{"id":46265,"date":"2024-12-27T16:55:43","date_gmt":"2024-12-27T21:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=46265"},"modified":"2025-03-04T15:25:57","modified_gmt":"2025-03-04T20:25:57","slug":"vlad-prelovac-on-kagi-search-and-orion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/27\/vlad-prelovac-on-kagi-search-and-orion\/","title":{"rendered":"Vlad Prelovac on Kagi Search and Orion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Talk Show<\/a> (transcript<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here are some highlights from what I thought was a very interesting conversation:<\/p>\n\n

Microsoft tried that with Bing and they spent 20 years, I think 100 billion is what I read and had thousands of the smartest people working on it and we all know what Bing results are like[…] So it’s really impossible for a small startup to compete with that nor I think we should. I think we should instead focus on providing the different business model.<\/p>

The search index is one of those things that the DOJ suggested in their proposal to be open basically and just to prevent what I just described and also help proliferate startups that will offer different experiences.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

We use five or six major search engines so everything that exists in the world and another advantage of doing that although it costs more money is basically we ensure that if it doesn’t surface on Kagi it probably doesn’t exist anywhere which is what you describe.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

So Google has an offer that is basically a franchise and you have ability to get Google searches out but you also have to get Google ads so it’s one package and we have been trying for years to sort of license Google results in a way that we don’t get the ads so what we currently do is there are services out there that basically resell Google results that we use because we cannot directly retry but Google is not ready to do that and this is what the DOJ trial I think is very important for.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Safari to me, as far as I know, stands alone amongst popular browsers for not allowing the user to easily add their own, default search engine choices.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

But all of those companies have traffic acquisition cost arrangements with Google. That’s how they get on that list in Safari.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Neither of them thinks that divesting Google of Chrome would solve anything.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n