[fumufumufumu]

What I gather from this is few if any non-software devs use Kagi

8 of the top 10 "raised" sites are software dev sites and with #6 being MDN I'm guessing it's not just any software devs, is web developers specifically that use Kagi.

Am I drawing the wrong conclusion? Does that mean Kagi's days are numbered? What would it take for them to get enough non-web-devs that the top 10 raised looked more representative of the average internet user?

[OuterVale]

I think it is also a consideration that more technically inclined users are more likely to spend time tailoring their experience in this way.

Technical users also likely have specific sites (namely documentation) that they wish to bump in their results where other professions might not.

I'm not disagreeing with your point, just offering some thoughts of my own.

[harrall]

I think it’s more word of mouth because many professions use the Internet and could surely make use of site preferences.

To be honest, I’ve only heard of Kagi on HN and nowhere in any of my friend groups.

[yellowapple]

> Does that mean Kagi's days are numbered?

Why would it mean that their days are numbered? Nothing wrong with having steady income from a loyal customer-base, even if that customer-base is niche.

[globular-toast]

It would mean that if they are operating at a loss and hoping to capture more of the market later. But if they're profitable then the main danger is a competitor coming along.

Growth mindset is a big part of our sick society, unfortunately. It's the only thing our politicians like to talk about, after all. Being a stable business delivering value is as good as dead.

[whazor]

Kagi is the only paid search engine and they are already profitable: https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi

I think the bigger danger is the competition around AI chat assistants. There are other paid assistants, but you already see that even the paid assistants are getting trained to promote certain corporations.

[doublerabbit]

Kagi were an early adopter of LLMs. You can use Kagi assistant for AI needs.

[pbronez]

Kagi Assistant is awesome. It uses their search for context. I got a free year of Perplexity and liked Kagi better.

[littlecranky67]

Bing Chat (chatgpt without login) has replaced more than 80% of my searches. Still with kagi for the remaining 20% but if my searches run out I probably use duck again for those

[freehorse]

Because devs (or maybe just web devs?) will be replaced by AI soon, I guess.

edit I do not agree with this, but this is what i assume OP was referring to? Because right now web devs is a quite populous and active crowd.

[johnisgood]

Someone still has to write the prompts though, someone who knows what he is doing.

[chillfox]

The average internet user is never going to pay for search. Trying to target them would likely be a mistake.

[carlosjobim]

The average person is far more willing to pay for anything computer-wise than the average software developer / hacker.

Or how about the average knowledge worker? There's hundreds of millions of them.

[doublerabbit]

I am an average internet user.

I pay for Kagi and it's refreshing to actually see real results rather than sponsored slop from the others.

[orphea]

  I am an average internet user.

How many average internet users comment on HN?

[sejje]

The average Internet user doesn't contribute content/comments at all.

The average Internet user doesn't visit HN at all.

The intersection of these groups, HN visitors that comment? Distinctly not average.

[natebc]

it's a nice round number.

[mystified5016]

Goalposts

[gxs]

Not every business sets out to be the next Google

Loyal Kagi customer here, based on their posts and in my dealings with them, they are doing their thing and doing well

They are focused on privacy, do a great job of it, and their AI assistant is top notch (highly recommend you take a look, can choose from many models and swap out responses instantly, not even getting into the awesome search features)

Not commenting on your (good) who is the main audience question, rather the other point about if Kagi is doing well

I subscribed my girlfriend to it as well and tell people whenever the moment is appropriate

Really rooting for these guys to succeed long term

As an aside, when I got my Kagi subscription the first thing I did was lower Pinterest results

[ipaddr]

I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one. They need to record every search and connect it to your account. Duckduckgo is more known for privacy and searches well through tor.

Here are the stats: https://kagi.com/stats

How many are paid vs trial accounts?

We know family doesn't offer a trial nor teams.

126 teams x 5 or 6 members = 1,000 accounts at 10 per day 10k

4500 family plans: most will take the 20 a month plan 100k

45000 individuals lets say they are all paid most on the 5 dollar plans lets assume on average 6.50 is earned 300k

Then you have orion+ members at 2000 giving an extra $15 per account. 30k

They probably make 450k a month

They have 19 employees on linkedin and they are listed at under 50 everywhere else. Lets give them 25 employees at 100k average salary which would be 2.5 million in salaries which might be low.

Add on costs to actually run the website (paid search, servers, office costs) which hopefully cost less than 3.5 million.. the rest is profit.

I'd say they are doing well enough. My average of 5/6 per team might be much higher if they have a few 100+ sized teams. I think the mode would be 5/6 regardless of the average.

[Semaphor]

> I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one.

I don’t use it, but the Privacy Pass [0] thing should actually make it great for privacy if you care more about that than personalization.

[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

[almyk]

> I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one. They need to record every search and connect it to your account.

Looking at their privacy policy they state the following:

> We may store web requests made by user browser temporarily, with strict retention periods, for debugging purposes, and in a manner that they are not linked to an account.

https://kagi.com/privacy#server-data

[KomoD]

Is it actually true though? They've lied about other things, what stops them from lying about that?

For 2 years they've said "Kagi has zero marketing budget and spends zero on marketing", that's a lie and they still haven't changed it. They've sponsored over 200 youtube videos https://filmot.com/search/%22brought%20to%20you%20in%20assoc...

[speerer]

Do we know that they spend money on this or is that inferred?

I asked because the search you've linked to only seems to list relatively niche chess videos on one creator's account. And the videos themselves are also ad-supported. It's (at least) not impossible that the sponsorship association is not budgeted in the way that (I think) you infer.

[KomoD]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013889

https://kagifeedback.org/d/3822-kagi-is-sponsoring-youtube-v...

"I watched Daniel King for 10 years and have previously donated to him, now I am happy that we are in position to sponsor his work which I believe is extraordinary.", this also definitely sounds like monetary compensation to me.

[timokoesters]

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

[richardw]

That’s a great segment to target. I’d take that any day over most others. It’s also a pretty hard bunch to please, so pretty defensible unless you somehow beat Kagi by a lot.

It’s also much bigger than their customer base. Keep going, Kagi.

[Semaphor]

> I'm guessing it's not just any software devs, is web developers specifically that use Kagi.

I do both, and I have MDN pinned. The thing is, if I search for C#, Python, Java, I get great results on any search engine. If I search for web stuff, I get tons of crap and mediocrity. MDN is almost always what I want instead of some other stuff.

Regarding "days numbered", I agree with the gist of the other replies ;)

[xigoi]

I have MDN pinned and I’m not even a software developer, just a mathematician who likes programming.

[jve]

> Does that mean Kagi's days are numbered?

Perhaps it just means technically inclined people are the first to see value and use in some product. Whether word of mouth spreads and people will find value in paying for search engine + goodies - time will tell.

[LoganDark]

Kagi's days are probably not numbered because of web devs (web devs are not going away any time soon, even with advancements in LLMs) but rather because of the indexes they use, or rather don't use.

Kagi is fairly good at ranking results and essentially making do with what they have, but in my experience it does not seem very good at all for searching for anything particularly obscure. It's like how DuckDuckGo uses Bing - nearly useless if you're not searching popular sites (like Wikipedia, MDN, etc.)

[alpaca128]

DuckDuckGo likely also had almost exclusively tech people as users because the average person doesn't even think about search engines and more importantly doesn't want to. Alternative search engines only have a chance at getting a wider audience when Google messes up enough that people need to think about it.

With Kagi this is more significant because paying for a search engine is an even larger obstacle than simply switching.

[ignoramous]

> Am I drawing the wrong conclusion? Does that mean Kagi's days are numbered?

It is developers who are more likely to take digital privacy more seriously than the rest. And so, it seems like Kagi is indeed on its way finding product fit with the most demanding segment (from a digital/information privacy standpoint) there is.

For any tech, it is fully expected that early adopters belong to a niche. Whether Kagi wants to make the leap or stay in this segment is upto them. There is no indication that they have saturated the market even in their niche ("developers"), while this niche itself on its own might be lucrative enough.

Besides, Kagi may very well venture into other products to sell to the same market segment.

If anything, to me, the writing that's on the wall for Vlad (Kagi's creator) right now is... "The world's your oyster".

[whiplash451]

This good be a good sign.

It’s better to “own” 10% a known, faithful customer base than 0.1% of a floating one.

[vladde]

I have a hard time figuring out how to pitch a paid search engine to "normal people", when Google works and is free.

[thoroughburro]

You literally just wait for them to complain about Google, then say “Well, you get what you pay for.” They will be curious because everyone knows search is free.

IME, this works well.

[xigoi]

The problem is that I’ve never seen a “normal” person complain about Google search.

[Spivak]

Their days aren't numbered because they've built a sustainable business with a small team of developers that doesn't require a huge user-base to fund. Arguably if Kagi were more popular it would be worse. Just the fact that they aren't Google and use their own ranking while being small enough to avoid the notice of SEO hackers carries them a long way.

[zvitiate]

I’m one of them. I love Kagi, although the first week or two had a ton of !g. Now I only really bang for local areas, conversions, or shopping (maybe).

If they can sustain, maybe they can takeoff. Search in GenAI world is hard, and Google has other focuses with talent and inference chips too.

I hope their days aren’t numbered!

I think it needs some UI improvements. It’s ugly, and I find it can hinder actual use.

More usability improvements on features. There’s a lot I’m still not leveraging because I haven’t bothered learning. Maybe they can build an LLM tool to help with this?

And I don’t care how, but make it easy to make it default on all browsers, mobile mainly. Maybe they fixed this recently, but when I was swapping browsers recently, this was annoying. If they can’t fix this, they probably won’t make it.

Just some top of mind thoughts as high-usage, 95%+ non-coding user.

[carlosjobim]

I'd rather gather that the normal people subscribing to Kagi are simply satisfied with the better quality search results, and don't bother so much with domain ranking.

The "hacker" type of computer user is zealous in everything they do.

What's important is that Kagi refrains from letting hacker zealots influence their business too much, because normal people also deserve high quality search results, and most knowledge workers are not software developers.

[ZiiS]

Well I am a webdev who more or less exclusivly uses Kagi so I guess I support that point; but I also havn't bothered raising any sites and I would guess a lot of people don't.

[taskforcegemini]

I'm not sure about numbered, all I see is great arguments to try it and thus pay for it.

[aucisson_masque]

Most pinned website by far is Wikipedia tho, by a large margin.