| ▲ | mikelitoris 11 hours ago |
| Kagi |
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| ▲ | piskov 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Kagi will be dead if google and alike are dead. Buying access to web search indices is not the same as having one. (I love them but this is the hard truth) |
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| ▲ | tensor 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Kagi is building their own index. There are also other open indexes. Over time these can replace the big corporate indexes. The hard truth is that the big players in search are dead. They are now the yahoo of search, with landing pages full of ads and results that are primarily ads. | | |
| ▲ | piskov 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | See their revenue (number of paid users is not a secret): something around $7M annually? It was half of that not so long ago (glad, that the userbase is growing). With their current pricing they are out of their league of having any full-blown index, crawlers, people, what have you. I would say year ago I was amazed how they are alive at all (unless I am missing something in their funding). | | |
| ▲ | wahern 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | A little over 15 years ago you could index the web with a small cluster. I remember people doing doing it with Cassandra or Elasticsearch. I'm sure you'd need a much bigger cluster, but outside video and images I imagine it's still doable even for a small organization, especially if you're filtering out content farms. Plus, there are many organizations interested in having access to an index, and I'm pretty more than a few currently running their own index and selling to analytics firms. | | |
| ▲ | piskov 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Index is one thing, great search over it is another. A competitive, general-purpose web search engine with its own full index is _brutally_ hard and expensive. This is the reason there are only a few world-class like russian yandex, chinese baidu (to not state the obvious names like google). | | |
| ▲ | tensor 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | They already have world class search technology. In terms of indexing they only need to index the most important content. There is so much slop now and it doesn't matter at all if that is indexed. IMO their strategy of focusing on smaller sites with human curated content is correct. They can make some deals to index some of the big walled gardens and that's pretty much world class right now. What do you think a site like Google is giving you these days? They are explicitly bad at indexing the small web. Their search technology is not better than Kagi, and made worse by ads and LLM ad bias. So what is this big "world class" thing they do that can't be replicated? The web is not the same place it was years ago. Indexing all the slop and scams and ads is not useful to me as a consumer. |
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| ▲ | mapontosevenths 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Kagi depends on their being an open web to crawl. The incentive to publish on the open web is gone though. |
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| ▲ | carlosjobim 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Search engines can usually search the closed web as well. Also, incentives are super high for businesses to create quality content for the open web to drive business. For example a car tire manufacturer could publish reliable restaurant reviews in order to encourage driving. | | |
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| ▲ | efilife 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Please read the article before commenting. It's not about what you think it is |
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| ▲ | yunwal 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| In case you didn't read the article, it's about Google Adsense no longer being an effective way to advertise. |
