Kagi founder here. This is very early (alpha) concept built by a single Kagi Labs developer in a few weeks. The proper infrastruture and product is not built yet. We are launching a prototype to get feedback and gauge demand.
Why does this exist?
It would be an efficient way for us to build and expand our own index. Assuming users of this would be Kagi users, we would expand our index by tens of thousands of high quality? personal websites, hobby projects, startups, documentation websites, etc., also helping to surface them in our results (where relevant, like we already do with Kagi Small Web initiative [1]). It is a win-win for both our users and Kagi.
It would also be a way for Kagi to get some exposure outside of kagi.com (provided the search widget has some branding on it).
This is why it makes sense to offer it for free for smaller sites/projects.
And crowdsourcing index is completely opposite direction of one that causes deterioration of web search results in ad-supported search where few entities control the majority of space [2], so we like it.
That is the plan - and since this is a "Labs" project, we are open to it crashing and burning. Know we do not, until we try. Try and try again, we must.
How will you prevent someone from connecting Sidekick to a website that appears at first to be a small website but eventually fills with LLM-generated SEO keywords and ads? You might be able to manually review sites when they first sign up for Sidekick, but once the channel is open for them to inject content into Kagi's index, what's to stop them from abusing their privileged position?
That is a great question. Well we first have to ask what would be the purpose of someone going through the trouble to create such (LLM generated) spammy SEO content? The answer (for the majority of web at least now) is to monetize it with ads/affiliate links. If that is the case then the answer is easy as we already penalize sites with ads/trackers on them for our general web search, and completely boot them out of our own index.
In parallel, we are developing LLM-content detector technology to be more efficient at detecting such content regardless of how it is monetised (and we will offer this as an API once developed).
This is a naive take. SEO schemes are attractive for companies that sell products themselves (e.g. try searching anything related to ETL tools). The content itself is the ad and you won’t find any ad serving scripts or affiliate links in there.
(Source: have created such schemes, although would generally not recommend them to my customers nowadays)
Underestimate the average Kagi user at your own peril. I do not think many would fall prey to an LLM generated content marketing page and end up buying a product from such site. Much likelier scenario is the page gets instantly blocked/reported.
They want to index companies that sell products. I don't see a big problem here if a company that sells a product I'm searching for, who happens to also have low-quality SEO content, shows up in that search.
In fact, I would rather they not get penalized for it, since low-quality SEO content is a good way to show up in certain other search engines (Google), and every business wants to show up in Google, making that content quite common even from reputable businesses making a quality product.
As someone who in a past life spent loads of time doing of SEO I cannot help but find this argument flawed.
So, we shouldn’t penalize low quality, SEO, spam because of people’s wants? I do want them to penalize those sites because they are a disservice and more often than not crappy, unsecured WordPress that drowns out those that are not spam.
Thank you Kagi team! A shame how far Google’s results have fallen.
Edit: also SEO is one of the more seedier parts of the software industry. Tons of unaware small businesses conned into these awful, low quality sites. I literally quit because it was so morally bankrupt.
Problem is that many webites used to hire writers which wrote tangentially related posts to get their main product higher ranked. Like LogRocket and Partition Minitool do.
Combine that with that guy who boasted about his 'SEO heist', I think it's a very valid concern.
I have solved many problems because of a blog post created by company that wanted to get their product name out there and I don't think they should be looked at negatively for doing that. Are upset whenever a companies tech blog lands on HN? Because it is virtually the same thing. If you use Kagi and come across a site that you find is low quality and spammy then just block it. That's the cool thing about using Kagi.
I've also found that type of developer marketing valuable many times in the past. It's sometimes obvious its going to end in a pitch for the product, but often it does a good job summarizing the key problems in the space, mentioning or showing other solutions / offerings, and pitching which tradeoffs they made for their own product and how they solved issues.
Even if you don't go with the ad, you can quickly pivot to other named players or get a better understanding of the terminology or jargon to start searching more.
My general impression of the LogRocket site is that they have decent articles on how to do frontend development. At least that what I remember from the times I've been directed there by a search engine.
And we…want to discourage writing useful web pages, even though articles on understanding TypeScript's type system aren't all that closely related to their main product…? What am I missing?
Another decent one would be linux sysadmin info from Digital Ocean and the likes.
But for every joelonsoftware there are 99999 sites that have all copy/pasted the same tutorial about something basic and try to push some random product or just ads.
SEO pages pushing some product are SEO pages pushing some product. You should ignore them no matter what the source is, so what does it matter if they're LLM generated or hand written?
The problem is that people keep consuming the samey low quality content instead of skipping it (think superhero movies and Netflix series that are all indistinguishable from each other). As long as they're satisfied with that, they'll fall for fake product reviews too.
Maybe you can't determine that with certainty, but there may be statistical tools you can use to estimate the probably that some content came from one of the LLMs we know about based on their known writing styles?
Someone did something like that to identify HN authors (as in correlating similar writing styles between pseudonyms) a few years back, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
Of course, LLM output can be tweaked to evade these, just like humans can alter their writing style or handwriting to better evade detection. But it's one approach.
That's a digital signature, same as sending an email with GPG to prove you sent it. You wouldn't say that because some people use GPG you can somehow detect who wrote every email on earth, it's a push model vs pull. This is why I wrote "any sentence" vs "some sentences".
Watermarking is not at all like a digital signature and a lot like steganography. I only have a surface level understanding of the process, but it works by biasing token selection to encode information into the resulting text in a way that's resistant to later modifications and rephrasing.
I have my doubts about the effectiveness of this method and realistically, it won't make any difference because the bad actors will just use an LLM that doesn't snitch on them, so you're technically correct.
The only way to make that stenography robust is to have the encoded message be generated with some secret key that can be verified. Otherwise anyone could manually fake the stenography into human typed messages assisted by some encoder and you'd have no way of telling if it was really typed by an LLM. That line of thinking is what makes it have to be like a signature to work like you said for "any sentence". I also think these methods only work above certain character limits. Short messages are impossible to tell.
If you look here : GitHub.com/HNx1/IdentityLM you can see that it’s relatively easy to sign LLM output with a private key using an adaptation of the watermarking method.
This application is exactly what I was describing. I'll look it over to see how it scales the encryption strength based on token length or how it deals with short messages, which is the only thing I'd think it'd be very hard to do. If you print 2 paragraphs it's easy to change some tokens with a secret key mask but if you print "Yes", it's not so easy. Thanks for the great share.
While I agree with others that AI can take away from a products core vision, I’ve been very happy with Kagi’s path and roadmap. I feel like the AI products that you guys have released have served well as complements to search, and hope the trend continues.
Hopefully this helps with indexing while offering a cool service to small creators!
Edit: I forgot to say, the change where a `?` appended to a search triggering the quick answers was an amazing change. I would love to see more features that can be invoked by appending or prepending to the search query.
RE your edit, I’m assuming you’re already aware that Kagi lets you create custom bangs, but just in case you’re not, you can create your own shortcuts that when preceded by an exclamation mark like !so can redirect to or search other websites. I use this to append ‘site:reddit.com’ when I add !r to a query, for example.
I love your transparency. Saying how it benefits Kagi, not just how it is a cool feature for users, is refreshing. It makes me trust more of what you say, and builds some sense of what the product’s direction could be. Thanks.
What would your approach be for pricing for wiki-type sites that are nonprofit but may have hundreds or thousands of pages with assorted media? I know that decent search beyond just name matching is a recurring issue for independent fandom wikis, which rarely have the funding or coordination to do anything fancier than just a Mediawiki site.
For a random example, there's the Baldur's Gate 3 wiki (https://bg3.wiki), which has upwards of 8,000 pages often with pretty dense text (see https://bg3.wiki/wiki/D%26D_5e_rule_changes for an example) and is funded entirely off donations.
It would be great if there was a free version for charity/non profit/open source. I don't know if this is feasible for Kagi. But I do know that many of these types of wiki/forum/blog are run on a shoestring.
I think kagi sidekick would be very well received in the bioinformatics space. Lots of complex docs that require end users to digest large complex data.
Can it be tuned to only point users to the docs and not answer questions?
Is it possible to use the search functionality without the "AI smarts"? I can see a good site search service being a great addition to some websites I run, but I would absolutely not want to push an AI chatbot on my users.
Unfortunately, neither English nor Japanese IME's on desktops provide any way to type Hepburn that isn't extremely awkward. E.g. on Windows if you want to type Tōkyō, you have to be in Hiragana mode, go letter by letter and pick from a list.
Since I'm originally from Slovakia, I used my Slovak IME, which is convenient for me.
Incidentally, Slovak has its own romanization of Japanese, which uses almost nothing but Slovak letters and diacritics (plus "w").
The Hepburn system is an Americanism. Americans don't own the Roman alphabet or the way it should be applied to Japanese. Though Hepburn has official status in that it is taught in Japan, and used for the benefit of visitors. E.g. signs giving names of train stations or government buildings or what have you.
Fr what sort of romanisation system uses an acute accent for that. It's much more akin to the latin flat accent. But in reality just leaving off an accent or using the u is more convenient for typing.
A number of European languages use ó for indicating the long vowel o, rather than stress: Czech, Slovak, Polish, Icelandic, Irish, ...
According to Wiktionary, ō is used as a long vowel in two Latvian languages, and in Swedish as a hand-written form of ö (not always a long vowel). Also in Silesian, a language in a region of what is now Poland.
Even though Sony has taken the sidekick word, there are lots. The characters 愛(love), 相(together) have "ai" readings and are productive. The verb あう goes to an あい noun form that is productive for forming words like aizuchi. Plus various others.
and "jisho" means "dictionary" haha! loved the explanation, although I can only read the hiragana and love jisho too! have to get on with those wanikani exercises...
Satisfied Kagi early adopter here. Can you make a Mediawiki extension also? MW search leaves something to be desired, and I'd love to have Kagi on my wiki site.
Keep up the great work, you have an incredible product.
I think it would be interesting if like the website ranking that is done on Kagi there was a way to rate the search results to lower or higher it's ranking in search results. It would be a little different though since the website ranking on Kagi is for users but ranking the search results might just improve the intended search result that many people are looking for.
I guess this assumes that you aren't already doing that when they click one option over another for a certain search term.
Just thinking about searching through some documentation sites and you get a dumb result you weren't looking for at the top, and would want to deprioritize that result.
Hi Vlad, would you consider providing subscription via never expiring model to Kagi search? No need to lower prices, but, say, X searches in Y dollars? But the search quota never expires? Like the OpenAI API model.
If you offered such subscription, it would motivate me very highly to buy a subscription.
If it worked in a shell script or similar old-school unix architectural style on my bespoke static site generator, which is a slow-motion train wreck of a weekend hack-fest being ported from python/staticjinja to rust/minijinja.
Is kagi competing with whoogle?
Whoogle gives me the old-school, seemingly linear algebra of pagerank, hauntology that I expect.
Ah yes, "The 16 Companies" - except it's actually five hundred...
Seems like the problem in [2] is a few entities controlling the majority of spaces other than search, to me. Shame we don't have any real laws against anti-competitive behavior (just the way YC likes it).
Questions as a technical writer who maintains docs sites:
* What pages would get included in the index? Everything on the same domain? Or only pages where the search widget is included? Your demo looks like it's pulling in answers from kagi.com whereas if I were maintaining those docs I might want it to only look at help.kagi.com
* Do I get logs of the things that people type into the box? How? Also the generated summaries, do I get logs of those? I would need to know what these LLMs are saying to my readers...
* Do I get access to the embeddings that you've generated for my site? (Probably not but I have some use cases where it'd be really cool if there are embeddings for my site "just out there" with no further work on my part needed.) Edit: assuming that embeddings are involved which I realized later might not be true...
* How frequently will you index my site? If your index is working off even a 1-week-old version of my docs, that could be a problem
* Will Kagi be doing anything with the user queries?
I've been a paying Kagi user for a few months now. The only thing that made me miss Google results was immediate answers: the answers that are extracted from a prominent web page and shown directly, so you don't have to click the link. Actually, Kagi has some of that for certain queries, but it's not as extensive as Google's.
So, contrary to the most of the comments here, I support their AI endeavors for the sake of providing answers directly, saving us from clicks.
Their search results are already very good. Can't wait to see Kagi flourish.
This is so true! While planning a trip abroad last year we were unsure about whether $thing is legal in $country. Google proclaimed in bold letters that, yes, $thing is legal in $country, but this line was taken from a site with the title "common misconceptions about traveling in $country" an in fact $thing was not legal.
Such a basic mistake, I haven't trusted the instant results ever since.
I remember there was another story here about Google returning bad results for what to do for a particular medical emergency. The page had a list of "Do"s and "Don't"s, but Google had grabbed the list of the "Don't"s and displayed it as the immediate results.
I have used Kagi for several months now, and I find that the ability to decide which searches I want quick answers for to be useful. There are certain searches where I feel comfortable with accepting a quick answer, and others where I don't think it would be useful. Being able to avoid the clutter unless I want it is nice.
I don't really web search for those things but I can see why that would be useful. There is a feedback site that they are very responsive on; you should post there if it hasn't been posted yet.
Re: bangs ruining suggestions: you can put the bang at the end of the query instead of at the beginning.
They just released a major improvement to these, actually :). So keep trying it! At the risk of sounding like a shill: kagi is by far the best money I spent last year. The “programming” “academia” “small web” and (especially!) “PDF” buttons are worth their weight in GOLD.
These are the main two improvements from last week:
We added Wolfram|Alpha to enhance our capabilities in calculations, unit conversions, and time queries for better results. This solves a huge number of issues reported for these kind of queries as the results now come from a computational knowledge authorithy.
In the same spirit of getting answers faster, now simply starting your query with an interrogative word (what, where, who, which, when, how) or just ending it with a question mark (?) will automatically trigger Quick Answer.
Oh, interesting. I was actually wondering what had changed. That wolfram integration needs some work. Right now it's consistently just simplifying fractions. I keep having to "!g" in brave to get google to do simple math for me.
As someone who has used wolfram alpha for a long time, I wish they'd just put both. They do on queries like 23000/105000, but not on queries like 23000 = x*105000
It's not wrong, I suppose, but a break from the behavior I've learned for this sort of instant answer across google, ddg, and kagi as long as I can remember.
I can't actually think of a situation where I want to simplify a fraction like that.
You can click the "Quick Answer" button on the search results page to trigger the same feature. I think it appears whenever there is more than one word in the search query.
Since last week, it will trigger whenever your search query ends with a ? or starts with How or Why or other interrogative words
https://kagi.com/changelog#3179
One thing I miss from Google is a reliable built-in calculator. I know I could just use some other calculator app but the habit of just typing stuff into my address bar is hard to shake.
Kagi also has a calculator, but for a lot of queries it gives questionable results, for example for `210/8` it returns `105/4`. Technically correct, sure, but almost never what I want.
FWIW I think this has improved radically in the past few weeks thanks to their integration with Wolfram. I haven't tried it yet though but was pleased to see that in the changelog
Ultimate/normal customer, and i agree. Personally i think AI _is_ Search, and while we don't need to force them together in some massive behemoth now - laying foundation for being familiar, comfortable and well integrated in the future seems foundational to today. In my eyes at least.
Strongly held belief that I think is backed up by academic consensus: we should not treat LLMs as stores of knowledge. As my mantra goes, “language models, not knowledge models”. So the future of search might involve LLMs at a very fundamental level (and I think it will!), but they’ll never be the central component. Humans will never ever ever invent a better knowledge system than a database / a piece of paper, I guarantee.
Agreed but there's nothing about this discussion that requires LLMs are the store for anything. That's an implementation detail. One that's not that controversial imo. The current tech is clearly too destructive to "store" anything.
If anyone from DDG is here, please sort out your calendar one? I reported it in early January that it was (understandably) erroneously assuming 'jan calendar' still meant current_year+1; still doing it for February.
March is ok though, so I think actually the implementation was always buggy, not just now it's 2024, but it's checking if month is <= current month where it should just do <.
I am also a paying customer providing my 2c; only rarely do I use google, and then mostly for maps and image search. I enjoy not seeing ads and the power functionality within the engine.
I love Kagi and I'm a happy customer. I hope their endeavors in AI features don't distract too much from the core offering of a web search engine. That's the only thing I want from them.
Early Kagi adopter here. I love Kagi search and their summarisation features, but I'd rather they just focus on high quality and configurable search and summarisation results rather than new products.
I suspect their core business is unsustainable as is. From what I understand, they use search APIs, which are expensive. So they need to get their own index, at least partial, to have a sustainable business.
Kagi employee here. The search business is sustainable, we don't need a push in AI things to make it work. We're looking at these features/ideas because we think they complement search well, not because we need them from a cashflow perspective :)
Duck Duck Go uses the Bing API and they've been around for a long while. I'd imagine there's a heavy 80/20 rule of data that needs to be indexed frequently that people also search for, so those same cached results from API calls get the most use.
I don't think it's a fair comparison. Every single other search engine sells ads including ddg. Sure, they don't track you, but will still serve ads for your quesries.
Kagi is explicitly an ad free subscription. Comparing profitability is not straightforward.
Tiny Kagi has already shown an ability to produce better results than massive Google, despite them both dealing with the same SEO site gaming/structuring. Which is the reverse of what would be expected if Google's greater resources were also focused on quality.
If the userbase grows enough (let's say 100x that of today), they could become an SEO target. As happy as I am with the current results I am aware that SEO gaming is only a problem once scale is relevant. Once there are teams of people reverse engineering kagi's ranking explicitly wanting to beat it.
There's a good chance not enough people are willing to pay for search and this never becomes a problem.
Kagi is leagues better than now-Google. It is about on par, slightly worse than the Google of yore — not by their own fault, but because they operate in a much more professionalized, difficult, hostile web.
They didn't dodge the SEO bullet — nobody has aimed at them yet.
This isn’t totally true. They can dodge a lot of stuff, because optimisations target Google’s algorithms, not Kagis.
And Google also has conflicting intrests on same cases to let them just be.
I have paid for long time as well.
But this brings new ”attack vector”, which is important to consider.
With Kagi’s customers being users, not advertisers, they can put in features to mitigate against problems caused by SEO, like how Kagi bundles up all the “Top X abcdefg” lists that turned Google into trash.
If that becomes a problem, they can alter the plan. Kagi doesn’t have the same conflict as pretty much every other search engine when evaluating this stuff. If it starts making things worse, stop factoring it in, or reduce the influence in the ranking.
This seems like a problem of the search space rather than solely Google's. How are you supposed to guard a system which, by its nature, provides financial incentive to others to game it?
No matter what weights and checks are put in place, some observers will notice how their rankings change and make appropriate modifications.
This isn't solved by Kagi's product, either. I'm a happy user and use it as my daily driver. That doesn't mean that, if it increases in popularity, the results will remain unskewed.
Given that their motivation for this is to find more sites and pages to index, it seems like it should improve the quality (or at least quantity) of results thanks to a larger index.
Agree, I thought I was paying for search so they could focus on building search. Anything that feels like a money-raising or God-forbid acquisition play is concerning.
Agreed. Seems like web search implementation (both from Kagi and all its competitors!) could be almost endlessly improved upon, and any non-search feature is at odds with that.
Maybe there’s an argument that people who might use this, might also be people with sites that’d be valuable to index, and thus it’d both be nice for them and improve search for all users? :)
As a paying customer, I agree that the only thing I care about from Kagi is search, but...I think that there is a very non-trivial chance that in the near future, search almost entirely gets eaten by AI. It makes sense to me that a search company would be exploring AI and its interaction with search. While I hope this doesn't become the main focus (until and unless it has to be), the history of companies like Kodak (who was a "film" company and therefore chose to ignore digital cameras) should be instructive. If they completely ignore the potential replacement to search, they might get good at search just in time for that to become irrelevant.
This feature isn't specifically to do with AI though is it? Unless I missed something (likely).
My understanding was that it was about adding a "search with Kagi" thing to your site and triggering Kagi's indexer to index your site as a side effect.
Any chance you'd consider making a version of this as a browser extension for paid subscribers?
What I really want is this functionality on unsupported websites/documentation. It would be killer to "ask" kagi a fact about the article or docs I'm already reading, even if it only traverses/parses the single page.
I think everyone has some point where they determined that Google "went bad" (or at least everyone who thought they were good at some point). Mine is Google Plus, because they decided to make it, like Facebook, a destination. Before it was unveiled, I assumed it was going to be, like AdWords, a thing you could add to your website: adding a social layer to the Web would have increased its usefulness, allowed Google to do its usual thing of providing a feature that informed it of where the interesting stuff was, and undermined Facebook's main advantage over the rest of the web.
Light fast response, fuzzy search, low-difficulty include. If this was available and free, I'd be working hard to use this to search all my note/docs. If it were cheap, I'd use it for simple search @ dayjob on a regular basis. What a great little feature! I am not a paying customer for Kagi, though I keep thinking about it. Maybe this'll turn me into a paying customer ahead of schedule.
In Kagi example search results I found some results being considerably not relevant to the search query. Is it like an option "discover" which can be disabled? Headphones search returned a MacOS app when searching on a phone. Does actual search vary reaults based on device user-agent class or platform?
I love this. Llamaindex has (had?) a discord bot that did something similar. I forgot who the exact provider was but it solved my problem. Sometimes small projects just doesn’t have the people power for support and features like this go a long way.
The demo docs site says the feature is only available to 'Ultimate' members, while the linked page is ambiguous. Is it the case that Sidekick is only available for such Kagi members?
The feature is in Alpha. They use the Ultimate tier as an early testing group. One thing you’re paying for at that tier is access to stuff like this fresh out of the lab.
Sure. I clicked the docs demo URL[1] linked from the Sidekick page, then typed in the search box `what is Sidekick`, which returned the following:
> Kagi Sidekick is a helpful and cheerful assistant that assists users in finding the information they want on the Kagi website. It is a product feature backed by Kagi Search and large language models. Kagi Sidekick is currently in open beta and is only available to Ultimate plan members. <link to Kagi Assistant page>
The page it linked to was this[2], which stated similarly to the latter line above, except 'Sidekick' swapped to 'Assistant'. I had assumed from this that Sidekick had been renamed sometime recently or something.
> Kagi Assistant is currently in open beta only available to Ultimate plan members.
I am a paid subscriber. I love Kagi search. I love that I can lower my personal ranking of a website which doesn't provide value for me - SEO spam, AI nonsense, etc.
Funny. Kagi was the payment solution I used to sell shareware in the late 90'ies. I believe the company later disappeared due a fraud case that made it bankrupt.
Seems like both domain and company name is recycled into this now.
> Just integrate with two lines of code using our lightweight Web Components (20kB min+gzip) or our Docusaurus, Hugo, or VitePress plugins.
See demo in Kagi's own documentation at help.kagi.com
How do I do this on my site? I couldn't find the code anywhere.
Disclaimer: Happy paid kagi user for over a year now.
Why would they offer this for free for small websites? This isn't some VC-backed company getting ready to data-mine us and collect users for enshittification purposes, and in general, Kagi is the site people recommend when they say "if you're not the customer, you're the product".
I've had the same thoughts on those. Maybe it also allows them to gather data on whether/how people interact with a webpage itself, which may be an indicator for its quality.
Hmm I’d like to hear more from Kagi on this. They make a point of not logging searches by their subscribers. If this widget is available to non-subscribers outside of Kagi.com, do the same privacy-first principles apply?
Maybe because they can comfortably afford to? Maybe because some people who operate businesses are actually kind and generous? Maybe because this service doesn't cost them much to operate for "small/personal websites"? Maybe because it's a clever way to get more people to pay for the service in the long run, after they initially try it out for free?
Because their main business is taking content ranking it and charging you for it. This allows them to discover sites cheaper in a more targeted way. It increases awareness of kagi. It's a win/win idea.
Don't mistake Kagi for something it's not. You are still the product. All of your data is feed into the system (what you search for, what you rank, what you filter etc) and used to sell others.
I would not really count using a paid, relatively expensive service as "you are the product" which is usually used if a free service is subsidized by selling access to the users to a third party.
I cancelled my Kagi subscription because it's a little too expensive for me in the unlimited search tier. And I search too much for the limited search tier.
I can't help but wonder if my money was being spent on pet projects like this instead of improving/maintaining the search.
On top of that, the top comment from the Kagi CEO says this was developed by a single developer in a couple of weeks... Yes they will have to finish building up infrastructure behind it, but as a paying Kagi user I'm more than happy to support any side ventures that ultimately end up making search better in the long run.
Yeah like it's fine. I just felt the value wasn't quite there for me personally and I found a few too many projects coming out that didn't benefit me. So I cancelled. No harm done in the end, just a little sad nothing is filling my personal niche of the market.
Of course I understand that it's not my money. Weirdly hostile comment.
I'm just expressing that the value wasn't quite there for myself. And these projects kept coming out so I wondered if they were the reason for the higher prices.
Why does this exist?
It would be an efficient way for us to build and expand our own index. Assuming users of this would be Kagi users, we would expand our index by tens of thousands of high quality? personal websites, hobby projects, startups, documentation websites, etc., also helping to surface them in our results (where relevant, like we already do with Kagi Small Web initiative [1]). It is a win-win for both our users and Kagi.
It would also be a way for Kagi to get some exposure outside of kagi.com (provided the search widget has some branding on it).
This is why it makes sense to offer it for free for smaller sites/projects.
And crowdsourcing index is completely opposite direction of one that causes deterioration of web search results in ad-supported search where few entities control the majority of space [2], so we like it.
That is the plan - and since this is a "Labs" project, we are open to it crashing and burning. Know we do not, until we try. Try and try again, we must.
[1] https://kagi.com/smallweb
[2] https://detailed.com/google-control/