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Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

Hello Josep ! (Kagi founder here)

For a bit of historic accuracy if it ever matters for future readers:

Kagi was founded in 2019 and we have operated for years in private beta with thousands of users before public beta release this June.

Goggles were not inspired by Kagi”s lenses and I can confirm seeing the whitepaper before we got the lens feature out last year.

Kagi”s Lenses were inspired by Blekko’s “slashtags” which is probably the original “prior art” for this kind of feature.

Looks like we arrived to similar idea, but different execution. Kagi”s Lens feature is osimple to create filter for the web, that anyone can make with a few clicks plus a bunch of powerful built-in lenses like “noncommercial” or “discussions” search.

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We applaud all these innovations and are glad to see what is being done with Kagi Lenses and Brave Goggles. The Web ecosystem and users need innovations in search.

Our own innovation in this domain go back to 2005 and was called Personal Search Engine. https://web.archive.org/web/20060220233451/http://www.mojeek... (first capture Feb 2006).

We are currently bringing this back (in Beta). RollYo innovated too (private Beta August 2005). Google Custom Search launched in October 2006. So there were at least 3 services that predate Blekko (2010).

I'm a paying Kagi user, it's a solid search engine and the lenses feature is excellent. Keep it up :)

I'm a paying Kagi user because doublequotes works, i.e. if I search for something using doublequotes around it, Kagi actually makes sure those words are in the page, and if it fails they create a bug report and fix it.

It seems to be better in every other way too, but that is actually the single reason why I pay for it.

Hi Vladimir! Good to see we are in sync. Glad to see Kagi doing well as well.

For the record, when I said "long before Kagi was even announced to the public." I meant exactly what I wrote, not that Kagi did not exist, it did.

That is what I corrected, assuming you meant we were announced to the public in 2022.

Kagi was announced to the public in 2019, long before public beta release this June. I understand it is kind of hard to track small, bootstrapped startups with no mainstream exposure, but as I said this is for historic accuracy.

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