Neeva - cofounded by an ex-Google exec also provided a paid search experience with similar features. They have since shut down and in their blog post pointed out that the issue they faced was not convincing people that they should pay for search but rather the fact that distribution of their service is difficult (i.e. being browser defaults, at work, on people's phones).
What's Kagi doing differently to be able to succeed?
That's hardly a relevant criteria. HN consists of a niche audience of technical users already interested in startups and search technology. The real criteria is whether Kagi will be able to scale beyond a niche market, and establish a sustainable mainstream business. OP's question is valid, but it can't be answered by outsider speculation. Hopefully someone from Kagi is able to address it.
This investment is a good sign, though. I'm rooting for them. We need more competition in this space, and a proper business not hijacked by advertisers is always a good thing.
> HN consists of a niche audience of technical users already interested in startups and search technology.
Isnt that how firefox got popular, techies started to use it and then convinced others to switch. Of Course in the end it was no match against Google marketing for Chrome.
True, it could be. I'm just not sure it can survive as such when its main competitors are billion-dollar corporations.
But maybe there's room for smaller search engines with alternative business models to compete with each other. marginalia.nu is another promising startup.
You're forgetting that the "niche technical audience" has something marketers and influencers and other kinds of pushers don't: competence and credibility. And (not relevant here, but to plenty other products) control or influence over procurement process in SMBs, corporations, universities and government facilities.
Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are the personal IT support departments of some subset of our family, friends, and their friends. They come to us asking for advice, or to set their computers/phones up, or to fix them after they "caught viruses". However begrudgingly we do that, it puts us in a position of power - they listen to and trust in what we say, and accept uncritically what we do to their machines. And, our interests are mostly aligned with theirs - even if we don't care about particular friend-of-a-friend's happiness, we'll still do them good so they don't have to come back with more issues any time soon.
This is how Google Chrome spread. This is how Firefox still survives. This is how several brands of anti-malware software spread - a mistake that's now difficult to undo. This is how AdBlock Plus became a thing, and how uBlock Origin is now replacing it. All these trends and more, I participated in first-hand. People still remember and follow advice I gave them over a decade ago (which isn't always good - see the anti-malware stuff).
And so is the case with Kagi, to a degree. I'm paid user for 1.5 years now, happy with the service. I recommend it in relevant discussions, I mention it to people who spot it - but since it's a paid product, it is a tough sell with general population. Still, I try to spread the word, like I do with any other good and non-user-abusive tool.
That said, this news makes me somewhat reluctant to recommend Kagi. I'll keep using it because it provides me immediate value for reasonable price, but taking investment often is a Faustian bargain. In this case it's not as clear as with regular VC backing, so I guess we'll see where this goes.
I think you're overestimating the impact technical users have on the survival of a business. Word of mouth and technical influence inside SMBs and corporations can only do so much, especially for a business that doesn't have a corporate sales strategy.
> Nearly all of us in the "niche technical audience" are the personal IT support departments of some subset of our family, friends, and their friends.
How has that influence worked out for you so far? By that logic, all our family and friend circles would be running Linux, using OSS, and be more mindful of their privacy. IME my attempts at convincing others to use the tools that I use has mostly been met with lukewarm response, or even arguments in favor of the tools that they already use. Convincing someone to change their computing habits is not just a matter of being considered an expert in the field.
Google Chrome spread because it had the resources and influence of a billion-dollar corporation, and the marketing budget to reach millions of users. Firefox is barely surviving, and most of it is due to its corporate contracts, not because of its technical audience.
> How has that influence worked out for you so far? By that logic, all our family and friend circles would be running Linux, using OSS, and be more mindful of their privacy.
Asking normal people to use Linux and OSS is a bit too much, but I think that Macbook sales have had at least a bit of help by being endorsed by the technical crowd.
And iPhones and iPad, too. They are what you recommend to your family members after one too many requests to "fix" a "virus" on their Windows PC or Android device.
Kagi is not convenient in the sense of browser search engine awareness. They do plug-in type thing. Needs work from the browsers for better integration.
> What's Kagi doing differently to be able to succeed?
Define success? It outperforms every other search engine in terms of quality of results and at least from what I understand, they're not too far off from breaking even on their salaries.
Neeva was a VC funded abomination and it showed, they even had deals with "big brand" companies like LastPass to offer bundles, but their core product sucked. Neeva search results were often worse than Google. That's not the case with Kagi.
Its not hard to define success. It means having more revenue than their cost, and paying all employees market rate salary(including the founder himself).
Everyone has their own definition of success. For many, a "successful" tech startup is one that eventually lands a $100M+ buyout, or gets millions of paying customers, or some other metric that's far beyond "simply" arriving at a sustainable business that you (and I) mentioned.
Unfortunately, it's a common bar for the continued existence of companies. I'd say successes if the company still offers a service in 5 or 10 years. Unless the operators an employees are all independently wealthy, you need to break even
I tried Neeva and immediately hated it - it felt slow and clunky. I tried Kagi and immediately loved it enough that I've been paying ever since they let me. I think the big thing that Kagi is doing differently to Neeva is just being good.
I know right! I can't remember the last time I had to click through to the second page of Kagi unless my search was a futile one in the first place (ie: I hadn't understood the problem enough to know what to search for)
They have their own browser, the Orion browser, to funnel people onto their search engine.
Their search engine is also better than google for me for most use cases already, it has a clean and smart design with well thought out features that add value.
I hate that Orion is not cross platform and limited to apple ecosystem.
With that said it is native and my default choice for macOS and iOS.
No telemetry, ad blocker built in, performant and supports extensions from chrome and firefox - on iOS too.
Hands down the best native tree style tabs of any browser on the market on top of that and easy tab syncing.
It’s still in development but it’s stable enough for me to be my main browser.
These two products show some serious technical ability from a small team. I bet on companies who invest in and show technical ability over those with VC money, big names focused on marketing and growth.
At least for iOS/Mac but 99.999% sure for other browsers as well, they could write an extension that rewrites "https://www.google.com/search?q=some%20search" into their own search url right? Then keep Google as default search engine. Installing an extension sounds like a hurdle people paying for search are willing and able to jump over.
I love kagi but I hate this. It's not their fault, it's just a limitation of the os but it's such a hassle when you have to solve a Google captcha to get kagi results. I'm considering just removing that from my phone and switching back to Google there.
You can switch default search engine to DDG or Ecosia, Kagi extension will still redirect you away. Or use extensions like xSearch or xEngine, they seem to be better at redirecting
That's exactly what I do. I feed searches to Ecosia and the Kagi extension handles the rewrite. Works well on Mac and iOS. I only use Google explicitly with the !g operator (which I use sparingly, and often get the same results or slightly worse) or for Google Images (which are better for now)
I didn't realise Neeva had shut down. I tried it for about a week, but stopped using it because it wasn't as snappy as Google. In fact, I always seem to return to Google from every other search engine I try because of its snappiness — decades of tuning seems to have paid off.
Kagi is the first alternative search engine that I actually use regularly instead of Google.
I used DDG for years, but more than half my queries ended up being prepended with !g because their results just weren't very good. With Kagi, I fall back on Google maybe once a month, and usually Google doesn't end up finding anything better.
Neeva did only one thing right: they cared about privacy, but otherwise they really did not do a good job. Their search results were worse than google, their load times were even slower than google, they tried making too much money too quickly, and they jumped towards fads too quickly.
