Hi everyone,
My name is Vlad, and I am the founder and CEO of Kagi. Our mission is to humanize the web, aiming to bring a more user-friendly version of the internet to homes worldwide.
We are the creators of Kagi Search [1], a unique, ad-free, privacy-respecting search engine that gives power back to the users. Unlike anything you've seen before, it operates on a subscription-based model! We believe that a paid search model is the only one that truly aligns the interests of the user and the search engine. And, we accept Bitcoin Lightning payments.
For those interested, you can read about our our origin story [2] and manifesto [3].
In addition to Kagi Search, we're developing the Orion Browser [4], a fast, zero-telemetry browser and Kagi Small Web [5], a platform designed to surface voices (personal blogs) that are otherwise not heard on the web. Kagi Small Web posts directly surface in Kagi search results.
We are also working on AI tools like FastGPT [6], Universal Summarizer [7] to help users access information more quickly.
Collectively, we're building an ecosystem of tools that prioritize users' interests and provide them with leverage - if you're not satisfied with the product, you can vote with your wallet and walk away, giving us the incentive to continually improve.
I'm here to answer any questions you might have!
this territory is moderated
Holy Cow, TheWildHustle is a little blown away.
Brief summaries of the sites viewed on the same page as the search results....
Discussing the document with an llm through a pop up......
Honestly the best search results page Hustle has ever seen
Seems like a pretty amazing project to be frank.
Now that thats said......wen nostr.
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Thank you!
Regarding Nostr, you can do some pretty cool things in Kagi already eg.
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813 sats \ 2 replies \ @davidw 11 Apr
What does the future of search look like? Will we even call it search?
Would love for you as someone very far down that rabbit hole to share that with us.
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I am pretty sure that my kids will not be clicking on ten links drown in the swamp of ads. Any search engine that has ads in the future will have a label 'for entertainment purposes only' and will not be used for anything serious.
I wrote about it in our manifesto https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
Knowledge Navigator is an interesting, 35 years old concept https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0
We are far away from these from many reasons but Kagi is trying to make sense of all that.
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Its time is coming. Thanks for sharing the video.
With like the blend of personal life information & worldwide research, seems obvious to me we’re not going to trust big behemoth tech companies with this filtering & instead prefer personalised local curation.
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Hello Vladimir !
In a very general way, how do you filter the good content from the bad?
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Great question! We have found that the quality of the content on the web has inverse relation to the number of ads/tracking/other "crap" on the page.
So when Kagi ranks results, we down-rank pages that are heavy in ads/tracking and promote pages that are not.
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Genius! Will definitely try it out RN!
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584 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 11 Apr
Presumably Kagi has venture funding. Do you have a memorable rejection or two from investors?
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We do not have venture funding. I've bootstrapped the business and it is currently 98% owned by me and Kagi employees, and 2% owned by Kagi users!
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How do users own part of Kagi?
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510 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 11 Apr
What concrete advantages has a non ad-based business model given Kagi as a company? And, beyond privacy, what concrete advantages does a non ad-based business model given Kagi's customers?
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In the last two years Kagi made more innovation in the search experience than legacy search engines did in two decades. We are able to do that because on Kagi, users and customers are the same.
On legacy search engines, customers are advertisers and inevitably the design of the search experience is geared towards them which is the reason it has deteriorate so much in the last two decades.
With Kagi, customers will always get the best search results we can produce and they are often much better than on other search engines including Google because they have different incentives (keep you searching, so that as many ads are displayed).
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163 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 11 Apr
Google does have incentives to return poor search results if it means you'll view more ads. They wouldn't do this intentionally I imagine, but these things are a kind of invisible hand.
What's an example of a design choice you made that's incompatible with ads?
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We downrank results that have ads/tracking on them. This small adjustments vastly improves the quality of results in Kagi, and is something Google could never do (as most ads on those sites come from them).
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Bro… what of course they know what they’re doing and make the trade offs intentionally. Ads is their entire business. As long as they don’t lose too many users, revenue will go up if more ads are shown. Nothing invisible about it
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456 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 11 Apr
How does Kagi Small Web prioritize individual blogs over large corporate publications?
If Google is like Walmart, is Kagi Small Web like Etsy? Where you focus on independent creators discussing niche topics instead of large publications covering mainstream ideas?
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Kagi Small Web is open source, manually curated list of websites.
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377 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 11 Apr
What's something you believe that almost no one agrees with you on?
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That we need to pay and own our search and our browser as these are the most important, most intimate tools we use every day.
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356 sats \ 2 replies \ @Lux 11 Apr
My experience is most months I get to the limited number of searches near the end of the month and then search on startpage. Did you consider a lightning integration with pay per search model?
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Consider yes, executing on this is hard and we do not want to be in the business of managing different ways of billing, but in the business of search. Mind you our team is very small and just integrating Lightning to begin with took us 4 months and the number of users using it still does not justify the initial investment made. Hopefully as Kagi becomes more popular in these circles we can prioritize this more.
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just integrating Lightning to begin with took us 4 months and the number of users using it still does not justify the initial investment made.
I figured I'ld sign up, but found I already had signed up.
I suspect that occurred at the time of seeing this (which I probably saw, because I read a lot of bitcoin-related posts): https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin
So while I'm not a paying user (yet), a few marketing touch points have occurred now. I'm going to consider the Pro plan, since there is ChatGPT included.
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How do we address the potential biases embedded in AI systems, especially those that can perpetuate social inequalities or reinforce existing prejudices?
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How do we address the potential biases embedded in AI systems, especially those that can perpetuate social inequalities or reinforce existing prejudices?
We are not an AI company nor are trying to be one.
We use models from other companies in our product features (which are always opt-in) and emphasize that AI is a tool that you need to learn to use, not a replacement for your brain.
You can read about our AI integration philosophy here https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy
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What board games (other than Axis and Allies) are you playing these days?
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I play board games with my kids (our favorite is Stone Age) and I play MtG: Arena these days when I am stressed out.
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Hey, first of all thanks for the AMA. I've been reading about Kagi for a while and I'm impressed that you were able to build a paid search engine. Truth to be told the last time I changed search engine was more than a decade ago, when I ditched Google.
Since then, I have no complains, however I also feel that my search experience hasn't evolved (in other words, got better).
Aside from no ads and privacy concerns (which IMO are awesome), what are the main Kagi selling points for a commoner like me?
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We have the best search results in the world. The metric we optimize for is users finding information faster. What you search for is usually in top 3 results in Kagi 99% of the time.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @beorange 11 Apr
Thanks. I will try at least to get the feel of it.
I hope the Bitcoin payment is straightforward :)
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @odium 11 Apr
You can top up your prepaid balance with onchain and lightning. They use OpenNode for that, so all pretty smooth
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183 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 11 Apr
What was the most surprising thing you learned building Kagi?
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That you can make a better search engine than trillion dollar companies can with just a handful of people, once you align all the incentives and focus on user (vs advertiser) experience.
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I'm not sure if there are any other similar services available. If there are, why should I use yours instead of the others?
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As far as I know there are no search engines out there that you can pay for with your wallet instead of your data/attention.
What makes Kagi worth the money is the quality of results and innovative search experience.
I collect Twitter feedback about Kagi here : https://twitter.com/vladquant/likes
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 11 Apr
I’ve been happy paying customer for almost a year. Worth every sat!
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This is amazing, thank you for what you do and for doing this as well. Lightning payments for this is a perfect use case and really appreciate the fact that you accept it.
I think the main reason I haven't used Kagi yet is because I'm turned off by tying all of my searches to the same account. Have you thought about pay-per-api call with Lightning? Or doing something with blind authentication tokens to pay for X number of requests upfront and you can't tie any of the requests back together to the source of payment?
There's a lot of things I believe Kagi gets right, but I'm concerned about the privacy by using a single account. I know I can throw away every month, but I don't know how often I would do that on top of all the other manual hassle I do every month for privacy.
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We do not store searches. And we do not require a valid email address. And you can pay with Lightning already. Can you clarify what is the concern?
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Good to know, though the concern is that we have to trust that. Would prefer tech that we could verify searches wouldn't be linked together. Less concerned about it being stored, more concerned that it's being linked together tied to a specific individual.
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I am not an expert on Lightning, but presumably if you use it, it should be possible to link anything to a specific individual?
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Amazing, that's great to know. We just built something blind token based too at Mutiny, will be writing about it more this week.
Lightning can be very private from the sending perspective, less on the receiving side, though we're working on that too, slowly but surely.
Will throw up a burner account and play with Kagi more. Thank you for doing this and answering these questions!
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  • Meant to say "it should not be possible"
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Okay, this is the answer I was seeking. You should look into cashu.
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I realize I basically asked the same thing. Ecash would be a perfect fit for pay per search. If they don't want to implement it maybe we could using their API
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252 sats \ 0 replies \ @dtonon 11 Apr
Kagi Is great. When Nostr login? Do you have a Nostr account?
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120 sats \ 0 replies \ @Lux 11 Apr
Gostovanje u @dvadesetjedan podcastu? Ovo je službeni poziv
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So far so good. Better than gooooo-glitch and others.
Why did you name it kagi?
Any mythological reference?
Privacy respecting, why not privacy ensuring?
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Kagi means 'key' in Japanese.
Not familiar with "privacy ensuring" concept, can you expand on that?
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I mean, can you ensure that privacy won't be breached in any way?
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I think we are privacy ensuring in a way that we do not associate searches with an account and require minimal personal information (we do not even verify email address). And if you want near anonymity you can pay with Lightning. So our privacy 'attack surface' is really minimal.
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988 sats \ 1 reply \ @fiatjaf 11 Apr
Can you provide native search over Nostr content? Please.
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+100
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Do you have your own crawler? How can you be so much faster than Google and still have more stuff indexed than Google?
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You mention on your personal site that you're a big fan of The Egg. So am I! Do you think this is how life/reincarnation actually works?
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Yes I do. Someone should start a religion around it lol
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Did not know "The Egg" before. Stumbled over your profile @MaxAWebster and then this reply. Thank you for that luck. I will store this idea safely and give it some time to breed...
The way you gather information in life is never foreseeable.
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how will most humans interact with search engines in a decade?
by texting, talking, or thinking?
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Talking is faster than texting for expressing the query. Text + visuals is faster for information consumption.
Thinking is fastest of them all, but scariest as well - this may end up in Matrix.
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Wow. A product and his creator loved by hacker news users seen here on stacker news. Hacker news users being generally dismissive of anything incorporating bitcoin.
Will this be the tool that brings lightning to the masses?
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Indirectly, that is.
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Thanks all, great questions, this has been fun!
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Kagi user here, love what you're doing!
Your privacy model boils down to "trust me bro", though, and I do. But as you may know in these communities we value trust minimization. One could argue that free search engines are better as they don't have a token associated to every web search.
Do you have any concrete plans to improve this situation? Have you considered ecash tokens in a pay-per-query model?
Also, I'm having constant FastGPT failures ("Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again", all the time) but I found it painful to have to register with email on your feedback platform. Are you planning alternative log ins, like with nostr?
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Our model is not "trust me bro". We are very transparent about our privacy practices.
There is also lack of incentives. Once you understand that any piece of information we collect is just a liability for us, you will understand why we want as little as possible. We just want your $10/mo, and we want to offer something much more valuable in return.
if you want anonymity with Kagi you can get it too, as we do not need a verified email address and you can pay the fee in Lightning.
One could argue that free search engines are better as they don't have a token associated to every web search.
There are no 'free' search engines. You either pay with your wallet, or with your data/attention. But web scale search is never free, and is actually very expensive to do.
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I understand the incentive structure, but how can I be certain that you're not taking the $10 AND selling my data?
There are no 'free' search engines
Yes they are, if you know how to use them (can definitely run them through proxies). But they're financed with the privacy of other people and I hate that model so I don't want to feed it.
LN payments are awesome, thanks for that.
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What I meant by no 'free' ones, is that there is always currency involved - either your money (eg Kagi) or your data/privacy/attention (eg. most legacy search engines).
understand the incentive structure, but how can I be certain that you're not taking the $10 AND selling my data?
Because the moment something like that leaked, our business would be dead. This is what alignment of incentives means.
140 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 11 Apr
how come you decided to go with a subscription model for Kagi? do you think pay-per-use Lightning payments will become a viable business model over time?
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Search has a cost. It is either that the user is paying for it, or someone, a complete stranger, advertiser, is paying for your searches. The latter is very creepy and wrong on many levels if you want a healthy functioning society.
So yes, I think more and more people will realize the value and importance of information we put in our heads, like we care about food we put into our body. High quality search engines like Kagi make people more productive and more competitive in the world as witnessed by tens of thousands of customers already paying for Kagi today.
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @based 11 Apr
FYI, I looked around, and the link to "understand your consumption" is broken on the plan types help page.
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Hey Vlad. Awesome to see you on here. I've been using Kagi for years now and appreciate all the ongoing updates. One thing that would be amazing to integrate (and would go a long way towards user privacy) is Login with Lightning (LNURL-auth) or login with Nostr. This is something that is available for Stacker News and allows you to easily login just by scanning a QR code from your favorite compatible Lightning wallet.
I'm waiting for this to come to Kagi because currently at work it is too much trouble to type in my email address and then whip out the password manager to type out my randomly generated password. It would be much better to use scan the Login with Lightning QR code and login automatically with that. I think I have a video somewhere showing how simple this is to use, but I'm sure developers on here would love to help as well.
This would go a long way to anonymizing accounts because you wouldn't even need to associate an email address with the account at all.
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Thanks! Suggesting this on https://kagifeedback.org and getting some upvotes would be the way to go. We have a pretty big roadmap and want to make sure that would benefit as many of our users as possible.
Given the current competition, how do you plan to outpace others, especially the paid search ones?
Can you say I. How much time kali will be able to replace google as the no. 1 search engine?
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What paid search competition do you refer to? :)
We plan to outpace others by the strength of the vision and quality of the product.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @john_doe 12 Apr
Nice! I have been using Kagi for almost a year now. I started the 100 searches around April and started the yearly subscription around June. For me it works great, and I appreciate the add-on of Chat GPT. It could be interesting also to have a similar add-on for images. Next time I will check the Lightning payment!
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Additionally it could be a nice option to have different user settings for people like me who share the account with a member of the same family. Typically it can be useful for the language setting and for the filter. For example to avoid applying a filter to a different member of the family (in my case my wife)
I love Kagi and I happily pay for it.
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Cool product! What your vision for future growth?
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Very satisfied with my yearly subscription, now 6 months in. Thanks for the great product! Onion link would be great tough, usability in tor browser is rather bad due to cloudflare.
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How's it feel to be named Vlad when there's another Vlad out there tarnishing your good name?
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I am pretty proud to be carrying my grandfather's name.
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How do you get started? Is it mobile friendly? Plans for an app?
What kind of search refinement features does Kagi have currently?
I run ~UFOs so I'm always using search to find oldest resources or from a specific date/range. One of the best I've stumbled upon is www.oldestsearch.com, to sort results by oldest first. Works most of the time.
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This will give you more information on this: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/
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Nice, excited to try this out
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Do you believe that open source AI models will remain at most 1-2 years behind the latest big tech releases?
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Up to a certain point, yes. But ultimately any crowd-sourced effort should overtake any centralized effort, no matter what the challenge is. Example from history is Wikipedia overtaking Encyclopedia Britannica.
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Great to have you here @vladquant!
If you weren't building Kagi/Orion (search/browser), what other problem would you be solving?
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Education is something I deeply care about. So it would be something about democratizing education and inspiring kids.
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100 sats \ 3 replies \ @Cje95 11 Apr
I apologize if this is not really compatible or if you can't really answer it but what is the difference be it in approach/implementation between Kagi Search and Brave Search's Premium feature? In the same vein can you explain the difference between Brave Browser itself and Orion Browser? Both are privacy-focused so could you maybe elaborate on what makes the two different?
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Main difference is that Kagi is funded completely by users where Brave is (predominately) by advertisers. So everything we do is always user-centric. I welcome that Brave has an ad-free option available, but have yet to meet anyone who pays for it. Brave search is mainly known as ad-supported search engine.
Orion Browser is truly privacy respecting browser. It is zero-telemetry and blocks first party ads by default, unlike Brave.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Cje95 11 Apr
Awesome thanks for the clarification! I think you hit the nail on the head since Brave has a free version the idea of paying for a premium is a tough pill for most to swallow. Is the browser being completely built from scratch or is it built upon an existing browser?
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Orion browser is built from scratch, using WebKit rendering engine.
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Hi Vlad! Seems like a cool product! Eventually is this headed towards the kind of product where I could ask it to, as you used as an example, find the best headphones, then read summaries to me of the various results, and dig into them deeper, all with verbal commands?
Tyler Cowen talks about how this type of utilization of AI to filter and absorb the vast amount of information we have access to now is what will tip technology in favor of empowering humans to learn anything the desire instead of being a constant source of distraction.
Also, any thoughts on having the search result algorithm be directly user tunable? FWIW IMO the 10$/mo price will demand a fairly hefty product delivery.
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I think we deliver :)
You can already tune kagi results, it is one of our most coveted features
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What measures does Kagi take to ensure user privacy and data security within its subscription-based search engine model, particularly in comparison to traditional, ad-supported search engines?
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Please check our privacy policy. https://kagi.com/policy
In short, we do not need or want user data, it is just a liability for us that is not needed for running our business in any way. All we want is $10/mo and that's it.
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Great stuff! Orion has helped me a lot with using phones to log into Nostr-related sites :-)
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Kagi has been my full time search engine for over a year now. Results are consistently better than Google already IMO. I can’t remember the last time I searched using Google, perhaps for some kind of local result thing. Kagi is winning by being better, not simply being a “Google alternative”.
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Anything you are working on is FOSS at all? The source to the repos should be the main links
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What do you think about having nostr comments natively in orion browser? Something like this: https://satcom.app/
Thanks.
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I've been using it for a couple weeks. So far I love it and plan to continue being a paying customer. Thanks!
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I have no questions I just want to tell you that I’m a happy paying Kagi user and also a user of FastGPT 😃 👍
Keep up the good work.
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is there intention to perhaps utilise a similar model to Brave within the Orion Browser? allow ads to show up to users but in return those users get BAT, would it be something you'd consider implementing into the Orion Browser, but use sats?
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31 sats \ 1 reply \ @aoeu 21 Apr
I haven't seen anything similar to this mentioned anywhere. And I seriously doubt it would be even entertained. If you are interested in getting sats for viewing ads, consider installing https://addslice.com/
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It's more for me a case of if I'm going to see ads. I'm the thing that platform is selling to its advertisers, I'd like a slice of that pie.
Websites make a lot of money from ad revenue. If they're going to make money off of me and what I view, they can pay me for it. I don't work for free. And viewing ads, that's working for them.
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I wish you success.
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