Comment by drdaeman

The other part to this is that the internet accelerates network-effects, which you can further supercharge by making your product as cheap as possible or free to the former group in your example.

It’s hard to make money by charging a lot to a small group of people since now you’re dealing with anti-network effects. Doubling the price of a product will likely more than halve your user base.

> This by default almost assumes a hostility towards the former group because their interests will of course be at odds with the interests of the latter group.

I would generally agree that that's the "default".

However, there are cases where two sides of a market need an intermediary with which they can both independently transact, and a net benefit of that interaction is felt on both sides. The key is to construct the solution such that the intermediary depends on the goodwill of both sides of the market.

I think Kagi is somewhat flipping the script. By "taking" data from publishers for free, they are then selling it to readers at a cost. However, there is a trade off. Kagi needs to make sure publishers continue to make their content available so that it can be searchable, or used in their Assistant product. In order to do that, they need to do the opposite of what Google is doing by trying to sequester traffic on Google.com: Kagi's best interest is to make sure that they provide good value to both sides.

Indeed, using the Assistant product, the way it is structured, I very often find myself clicking through to the referenced original sources and not just consuming the summarized content.

How this evolves over time, from a product design standpoint, will be interesting to watch.

Kagi user here. I agree!

The main driver of hostility to users is due to ad-based business models. I think we would see a much more healthy internet if we had regulation which prohibited companies from choosing ads based on any information associated with the user that the ad is shown to. That is, any data collected in the past and any data associated with the session and request must not be taken into account when choosing the ad; two requests by different users in different locations should have the exact same ad probability distributions.

I know we are never getting this because it would kill or severely harm the business models of some of the most profitable businesses in the world.

They would be a good steward of pinboard.in if it were for sale / recovery.

Direct monetization FTW. Charge people for value. Cultivate audiences willing to pay for value.

Incentives aligned. Happy customers. Good businesses. Maybe you only get 60% gross margins, or, gasp, 40% gross margins. But so much less toxic.

Any target date for open-sourcing it? :^)

I remember the announcement for Orion but I haven't followed closely at all - any support for container proxies like in Firefox? Can't lose that feature

Amazing!!!

And that's why Kagi has simultaneously rolled out their service availability on tor: http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6...

Tor has its flaws and criticisms, but it's really not on Kagi to fix them. With the combination of tor and their privacy pass, Kagi has gone further in allowing their paid users access to their services than anyone else.

Disclaimer: Not associated with Kagi in anyway other than being a very happy user.

I think I can finally buy into the Kagi hype now that I've found a sincere negative opinion.