You are (maybe) joking, but I’d guess there’s an extremely high overlap between HN users and Kagi users. I converted someone from a metal discord I’m in to Kagi with a promo gift last year, and he’s also the only HN user on the server ;)

IIRC, nerds were the primary drivers of the search engine wars.

Yeah, my understanding is that they are trying (and I think I remember succeeding so far?) to be revenue positive/sustainable from the beginning, and not trying to rely on "grow and make money later" that other companies used.

Which I prefer; I got burned by Neeva shutting down shortly after they started (for a pretty mild version of the word "burned", it cost me very little, but it was annoying).