Yeahhh I like to think of it as search like it's 2015...

Search had ads in 2015. They were just a bit less obtrusive.

Yeah I really do need to, I'm not sure why I didn't from the start...

I actually did not know if these, but I definitely will implement those!

I see, that is odd and I haven't run into that yet, thank you! I'll have a look into it and try to reproduce the issue, which browser+OS are you on?

Yup, it is pretty much just a better frontend for existing search. I want to build my own index and ranking algorithm in the future, but sadly it's quite resource intensive so it will depend on financial viability a bit in terms of timeframe.

So it's not a search engine, it's a frontend for a search engine.

You can just turn off the AI feature in Brave search so it’s sort of extra pointless.

It’s possibly worth pointing out that the about page doesn’t offer any indicator that this is an actual nonprofit entity from a legal standpoint, so at this point I have to assume it’s just a sole proprietorship that is pinky promising to become a non-profit.

In that sense I’m quite happy “donating” to Kagi to provide a stable and supported product from a company with employees.

That's fair enough. For the record I do intend to apply for a non-profit official entity. I would say it still has a role as opposed to Brave considering the lack of advertising though.

I certainly assume your heart is in the right place. I felt like it was worth warning people to do research before making donations.

Sure, would've made for a chunky post title tho :P

There's tons of these frontends, including SearXNG and proprietary (but very good) Kagi. Kagi are working on their own index; this will be their meat.

I am convinced LLMs are the way forward for searching, with a caveat: what they summarize isn't very relevant (it is overrated). It just gives a (hopefully accurate) semantic context. What matters is the sources it directs to. These are your links normally on top of ypur search query.

I'm genuinely curious why "LLMs are the way forward for searching".

Is it that the results won't be stack ranked lists anymore and instead a conversational output? Personally that's not what I want. I want results that are contextual to my search. If there's a use case for LLMs in search this would be, at least for me, what I'd be looking for. It seems, however, that all of the AI in search results today are not that.

I do pay for Kagi and will continue if the quality of the product continues to offer the quality product that it is today.

openwebsearch.eu wants to build an open index. But despite the funding it is still quite sparse.

How is it better?

Oh! I will make sure to fix that, thank you for the bug report!

Honestly I agree. This is part of what I love about the idea of Kagi. I do believe a not-for-profit alternative is needed, however if there's any for-profit model a search engine should have, it should be paid for by the user rather than the advertiser imo.

I do intend to support this and have actually already been asked to!

This is a really interesting view, but I'm not sure I agree. So many amazing projects are truly free without the goal of profit yet their maintainers still do amazing work. I feel like part of the reason this works is because often the load is split between several maintainers (of which I hope to onboard soon, and have one or two offers already from people to contribute) and also the fact it's genuinely something enjoyable to work on (of course, to the extent it's not too stressful and overworked).

There's a difference between awesome projects that don't have a recurring cost (i.e. open source software that users run themselves) and a search engine. You cannot physically run a search engine without real-world costs today. Those funds need to come from somewhere. And offering a good product at scale costs a lot of money.

That is very true, and it's not cheap to maintain. I do however really hope that donations can cover it enough, and I have plans about other ways to monetise it while remaining not-for-profit without ads or anything that affects the user.

Just brainstorming here, but would a distributed search index be possible / usable with current network speeds and latency? I'm not sure how to set up the data structure to not require many high latency jumps, but maybe someone has solved this problem.

It's possible, see the YaCy project. It suffer from probably a couple of orders of magnitude too few resources (in the funding/development sense) to really be competitive though.

Examples? If you are going to say something like linux, almost every developer gets paid to contribute to linux(I remember 95% commits have company attribution). Same with postgres etc.

They are paid, but the end used doesn't pay.

End user are corporate linux users and they pay for maintenance? Perhaps you mean all the end users doesn't pay.