I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search).
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.
> didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index
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.
I did not intend to spread misinformation here, and would like to hear more about the general-purpose index Kagi is working on. I had based my comment on several Kagi pages, but mostly https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm..., which mentions Teclis as Kagi's own index, but https://teclis.com/ makes it pretty clear that it's a "small web"-focused tool:
> 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?
What are the challenges of doing that when so much of the internet has turned itself into SEO slop to fit Google's algorithms?
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?
That's what SlopStop is for :) developing methodologies that scale for detecting slop.
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.
Anubis is easy, just use a whitelisted user agent or a headless browser if some sites disable that - you need one to index web app abominations anyway. Cloudflare and Google reCaptcha are bigger problems.
If a search engine starts censoring by whatever means, I'll not be using it, neither free or paid no matter how good it is (and by definition it can't be). Shills can provide a list of countries they don't want to see, hopefully some crooked search engine will satisfy their desire for censorship.
No search engines are uncensored, not even Yandex. Partly because they have to exist in a country somewhere, and partly because really nobody wants to index CSAM.
Yes of course and if you think that's all that western search engines censor then you can keep using Google and Bing - but some of us actually do want the full picture.
There's not just one war on, there are many. Should Kagi exclude all the results from American companies because of the actions of the US government in Iran?
This is so funny, as though wanting to boycott specific entities is some kind of absurd notion, and as though saying "Sure, what ELSE don't you like?" is some kind of proof that it's an absurdity
It kind of is though. Someone else will say "why are you sourcing results from an Israeli company?" and another will say "why are you sourcing results from a Chinese company?" and another one yet will say "why are you sourcing results from the US?".
Why are the ethics of working with Yandex or Baidu any better or worse than the ethics of working with Google or Microsoft? Except that they're not western.
The logical answer is that a person like this wants a very strong firewall, so ethically impure bits don't cross into their LAN.
Maybe not that ridiculous, since one can guess that the underlying thoughts are more about geostrategic concerns than favorite color of the day.
The United States (I guess that's also the premise here, I'm not USA citizen myself) has notable rivalries with several countries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. These nations are often considered adversaries due to various geopolitical tensions and conflicts.
I guess that Kahi is doing nothing illegal, so if people have that kind of question, it feels legitimate to reply with a demand of what is the extend this patriotism stance is going beyond the judicial requirements.
Sure, rapture the leader with only a hundred civil left dead and this is it, everybody in the country now is hearth supporter of those who launched that raid.
Western companies also bought strategically important Nazi Germany industrial products in the 1930s because they were considered superior. Commercial convenience and technical quality are not moral or geopolitical absolution. Would you buy cheap quality gold if the Nazis were selling it knowing what it supports?
What's the point in stopping paying money to Russia if Kagi is incorporated in Palo Alto, so it's paying money and will continue to do so to a country causing no less troubles than Russia?
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Much of the HN audience lives in the US, giving money to the US is unavoidable in life. But in return we do have the democratic ability to try to alter the behavior of the country.
It still makes sense to avoid giving money to other bad actors who are acting in direct opposition to your home country, and whom you have no control over, when you can.
Then one should ask for Kagi to move to a country that doesn't use taxes to invade other countries, and stop supporting them, instead of just asking to "stop paying money to Russia". Because fixing two wrongs is better than just fixing one, right? And I want to believe that living in the US doesn't make you agree with your country's foreign policy (which doesn't seem to change significantly even with your democratic ability to try to alter it) specially if you're worried about Russia.
Ru-speaking audience is ~2 times bigger than Russia, why would they cut this? Only because of SJWs like you?
I'd much prefer one search engine that searches well on two languages, instead of using different engines for each language. Ru-net has huge amount of usefulness in it, cutting it out is like cutting a finger. Fun fact, before the RU-UKR war, most Ukranians contributed to the Runet, so that would cut their heritage too.
I'm frankly a bit surprised that it's even legal for a US company like Kagi to do business with Yandex, considering it's sanctioned: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=18711. Though in fairness, I don't know enough about how exactly sanction laws work so it might be legally okay even if I find it morally questionable.
Yes, Yandex was effectively seized by Ru govt "friends" and turned into propaganda tool. And that's very unfortunate. But I'm not talking about getting the propaganda, only about search index.
About money - don't think this income is even remotely comparable with oil/gas incomes, which EU passes to RU.
Please don't start political debate. I do not like censorship of any kind, hence my initial response. I want to have available information in full.
Please don't pretend I'm turning this into a "political debate". Your position is, "Kagi ought to keep doing business with Russia". That in itself is highly political. No side of this issue is apolitical.
My position was more about access to information, that business side for me is secondary, as unavoidable evil. If kagi will find a ru-index with decent quality, I'll be more than happier. Right now yandex has the best index, but given the decay of ru tech sector now, especially now when it's oligarch-managed, that might not be for long.
Yandex has quite a few international entities, which are probably not direct subsidiaries, which in turn probably helps with sanctions. Yandex Cloud seems to be sold by a UAE company internationally: https://yandex.cloud/en/about#impressum
Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win.
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.
Prior to eternal September, the internet was dominated by college students and staff. Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That spirit continued as it opened to the broader public.
> Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism.
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.
Most people will gladly throw large pile of money for everything that they feel convinced serve them well, provided they are not living by some ridiculously low wage that turn them into monthly paycheck serfs.
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.
That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.
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.
The thing is, even today much content on the internet is still made for free without anything being paid to the author - we just have third-parties who have inserted themselves to profit from it. That's mostly a failure of society to provide the needed infrastructure as a public good.
BBS were only amateur efforts. Linux would not go anywhere if it was not for IBM famously investing 1 billion in 2000.
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 adopted Linux in college in 1993 and, like many peers, brought it to my R&D job and observed this wave of expansion through the mid to late 90s. Linux was already "going somewhere" in 2000 for IBM to even notice it. Lots of federal grant money was directly or indirectly improving Linux due to FOSS folks like me.
It was getting so much commercial and academic engagement that we had the idioms (cliches?) of the "LAMP stack" for basic web servers and "Beowulf clusters" for high performance computing. Even SGI was already revealing a Linux plan, before 2000, when they still seemed like a fixture of the HPC industry rather than an also ran.
I apologize for the hyperbole, but you are arguing my point: if something took "lots of federal grant money" to become usable in universities and amount to anything more than a research project, then we are no longer about something "free", are we?
From that point of view nothing that requires human input is free. Which is true in a sense, people are using free to mean free to use, not free to improve.
TANSTAAFL does not need a qualifier to apply. "Nothing is really free, so whatever you got 'for free' from a community member or some non-commercial effort was bound to have limited reach" is more like the point I'm trying to make.
Of course we put labor into it. It's not some seance or wormhole communicating with the software dimension.
This is the way FOSS is meant to work. I got jobs where an employer was happy to run other people's FOSS software "for free", happy for me to contribute bugs/requirements/patches back upstream, and happy to release our own projects under FOSS licenses.
It is a win-win for all involved. That's the whole point of it.
You seem to imply that work on FOSS projects is a second-class activity, meant to be done after companies and employers have secured their revenue sources.
This is like trickle-down economics for FOSS and it doesn't work.
I wouldn't call it second class. Maybe second-order?
To me, it is no different than management, planning, logistics, marketing, etc. which is done for the purpose of supporting some other objective.
It simply means that you perform software development as work-for-hire in support of that other objective, rather than for the purpose of licensing revenue. It provides wages for services rendered, just like the vast majority of other job types.
It just doesn't provide for scalable virtual rent extraction for a "publisher" or other middleman. To me, that is a benefit of it. It removes a bunch of perverse incentives from the table. Incentives that tend to harm the developers and users for the benefit of those middlemen.
In principle, I don't disagree. The problem is that in practice the large corporations managed to neutralize any chance for independent by commoditizing the software service layers that supported their business and invest all their resources they could to package their proprietary solutions on top of it, AWS and "OpenElastic" being the textbook example for it.
The one way to get out of this mess would be to have the market paying a premium for companies that do R&D in FOSS directly. It can not be a secondary goal, and we can not be telling them they shuold find some other way to make a living.
That’s disingenous. Microsoft themselves considered Linux a serious threat as early as 1998, as described in their own confidential memoranda. (AKA the Halloween Documents released by ESR.)
You are right, I abused the hyperbole. The IBM investment was not the first thing that propelled Linux to the mainstream. I remember that in 1999 my university was already installing Red Hat with Gnome 1.0 on the workstations for the computer lab, which of course already implies that Red Hat already existed as a mature company trying to make money from support contracts.
But even if the data point is not good to support the argument, I don't think one could argue that Linux succeeded by "being free". If Linux was a "serious threat" in 1998, it was because there already companies looking into it and willing to make back it up financially to help its development.
> The Software Creations BBS was not an amateur effort
Yeah, and it was a BBS ran and backed by a software development company that used it as a channel to promote and sell their software. IOW, they were not offering the infrastructure "for free".
> I already had a job deploying Linux and BSD systems in production at a corporate job
Which means that there was someone paying your employer to support it. Again, not doing it "for free".
I think you and the others responding to me are just trying to disprove the specifics of my comment but entirely missing the meat of the argument: I am far from being "a 27 year-old who just graduated business school", but I agree with GP said: people will not pay for digital services unless they absolutely have to, so companies that try to make a living by offering a quality service in exchange for payment will invariably lose to someone that offers their product "for free" but exploits their customers elsewhere.
Google could loose 70k active users and it wouldn’t even register as a blip. They have like 50,000-60,000 TIMES as many active users.
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. :(
I think the main value proposition of Kagi is that you're the customer not the product. As far as I know they are delivering on that.
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.)
"... didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to ..."
"... 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
I'm into sustainable, long-term vision. I feel like the plea for Google to make their index open has a lot of good points, but I also think it will go nowhere. So I could view Kagi strictly as a service, like a guy who mows my lawn, but part of the reason I'd pay for search is to build an alternative to all the crap out there. I stopped using Google search years ago and think DDG works Just Fine (I know there are detractors). I get DDG's play and it makes sense to me. I guess I need to reconsider what I think I'm paying for when I give Kagi money. I do think their search results are better, but generally not enough that an extra subscription is worth it.
I use and enjoy Ecosia, it works pretty well for most use cases. Unfortunately it has the same limitation as Duck and basically all of the other non-enormous-players in the search engine market: Location aware search is garbage.
I am the same, but at the same time I don't want to make assumptions about how viable it is to run a useful index for a small company. I assume they looked into it and deemed it non viable, but would like to know more.
We really should be investing in a public index infrastructure instead of yet another private search company that puts on a nice face while they are the under dog.
I think your statement is correct in the absence of a clear statement of direction and/or product launch by Kagi. I tried Kagi for a year and came away disillusioned as you were.
They also had a browser called Orion and till date that gave me anxiety because YouTube videos won't play the first time you load them, you need to refresh the page (randomly) and similar other weird quirks. It's state hasn't changed much over the last year either, so I switched back to Brave now.
I'll pitch in that since youtube was bought by Google it's become pretty anticompetitive too. They've absolutely been caught degrading their product on all browsers except chrome. I've witnessed this numerous times on Firefox on my android. Videos refusing to play, subtitles appearing off the screen, refusing to fullscreen, and at least 3 more annoying things i can't remember anymore.
Incompetence at scale is malice. We're talking about a mega-corporation gobbling up some of the brightest minds of our generation, not some garage startup that is barely able to keep the lights on.
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.
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.