| Plus, Kagi has only a few possible outcomes. These are my predictions: 1: Never has enough userbase to become sustainable. Very likely given that a search engine costing as much as a hulu account is not a value proposition and Kagi folds after a few years. 2: Kagi gets bought out by a larger brand and takes on the hulu platform of pay + ads. 3: Kagi gets enough of a userbase to get recognition, so advertisers and companies start targeting and optimizing their sites for that service so that they can get a share of a crowd that will pay to search the internet, eventually turning them into what Google is now. 4: Companies invest into Kagi, buying a premium subscription to enable the search functionality on their own systems. Soon after the companies realize they are covering a significant portion of their income streams and start blackmailing Kagi to change their business model so that their userbase is preferentially directed towards the controlling companies' products. 5: Kagi gets investors who do what the companies in 4 would do. 6: Cheaper competitors arrive and the paid search engine concept goes into a death spiral race to the bottom, destroying the field for everyone. (I can get the same results as Kagi on "Gluffer" for $0.99/month and the first 6 months are free! etc., etc.) There's very little chance that they make it past all of these hurdles. It would require a creator/owner with amazing self-discipline and an absolute corporate credo to force them to turn away money (all the way up to bankruptcy and the end of the business) in favor of the people that use their products. |