Even if they got 100 million active paying users it’d still be a tiny fraction of overall search traffic.
In the beginning, Kagi was mostly just API calls to Google and Bing AFAIK. Their results were still better for some reason, probably because they didn't have to consider how valuable the ads on garbage site were before throwing the site out of my results.
But I fear that if a large search engine copied some of Kagi's filters/lenses for non-commercial blogs & forums then SEO agencies would dedicate immense resources to polluting them.
People will target Kagi because it's packed to the brim with people who have $5-10/month to spend on a search engine, and likely have $5-10/month to spend on other things too.
If the way you make money is by convincing people to pay, you are highly incentivised to make the product good, especially where there are many other free competitors who are ad supported.
Well duh. Because it's the only value you're allowed to collect from retail customers without having to deal with either chargebacks or kyc.
We've deliberately made every other form of micropayment infeasible. It shouldn't be surprising that the only one left is insanely popular.
You might lose some people, but probably not many - we've been conditioned to really accept ads everywhere.
If they do become bad then at least I have had a fantastic search engine for another few years of my life like I had from 2002 until 2009 ish.
And also, already at this point, they and marginalia has proven that it isn't impossible to enter the search engine marked even now. This was long considered impossible, at least here on HN.
That because there's a chance Kagi will become bad, there's no point in using it now and thus we should stick to Google, which is already bad? That doesn't make sense.
The same line of thought can be applied to anything. We don't know what will happen in the future, therefore we can't be sure that things won't go bad. Is there even a way to have such a guarantee?
Assuming I don't want to use Google (because it's bad) and I won't use Kagi or Perplexity or others (because they might become bad), what's the realistic solution? Roll my own search engine? I don't have resources and I don't trust the future me to maintain it.