Kagi has around 200K subscribers. I wouldn’t call that “doing well”.
Edit: that should be 29K subscribers
Edit: that should be 29K subscribers
More problematic (for Kagi) is that it's not a free-standing engine (“Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide” per https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...), so it's still dependent on the weird business practices around non-paid search. I assume these other search providers wouldn't be able to provide API endpoints like this with just the business from API clients.
> I think it's a bit of a cultural defect that we consider a product with 29K (supposedly satisfied) users a failure.
> More problematic (for Kagi) is that it's not a free-standing engine (“Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major
20K subscribers can’t support the creation of a quality search engine.
(Years later Joel cofounded Stack Overflow)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
> A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
> Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
I always thought Kagi was still the old Mac focused company that enabled independent software makers to collect payments from customers.
I didn’t realize that the old company had been out of business for years until I heard the founder interview on the Talk Show podcast
https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
And relevant to this submission. I couldn’t find any information on Google, I used the paid version of ChatGPT that has had web search for almost two years
Of course, they are not going to grow to the level of FANG with this approach but do they have to?
I am a very happy Kagi subscriber myself. And I loathe when I have to wade through SEO spam sites on the few occasions where I have to use Google, Bing, etc. due to being on someone else's computer.
They do if they want to demonstrate that paying is a viable alternative to ads, and not just a niche curiosity.
They run a profitable company that is supported by fees paid by clients. Just this alone is the proof it works. And is far, far away from the speculative nature of stock market and FANG.
That 20K subscribers wouldn’t fund them enough to make their own engine nor could they compete for the engineers to maintain it.