propagating fast through Hacker News, Reddit and Twitter with word of mouth from existing users." Kagi shills hijack every single Hn discussion thread about search. You is just as bad. Just. Stop.

dang• 4 years ago

It looks like you have some substantive points, but can you please not be aggressive like this on HN?

I appreciate that you're watching out for the quality of the site, but you broke the site guidelines here, which is no doubt why users flagged your post.

Beyond that, your points would be much more persuasive if you made them more neutrally, without this kind of attack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dannywarner2• 4 years ago

I am sorry @dang I apologize for the aggressive tone of my comment and not making a better argument without the anger. The promotion felt blatant. I let it get to me (every comment I believe at the time - and many other recent posts). It was wrong and I'm sorry.

Fwiw this was the source of the self-promotion.

https://kagifeedback.org/d/887-comment-on-hn-discussion-of-k...

freediver15• 4 years ago

Hi Danny

1. Attention was brought to us for the unfortunate phrasing of that sentence and it was edited in the post

2. I am curious what rules are violated by mentioning plans for an investment round?

3. While I am glad this discussion happened, it was not submitted or solicited by any Kagi team member. We published a blog post this morning and our users (I assume) took it from there, as these things tend to happen.

Finally the post you linked to in your second post was from a clearly excited user (not Kagi team member) on our public forum.

bfors• 4 years ago

I really like how listicles are compartmentalized to one section of the results, instead of taking over the entire page.

geraneum2• 4 years ago

Paying user of Kagi here. I recommend it to all my friends. They have a family plan on the roadmap which is great for me. I have left Google search altogether and never looked back.

Over time I have managed to block most of the websites which annoy me the most from the results. For example I have blocked w3schools and boosted MDN or the annoying ads disguised as blogs or websites which pollute the search results by mere SEO enhancements.

Nextgrid2• 4 years ago

They mentioned that for family plans, parents could share "lenses" with other parents. I would love for this to be extended to everyone so there's a "lens marketplace" that people could share their curated lists of sites so that filter lists of shitty websites can be crowdsourced.

geraneum2• 4 years ago

That would be great, for example if I could find a lens that helps me search in topic I care about. Imagine Google’s :site but for a specific and custom group of sites with custom rankings.

bluSCALE4• 4 years ago

W3Schools is not as bad as it used to be.

duiker1014• 4 years ago

I tried many search engines, but I always ended up going back to Google for many queries. Kagi it's the first one that I really feel like Google doesn't add anything any more. Sometimes if I can't find something I will try google, but I never actually got better results, which means my query was just bad.

I am just so happy with Kagi I can't explain. I am not a huge fan of subscriptions and I carefully curate what I pay for monthly. I love paying for Kagi! I wish them only the very best!

disqard2• 4 years ago

Same here. Perhaps your happiness is due to Kagi being (right now anyway) an entity whose incentives line up with what's best for its end-users?

This could definitely change, but today, it looks like a genuine attempt to break out of the terrible local maximum (ad-supported Internet) we're stuck in.

girzel• 4 years ago

Exactly the same here. Every once in a while I think "let's see if Google has anything better for this query", and it never does.

justusthane• 4 years ago

I would really love to use Kagi full-time. I'm currently on DDG, but something about them that I can't quite put my finger on rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's the amount they apparently spend on advertising, or maybe it's that they're just sourcing their results from Bing.

Anyway, at $10/mo I’m not quite prepared to put my money where my mouth is. $5/mo would be much more attractive, and I would guess they'd have better profit at that price. How much does each user cost them?

Edit: Thanks everyone for the pricing info! I guess in a world where we expect search engines to be free, we don't realize how expensive they actually are to run (at least at smaller scales like Kagi).

Intuitively I would have expected the expensive part to be building the index and for each query to cost fractions of a cent. I am extremely surprised to learn that each query apparently costs them $0.125.

mminer237• 4 years ago

It says it costs them $12.50 in computing costs per 1,000 queries. It says the average user makes 27 searches per day, including the 10% of free users limited to 50/month, so probably about 30 searches/day for paid users.

$12.50 × (900 ÷ 1000) = $11.25/month/user

duiker1014• 4 years ago

One thing that I actually love about Kagi, is that they tell you how much you cost them. In the settings, under billing, there is a usage tab where it says how much your queries cost. Apparently last month I "used" $2 more than I paid, hopefully I am making it up with the word of mouth I spread.

There's more info in their FAQ https://kagi.com/faq#cost

bogwog2• 4 years ago

Wow I'm more than $10 in the red so far after being subbed for 3 months, with an average of around 1200 search per month!

I really hope that their high costs are due to some inefficiencies (e.g. with their current scale) they haven't been able to work out yet, otherwise that does not bode well for the concept of a paid search engine... or maybe I'm just an extreme outlier? I pretty much only ever search for documentation and things like that while I'm working, but I apparently do that a lot lol.

The price they're using seems to be $0.0125/query. I'm assuming that includes business expenses, like dev/admin/salary costs, and not just the raw costs of executing a query.

I guess a price hike to ~$15/mo would cover my particular usage, and I might be willing to pay that much, although I don't think many others would. $10 is already more than a lot of people are willing to pay just for search. Maybe if they bundled some other services into the subscription it would be more appealing? People expect search to be free, but are willing to pay for other services that are probably much cheaper to operate (VPN, password manager, cloud storage, etc)

freediver15• 4 years ago

You are, that is a fantastic way to look at it!

aendruk• 4 years ago

I feel the same about pricing; $5/mo is about what I’d expect to pay. I’ve been trying it at the current rate though to see how it goes. A fantastic thing they do is tell you how much you’re actually costing them. My billing page says:

     Month  Searches    Cost
  Jun 2022       875  $10.94
  Jul 2022       773   $9.66
  Aug 2022       842  $10.52
  Sep 2022        10   $0.12

  Your total payments: $30.00
  Your total usage: $31.25
  Your payments to usage balance: -$1.25 [Tip the difference]

jkestner• 4 years ago

This is fantastic, and I hope it can be a sustainable practice whether it's them or other larger companies. Transparency is positive when they're the little guy with a nerd audience, but most companies depend on information asymmetry to mess with our sense of value.

flas9sd• 4 years ago

made me curious how many search queries I'm doing: averaging 2000/month:

    sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*/places.sqlite "select strftime('%Y/%m', last_visit_date/1000000, 'unixepoch') as yearmonth, substr(p.url,9,14) as search_backend,count(1) as hits from moz_places p where (p.url like 'https://duckduckgo%' or p.url like 'https://www.google.%/search%' or p.url like 'https://www.qwant%') group by search_backend,yearmonth order by yearmonth asc,hits desc;"

add any search engine you use with another 'p.url like'

nottorp• 4 years ago

Anyway, at $10/mo I can't quite put my money where my mouth is.

Starbucks coffee fallacy :) I.e. it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffe so it must be cheap enough.

SyneRyder• 4 years ago

I'm currently on DDG, but something about them that I can't quite put my finger on rubs me the wrong way.

Have you given Brave Search a try? I honestly didn't expect to switch, but after trying it out for a while I ended up making it my default and haven't looked back. Brave is mostly using its own index (in my case, for 87% of my search results).

bigwavedave2• 4 years ago

Anyway, at $10/mo I can't quite put my money where my mouth is. $5/mo would be much more attractive, and I would guess they'd have better profit at that price. How much does each user cost them?

Not really. Between free and paid users, TFA says they average roughly 27 searches per user per day; 1000 searches costs them $12.50. If each user (TFA says roughly 10% of searches come from the free tier) is averaging 810 searches in a month, that puts their bare cost at close to $10.13 per user per month, not including salaries and other operating costs.

I'm one of roughly 2.6k paid users at the moment; they estimate the need for 25k users to be sustainable. There's so much about google and most of its current alternatives that legitimately disgusts me- voting with my wallet is the only option I really have.

pbhjpbhj• 4 years ago

that puts their bare cost at close to $10.13 per user per month, not including salaries and other operating costs.//

You're saying it costs then 1⅛ cents per search excluding wages and other operating costs.

That seems like they must be vastly over-paying for something? What does that money pay for and who is paying the wages+operational costs?

Edit: this comment [0] indicates every search is actually 3 searches, two at commercial resale rates (Google, Bing) and one against their own index; that probably explains it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678059

freediver15• 4 years ago

Maybe it's the amount they apparently spend on advertising

Hm not sure what you mean, because that amount is currently zero [1]? Kagi is kind of anti-thesis to digital advertising.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#marke...

nvrspyx• 4 years ago

I think they were talking about DDG with that part.

prh82• 4 years ago

Based on other data here, it seems like it's $0.0125 / query

marcolussetti• 4 years ago

The $0.125 is fascinating. According to my stats I query Google between 2500 and 3500 times a month. That would be a $300/mo. bill for Kagi?

I guess most people don't query as much as I do, but seems like it would need quite a number of people underquerying to make up for users who would be similar to me?

freediver15• 4 years ago

It is $0.0125. So more like $30/mo

kevincox2• 4 years ago

Orion is zero-telemetry by default so auto-updates are disabled by default

This is a very surprising choice. I'm also leaning towards the side of irresponsible. Web browsers are probably the biggest attack surfaces users have. They are running untrusted code thousands of times a day. That isn't even counting all of the other attack surfaces such as HTML rendering, media decoding and playing, WebGPU type stuff and more. The stream of vulnerabilities has been constant so far and there is no evidence that the stream is over.

If this was my product I would disable everything but auto-updates, and make a clear policy about what data I track on update downloads.

Trading security for privacy likely results in less privacy once you get pwned.

galleywest200• 4 years ago

I have used Orion to test it out and it prompts you if you want to update when a new update is available. Coming from a Unix background I prefer this method over a forceful update.

kevincox2• 4 years ago

Hmm, something is wrong with their wording then.

The way we measure this is through auto-update “pings” to our updates server.
This measures only users who have enabled auto-updates
auto-updates are disabled by default

This seems to say that they won't do auto-update checks by default. But I guess they are doing auto-update checks but not tracking the checks, just a "ping" (whatever that means if it isn't an update check).

throw10920• 4 years ago

This is a very surprising choice.

I believe that it's not too surprising if you know that most of their users are from HN.

The HN comments on every telemetry-related post that I've seen have been violently, overwhelmingly, religiously against telemetry (not tracking - telemetry proper) in any form.

Even if those comments aren't representative of the views of the readers as a whole, if you're building a company and those comments are your biggest insight into your users' feelings - you're going to do stuff like this.

(and yes, it shouldn't have to be said that this inhibits security, but then again most of the anti-telemetry HN commentators are fine with that)

account42• 4 years ago

and yes, it shouldn't have to be said that this inhibits security, but then again most of the anti-telemetry HN commentators are fine with that

The end result of security at all costs is zero user agency so this is not at all surprising. Like anything, auto updates are a tradeoff that is neither without cost nor provides 100% protection.

freediver15• 4 years ago

The choice to enable auto-updates is prominently present to users on onboarding. So while default off, it is one click away from being turned on for every new user using Orion.

Also there is a question of the real risk. WebKit and macOS are generally very secure. We had to intervene only once in the last 4 years with a (medium) security related WebKit update (and we shipped it a week sooner than Apple did with Safari).

We believe that the two facts highlighted above minimize any security risk.

On the other hand every telemetry, including auto-update pings, sends personal information (at the very least user's IP address) to the browser vendor. Almost every other browser on the market is ad-supported (directly or indirectly). Telemetry and ad-supported businesses can be a problem.

We do believe that browsers do not have the right to do this (at least if they want to call themselves privacy-respecting). In our view it should be on users to decide if they want to trust the browser (browsers are "user agent" after all) and every telemetry, including this, should be opt-in.

Simply put, if a browser is not zero-telemetry it can not be called privacy respecting, and any browser using telemetry by default should at least disclose it to users on the first run.

ilaksh• 4 years ago

Google has a search API. Does Kagi use this on the backend?

llaolleh• 4 years ago

This is the most important question. Are you piggybacking off of existing search providers, or is this a search engine from the ground up?

function_seven• 4 years ago

Looks like they do. From their FAQ[3]:

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.

[3] https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from

Semaphor11• 4 years ago

They use bing and google APIs (that’s where the cost mainly comes from as every querye requests from both), their own search index, and smaller indexes.

chomp• 4 years ago

I've been a subscriber for a while now - completely replaced Google, even for esoteric tech queries.

Only feedback I have is, if someone on the team gets some free cycles, please make the calculator a little more user friendly. Mostly looking for the ability to Kagi search an equation, and then tack on additional operations to the equation in the results page. Right now I have to reach for the mouse, click the small text field and type ans*. Would be nice if it just inferred that I want to use the previous answer.

gostsamo• 4 years ago

In regard to anonymity, I'm curious if the kagi users can form a closed tor-like network that will insure that all queries come from an authenticated user and at the same time the query source is obfuscated.

S6eUL2• 4 years ago

I joined the Kagi beta two weeks before it ended and have been a paying user ever since. I find the price to be quite steep but so far it have no regrets and will most likely continue my subscription. I average over 2000 queries per month.

- Search result quality is at least equal to Google for most queries and far superior for queries involving discussions or technical topics. Sadly, it is inferior for queries in my area of expertise (Swiss law).

- Kagi is the only alternative to Google that I know of (and I have tried many) which is able to produce good regional results and mix them - when appropriate - with international results. Most privacy focused search engines are very US centric.

- Blog spam and copy cats are not completely gone but the situation is at least bearable, especially after continuosly filtering them and boosting credible sites instead.

- Customization options, filtering options, speed and site layout are also far superior when compared to Google.

Apart from the lower quality results from queries involving my area of expertise, the only thing that still keeps me using Google Search are the reviews from Google Maps.

All in all, I recommend supporting this product.

niemenmaa• 4 years ago

I also have been using since beta, and agree with you. For me, the ability to boost and block certain domains is a killer feature. (There are probably solutions for other services, but to have it built-in is great.)

For developer-related queries I`m pleased with the results!

akvadrako• 4 years ago

Odd you say the price is steep - I have been using it mostly exclusively for a few months now and I haven't even thought about it cost. It must come out to under 0.1¢ per search.

vosper• 4 years ago

It must come out to under 0.1¢ per search.

I was struck by their pricing page [0] which says that "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches" and that "at USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use". I don't think they're going to be right that beta testers will do more searches than average users, and I think that they'll attract heavy searchers (the ones most noticing and disliking Google's quality). I would be surprised if I search less than 50 times a day, and that's probably just during work. If I was a paid Kagi user they'd be losing money on me. They say their price might have to go up, I don't see how they're going to avoid that.

[0] https://kagi.com/pricing

S6eUL2• 4 years ago

I can afford it but when compared to other stuff it just seems steep:

- Half the price of my fiber subscription

- Double the price of my VPS subscription

- Same price as my mobile subscription

BenderV• 4 years ago

I'm using Kagi in France. First time I'm not actively looking back to be on Google (which sometimes I still do). Congrats and continue your effort !

ss48• 4 years ago

"For example your parents can know everything about you and still fully respect your privacy."

This was raised in a flagged comment, so I still felt it was worth highlighting. I don't find analogies work well for technical decisions. I usually prefer that a company tell me what is and is not private and anonymous so that I can made a decision on if I should use an application and on how I will use it. There is no need to justify the decision you made and in some respects lecture us on why the decision was justified. Just be transparent about what is and is not and that's enough.

Semaphor11• 4 years ago

Heh, I actually raised that on their discord because it’s so cringy :D

freediver15• 4 years ago

Removed the analogy from the post since, agreed it can sound condenscending and wrong (missed that in the initial draft).

dcow• 4 years ago

I pay for Kagi on principle. I’ll just come out and say it though: Kagi is missing 30% of the internet, at least. It may just be that Kagi is in the landing phase of “land and expand”, but I do think that long term, and generally, search engines need to be indiscriminate. Sure, interpreting queries and providing flavored results is fine especially when I’m paying so I know the flavor is in my interest, but excluding entire categories of content is not.

Semaphor11• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate? What is missing?

frees1111• 4 years ago

I love this browser but I have problem with missing autocomplete on text inputs and with latest update I can’t play any video on youtube. Also would be possible to not animate address bar when entering url?

freediver15• 4 years ago

You can post these to orionfeedback.org

throwaway23236• 4 years ago

Been a paid Kagi user for 3 months and it's been a wonderful replacement.

If I could ask for one thing, though I don't think it is up to Kagi. I use my Android phone with the Microsoft Launcher and Edge and I for the life of me cannot figure out how to make it Kagi the default search engine.

Besides that, it has been a great service and well worth it! I wish the Kagi team well and I look forward to buying a shirt or hoodie in the future! :)

karaterobot• 4 years ago

Kagi has been worth the money for me. It's got a lot of room for improvement, but compared to DDG (which I like) it's given me everything I could ask for. I don't like the subscription business model most of the time, especially for software, but in this case there is a definable cost associated with me using the product, so it makes sense.

dklsf• 4 years ago

I'm really surprised how much a single search query is costing them in terms of compute/infrastructure (1.25 US cents). That buys you more than a minute of compute time on the top vps on hetzner. What's happening behind the scenes during a query?

Getting the compute costs down will probably be a major obstacle to growth, since they'll have to keep prices high (19 USD/month) to pay for their infrastructure.

godtoldmetodoit• 4 years ago

Happy paying customer here, and agreed. Their cost per search feels very high to me, but I don't know enough about the search space to know what is normal.

maxnoe• 4 years ago

Much of that will be the crawling and indexing that has to be done independent of the number of users, right?

So costs per user will go down with the number of users as this fixed cost is shared between more requests/users.

burkaman4• 4 years ago

Some of that comes from using Bing and Google search APIs. They have their own index as well but can't fully rely on it yet for all queries.

bongobingo12• 4 years ago

Is the end goal to ween onto their own index or will the search space always be dominated by some major upstream players?

wooque• 4 years ago

They wrote about it before. They use various paid third-party APIs to power their own search. I guess that is the majority of the cost.

pleb_nz2• 4 years ago

I'm guessing the query itself will be a very minor percentage of the total cost with just costs coming from crawling, data moving, storage, redundancy and resilience etc.

Melatonic6• 4 years ago

It is not compute that is killing them - it is using the Google and Bing API's for many searches. They charge a lot for those. In your Kagi account you can see exactly how many searches you have done and how much you have cost them (and it could easily be higher than your 10$ a month if you do a lot of searching)

osener2• 4 years ago

Both Kagi and Orion are deeply impressive products. Even though I try every new general purpose web browser and search engine that comes out, this combo is the only one that stuck.

Orion: Finally a non-chrome based web browser that can compete with the likes of Brave and Arc. It works much better on Mac than the alternatives, with the same engine as Safari it also benefits from deeper system integration such as native Sign-in with Apple and password management. Also, like Brave, comes with powerful ad and tracker blocker so you don't need a separate extension. I also love its built-in tree-style tabs implementation.

Kagi: It is Google without all the bad parts. It is user centric like some other alternatives, without the poor index and search results.

Props to the team, I am looking forward to what's to come. It is mind blowing how a single small company can make one of the best desktop browser AND search engine AND mobile browser on the market. Hope they are not spreading themselves too thin and can fund the development of all these for a long time!

My only complaints are the slow performance of Orion on iOS, and its poor handling of app urls. Latter caused some issues when I had Orion set as the default browser on my iPhone and some payment flow that used app redirects between my banking app and the store app got stuck. I was lucky and I could manually launch the app by pasting the app link in Safari, but I hope it can handle these cases as well as Mobile Safari in the future.

tra32• 4 years ago

Thanks for the review. I used Kagi for a bit and then forgot about it, time to try it again.

If Orion is based on webkit, what other advantages does it offer over Safari that you found?

Shank2• 4 years ago

I'm not the OP, but Orion supports extensions from both the Firefox and Chrome ecosystems. It also supports the WebRequest API in blocking mode, meaning you can use uBlock Origin, which you can't use at all with Safari.

osener2• 4 years ago

Web Extensions support, built in adblocker and tree style tabs (can be enabled using the option under View menu) are the biggest ones for me.

selectodude• 4 years ago

I wish I loved the browser. It's just close enough to Safari that I use it the same but it's just different enough where it drives me absolutely nuts.

behnamoh• 4 years ago

Orion browser currently has around 1,800 active users. The way we measure this is through auto-update “pings” to our updates server.

I'm happy for them, but is this an accurate measure of active users?

Kbelicius• 4 years ago

Next 2 sentences:

This measures only users who have enabled auto-updates (Orion is zero-telemetry by default so auto-updates are disabled by default). It may not be an accurate portrayal but is the best we got.

shepherdjerred• 4 years ago

The intro video for Orion is what convinced me.

lijogdfljk• 4 years ago

Is there mention of other OSs for Orion? I can't use it until it works on Linux/Windows, unfortunately.

bogwog2• 4 years ago

I started using this when it was in free/public beta, and signed immediately once it required a subscription. Zero regrets.

The results are excellent. Definitely better than Google and DuckDuckGo in my experience. I’ve been telling people to use it, but it’s kind of hard to convince them that $10/mo is worth it. A family/group plan would probably help get more people on board.

Also I completely forgot Orion was a thing until this post. I went to check it out, but unfortunately it’s Mac only. A port to Linux would be awesome.

jonpurdy2• 4 years ago

Orion looked (and still looks) amazing but when I tried it a few months ago 1Password refused to work with it (and any non-authorized browsers). This is 1Password's choice and entirely their fault, but I haven't found an alternative (though at the current rate of decline other options will become better by default soon).

Does Orion work yet with 1Password, or are there any workarounds yet?

Edit: found the thread on the 1Password forums and sounds like Orion has tried to reach out but are getting completely ignored by 1Password.

vladstudio2• 4 years ago

Not sure about 1Password extension, but Orion support for Chrome extensions is getting better with every update – so you might want to check it from time to time!

(P.S. Let me also recommend BitWarden - password manager UX is highly subjective topic, but it worked well for me, and it does not require subscription).

jonpurdy2• 4 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation. I avoided BitWarden for two reasons: - No Safari extension - Electron app

But now that 1Password is Electron and doesn't seem to work with Orion, I will give BitWarden a try again since the 1Password advantages were wiped out.

kitsunesoba• 4 years ago

AgileBits’ behavior as of late has been generally disappointing.

ApolloFortyNine• 4 years ago

I was thinking that something like this sounded interesting, and certainly couldn't cost more than $20/year for unlimited searches. But $10/m, and already being raised to $19/m?

Almost doubling the price per month already honestly seems like this product doesn't have long left to live. And the price is already expensive enough where only privacy enthusiasts would be considering it.

And for anyone saying free plan, 50 searches a month is just too low. If I have one issue I'm trying to resolve, it's very possible I use half of them right there, and who wants to worry about how many searches they have left.

Shank2• 4 years ago

Almost doubling the price per month already honestly seems like this product doesn't have long left to live. And the price is already expensive enough where only privacy enthusiasts would be considering it.

Well, early-adopters seem to be grandfathered in. But, if this model stops them from running out of money and helps them actually reach sustainability, I'm fine with it! I think that if they can't find 10,000 users who want to pay $20/mo for a really excellent search engine, there's a bigger problem here. There are surely 10,000 privacy conscious people who would pay, right?

The $9.99/mo pricing model is kind of a meme, because no matter what the service is, people seem willing to charge the exact same cost. At least Kagi is being up-front and saying "hey, our service costs more to operate and we aren't making enough money yet".

People willingly pay Superhuman $30/mo for an alternative interface to Gmail. If that niche exists, surely a paid search at $20/mo niche exists?

Semaphor11• 4 years ago

And the price is already expensive enough where only privacy enthusiasts would be considering it.

Their plan is actually to compete on quality. Just for privacy, I was happy enough with DDG for free.

encryptluks23• 4 years ago

A few things rub me the wrong way here... first, they don't accept cryptocurrency. Then they go on to say to be anonymous you can use services like SimpleLogin or PrivacyHQ, and they state "We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design."

The issue here isn't whether you log searches, but whether you log payment transactions and it is almost a guarantee that they do and is probably by law. SimpleLogin or PrivacyHQ offers no guarantees of anonymity when it comes to government agencies. In fact, you can almost guarantee that virtual debit card providers are logging your transactions and from experience usually require you link a bank account.

So even if pay with a virtual debit card and use an email relay, it can still be tied back to your search history if for some reason you are suspected of searching for something that may be investigation worthy. I don't think it is fair to simply trust a company that claims they don't log things, when history has shown that they do in fact even when they say they don't.

So why would they even try to market themselves as more private or anonymous? If you want privacy or anonymity then you'll use a free search engine that doesn't want payment; and you'll search from behind a reliable VPN or via Tor.

freediver15• 4 years ago

but whether you log payment transactions and it is almost a guarantee that they do and is probably by law

We don't log payment transactions. We receive notifications from Stripe to our webhook which updates the billing state.

So even if pay with a virtual debit card and use an email relay, it can still be tied back to your search history

That is why we make the point of not having any search history. Think about it - what would we use it for? It would just be a liability for us.

encryptluks23• 4 years ago

We don't log payment transactions. We receive notifications from Stripe to our webhook which updates the billing state.

So then you have a Stripe account with the transaction information. It is ridiculous to think that you have no information about payments coming to you, not even a transaction ID or reference number.

That is why we make the point of not having any search history. Think about it - what would we use it for? It would just be a liability for us.

"Trust us bro, we don't log."

Yeah, no thanks... I don't trust you because you told me to, and I've seen other companies saying the same thing that did in fact comply and keep logs but had agreements with agencies that made it "okay" to lie.

redavni• 4 years ago

I am not Kagi, but $10 a month would not be anywhere near enough money for anyone to provide you with protection from the law.

encryptluks23• 4 years ago

So Signal provides encrypted communication for free but should be charging $100/mo?

handity2• 4 years ago

While I am a happy paying Kagi customer, their stance on privacy is nonsensical and amounts to saying "We super duper pinky promise that we won't use your data"

From the Anonymity section: "For example your parents can know everything about you and still fully respect your privacy."

Ok, but if anyone thinks I trust a company the way I trust my parents they are sorely mistaken, and I certainly wouldn't want my parents to have an easily searchable record of everything I've ever searched for online, the same way a search engine provider does.

The complexity of accepting crypto payments is totally understandable. If that's the reason Kagi does not prioritize anonymity then that is understandable, but the justification that "you don't really want privacy anyway" is unnecessary.

"We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design. This is a software architecture decision (we simply don’t need this) and there is no simple switch one can flip to enable this in case of a court order."

"Software architecture decision" is meaningless. The only guarantee that data will not be collected and stored is a technological, probably cryptographic one.

If an organization is in a position to gain intimate knowledge of your life and habits, they have the ability to influence your life and that of others. Pinky swearing not to do so is a lot like following someone around with a camera while repeating "it's just for a video". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R5WjfL2ZAg

I don't expect Kagi to accept crypto, and I'll keep paying just because I'll jump at an opportunity to pay with my money rather than with my data. However, given that they decouple their service from the need to track users, I would have expected them to prioritize anonymity wherever possible as the next logical step.

If the justification was technological it would be understandable, but their reassurance that there is nothing to be concerned about is itself concerning.

ukd1• 4 years ago

It's unsovlable - even if cryptography could solve it, you'd have to trust the implementation.

Thought; Just periodically rotate your account, and use a new cc number. There is no bonus to me for keeping a particular account over the long term, as there is no history etc. However, I love the service and want to pay.

handity2• 4 years ago

I much prefer to trust an implementation over someone's word. I use Signal because I agree with their stated goals, and their implementation seems to align with those goals. I don't use Facebook because their policy is awful in the first place, and implementation is nonexistent. Kagi is in between. I am happy with their policy, but their implementation is lacking. This wouldn't be a problem, but they don't seem to admit that their goals are fundamentally in conflict with their mode of operation.

This is the first item on their FAQ:

"Our goal is amplify the web of human knowledge, creativity and self-expression and provide the user tools to fight against the web of greed, ad-tech and user tracking."

To pretend that company policy is the best way to achieve that goal is insulting. We will never have an ad-tech and tracking-free future without technological measures. Offering a service on the basis of "Pay with your money, not your data" is a fantastic step in the right direction, but obviously not enough.

COGlory3• 4 years ago

We are also considering a pricing change for our individual plan which is currently $10/month ($120/year). It is clear to us now that providing superior search quality at the current price will not lead to sustainability and that we will need to increase it.

I guess I will be part of the 70% that will drop. Back to DuckDuckGo it is. Great product, enjoyed using it, but $10/mo for searches was tough to swallow, there's no way I can double that. I was really enjoying it but their cost per search is waaaaaaaaay to high and they need to seriously look at which APIs are costing them so much, and just drop those. I don't necessarily need infoboxes with my search. I'd be happy with just the indexing.

darthShadow• 4 years ago

You may have missed this in the same section:

If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it.

COGlory3• 4 years ago

I appreciate that but I don't want to be sucking money out of an enterprise I'd prefer to see succeed. I search a lot, it's just not viable unfortunately.

Semaphor11• 4 years ago

seriously look at which APIs are costing them so much, and just drop those

Well, that would be bing and google. And combining those results is a good part of the magic. Currently, the searches are actually paid for by subscribers, but the founder is paying everyone’s salary out of his own money, so that’s a bit of an issue ;)

Melatonic6• 4 years ago

I wonder if Kagi could be a 501c and and there might be a way to get funding from other large providers?

Google finances a lot of Firefox, for example, so there is not a monopoly in browsers. One could argue that means Firefox is beholden to Google but in an ideal world it would not be. Mozilla probably gets lots of other donors too. Kagi may be able to do something similar or at minimum get some big donations / endowments from wealthy people who support the cause.

COGlory3• 4 years ago

No no I totally get that. It's just....so expensive it seems unrealistic. I pay for /e/OS and /e/Cloud...I pay for a Hetzner box and give money to a number of open source projects. If I'm not their target audience, I'm seriously wondering who is. Maybe I just don't make enough.

Anyways, great service, I hope they figure it out, but I really think they need to get the cost per search down.

manca• 4 years ago

I've been following Kagi's development for some time now and the idea looks promising. Not sure if the team plans to develop its own crawling engine and index that won't depend entirely on sources such as Google/Bing/Wikipedia, etc. Right now, it seems like the results are 90% google results without the ads (which is still a big plus). However, I'd like to see if they can pull off indexing of (maybe a smaller part?) of the web on their own -- that way they can completely get decoupled from Google and not put their fate in the hands of much bigger players.

Anyway, exciting stuff and I wish the team best of luck!

knoebber• 4 years ago

Another happy, paying kagi user here. I find the search results for dev related queries MUCH better than google. This is mostly because I set official documentation sites to have a higher precedence (No more w3 schools appearing above MDN, for example), which is a feature google lacks.

Here's to hoping it gains more traction! I love the competition in the search space.

insane_dreamer3• 4 years ago

Haven't used it yet, but very impressed with what I'm seeing/reading.

$10/mo could work (I think many people would go for it for $5/mo, though I understand that may not work for Kagi). More than that it starts to be very niche I think.

A family plan is interesting, and I would pay for a Kagi for Kids that works and filters out garbage without dumbing everything down to a "kiddie" level (like Google does). My young kids have a great deal of scientific curiosity and I'd like them to be able to explore freely and learn interesting stuff that might go way over their head at first but isn't "kiddish", without worrying about them stumbling into a cesspool (and I don't mean just a "safe search" porn blocker, but just all the horrible stuff out there you don't want them to stumble on).

disqard2• 4 years ago

Being niche is okay, but being sustainable is vital. There are many ways to articulate this, and I'm not an unqualified fan of pg, but he did capture this wisdom very well in "Do Things That Don't Scale" [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041765

insane_dreamer3• 4 years ago

for sure, niche is okay. would just be nice if it became more widespread because it's a good tool

gnicholas• 4 years ago

I have been trying out Orion for the last few months and have found two features to be very valuable:

• vertical/nested tabs

• sharing tabs between desktop/mobile

My daily driver has been Brave for the last few years, but the lack of TST has me looking for alternatives. If I'm not able to find a decent TST solution, I'll be migrating more of my browsing to Orion.

Phenomenit• 4 years ago

Love Kagi, can't remember last time I!g something. I admit $10 is a bit steep but there was a week after they changed the free tier when I was on the fence but I realized I can't go back to Google or ddg. Thank you Kagi team, the web is usable again.

andrewaylett• 4 years ago

Another happy early adopter here: I use Google tech for a lot of things, but not for search for many years. DDG is really good, enough that I've pretty much given up falling back to Google Search if DDG can't find something. Kagi is even better.

I particularly like the ability to lower and raise domains. I don't have many in my list, but the ones that are there are there for a reason.

neoromantique• 4 years ago

I've been just considering signing up last week, and this blog post has tipped me into pulling the trigger.

I am worried though, due to their high query cost, are they doing the full pipeline with external sources for simple queries too? Like I am accustomed to using google instead of my brain for literally the tiniest and pettiest of things, from just googling website name just to open it, spell check, conversion of anything into anything etcetcetc.

Melatonic6• 4 years ago

They have a simplistic answers AI that will answer some stuff (like if it can pull direct from Wikipedia or if you were to for example use Google as a simple calculator) that supposedly helps them reduce these costs. I am not affiliated and I am not directly involved but this was my first concern as well - because I am used to search engines being "free" I use them all the time for everything. I know most casual users are even worse - I hardly know anyone who types in an actual URL into the address bar even if they know exactly where they want to go and what the URL is (for example I type in "mail.google.com" when I want to go to my email but most would just search "gmail" into google)

ThePhysicist• 4 years ago

Wow, 26.000 USD MRR within a couple of months, that's really impressive.

pleb_nz2• 4 years ago

I'm interested in alternative browsers that aren't google based/owned and have found myself limited to use Firefox. But that I mind it, it does everything I need, But I'd be open to Orion, but correct me if I'm wrong, it's not cross platform?

Melatonic6• 4 years ago

Not on Windows yet no

Melatonic6• 4 years ago

Big fan of Kagi - I was part of the original completely free testing period and recently bought in to the subscription and changed all my devices to using it. Results are great so far. I really like that you can customize your results (and "up" or "down" regulate certain websites and especially like that it also searches some lesser indexed sources like smaller personal sites/blogs. Probably the coolest thing though is that it will also search old offline websites (archive.org) for results in super niche stuff - this makes it super useful for some things.

I am not on MacOS so I have no opinion on Orion but Kagi + Firefox is a great combo.

t0bia_s• 4 years ago

10 USD/month is too much for me. 5 USD/month in family sounds reasonable but if that means 250 searches for month for one user, it's not enough.

freediver15• 4 years ago

It is N x 250 searches total for the entire family, where N is the number of users. Some family members will probably search less.

wtcactus2• 4 years ago

As a macOS user, I was very well impressed by this project (mostly Orion browser) but, I simply can't use the basic plugins I need with it.

Been trying to get Workona plugin to work with it (both the Chrome and Firefox versions) on every Orion beta update, but nothing, it just doesn't work.

I'm starting to wonder if it's Orion that doesn't support some API call, or if I misconfigured something, but, there's no documentation that shows either.

ajgraves• 4 years ago

Orion has not fully implemented every API call for both plugin architectures, that is likely why you have experienced problems. Have you filed a bug report on https://orionfeedback.org?

wtcactus2• 4 years ago

Thank you, I wasn't aware of that page. I did just submit a bug about this specific extension.

rufusroflpunch2• 4 years ago

First I am hearing of Kagi. I'm impressed with what I am reading though. The company seems very transparent about their business model, which is refreshing.

Reading their pricing page, it says it costs them about one dollar for a single search query. Holy moly, that seems wildly expensive. I would really be interested in knowing why a single search query is so pricey.

Semaphor11• 4 years ago

You are misreading something, it’s about $0.0125 per query.

rufusroflpunch2• 4 years ago

You're right, their pricing says $1 per 80 searches, sorry. I still think that sounds like a lot. I'm wonder that their infrastructure looks like that making 80 searches costs a dollar. If there is one thing that I would think would be extremely cheap for a search engine, it would be conducting a search.

TradingPlaces• 4 years ago

Satisfied customer here. I like being the customer, not the product.

layer8• 4 years ago

There are some incredible discussions happening here, like for example this one about should Kagi include a suicide prevention widget.

That seems a weird topic to highlight, quite far on the long tail of what is important for a functional web search engine.

milgrim2• 4 years ago

Any way to disable the „auto correct“ feature? No, I don’t want to search for „mind journey“, I want to search for „midjourney“. Without additional clicks please. But apart from that I really like it, thanks for offering a real alternative.

freediver15• 4 years ago

That sounds doable, you may post a feature suggestion to kagifeedback.org

milgrim2• 4 years ago

Will do that, thanks!

badrabbit• 4 years ago

DDG was always better when I tested Kagi and Orion was not performing any better than brave either. Both products are far from terrible but based on the merit and value of the product alone I could not pay for it. The privacy angle is worth paying for but why won't I just use DDG? I use private tabs a lot and having to login to kagi or searching the internet logged in with an account tied to a payment method isn't a positive thing for me. Good idea but bad business model is my experience with both products.

But YMMV so don't let me discourage you from trying them.

billbrown• 4 years ago

Beta user and paid subscriber here. Kagi is just great—for all the reasons that everyone else here has already said.

I use Orion on my phone because it's the easiest way to get Kagi as your default search engine. It also sidesteps my two problems with Orion on the Mac: 1Password support (and Chrome extensions generally) and my years and years and years of muscle memory built up around Developer Tools. I've tried Safari's tools and they're just too different. (Once the Chrome extension support is fully-baked, I'll probably force myself to get used to the Safari tools. Until then, Brave it is.)

eitland3• 4 years ago

Many complain about the price, but for me it is an absolute no brainer.

In this day and age a search engine is one of the most important tools we have, and the price is rather cheap for not having to deal with Google and DDG ignoring my actual queries and including tons of results that doesn't match my query at all.

My time is worth something and having to deal with false positives takes actual time. Also it is mentally exhausting and the better I get at detecting fake results the bigger the chance is that I skip an actual hit.

But maybe most of all the arrogance of Google and DDG and Bing is tiring. When I ask for "something very specific" and every time they include a number of results that doesn't match, it is like they don't think I am an actual grown up who can decide for myself.

avinassh• 4 years ago

Do you have advanced Crystal or vanilla JavaScript knowledge? (Kagi search team)

I am surprised at the mention of Crystal here. I wasn't expecting Crystal to be used for crawler!

pwpw2• 4 years ago

I've been super happy with Kagi over DDG and Google. The results are significantly higher quality to me, particularly as a software dev that performs numerous searches per day.

The $10/month price is a pain point that will test my desire to keep using it long term. The $5-7 range feels much more ideal. Obviously they have costs to cover, but I can't see a large adoption rate unless they can bring the price down, which would be a bummer if they couldn't because the product is great.

pt_PT_guy• 4 years ago

kagi is awesome, really awesome. and Fast.

But they are like: super expensive.

Unacceptable expensive. More than netflix, spotify and friends.

I wish they invest more into bringing down their own operating costs so that the premium package could be more affordable.

dave_walko• 4 years ago

Here is my question. I used Kagi Search in beta, then when it went pay, I stopped due to my search being pretty basic. My concern/question is, will they make this pay too once its out of "beta"

Kagi/Orion status update: First three months

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