00:00 Thank you so much for jumping in today, Vlad. I'm super excited to learn more about Kagi because it's something that I've been a user of, I think, from really close to when you all announced, off and on. I haven't used it as much over the last 12 months, but we'll get into that as well. But it's a really fascinating departure from the norm of what people know about search engines and now the plethora of things you all are doing. So looking forward to having you on today.

To kick things off, why don't you just tell us a little bit about who you are, a little bit of your background, and maybe a little bit about what Kagi is as well. - Sure. Thank you for having me here and thanks for being our user. My name is Vlad. I'm the CEO and founder of Kagi. A pretty novel approach to search where we remove all the intermediaries between the user and the search provider. So no advertiser, no third parties, and people pay for search video wallets instead of video data.

And that has allowed us to basically build a search engine as best search results in the world, the best search experience in the world, and people are willing to pay for, and also have privacy as a cornerstone of our service, because there's no incentive to do anything but user data. Actually, user data is liability to us. It's of no use. I personally been working in the tech space for the last 20 years and previously had a company in the website management space.

We managed about half a million of websites, doing security updates, backups, and things like that. It sort of gave me necessary domain expertise to go into a little bit wider problem, which is the problem of search. And Kagi was launched to public in 2022. Yeah, so I think it was pretty early. I think I logged into Kagi yesterday, and you all have a little banner that tells you what you joined. It was like March 2022. So cool that I was a pretty early adopter.

That was actually pre-launch. I think I ran into you on Twitter, maybe it was the place that I kind of got exposed to it, and then tested it out really early. But yeah, I think that's one of the most fascinating things for me, is obviously you have a background kind of outside of the space, but in the IT world. Why search? Of all the things that you could choose to focus on, like you seem to clearly have a desire to preserve privacy, to give people good user experiences without the kind of perverse monetization that we've seen take over the space.

Why was search the thing that you wanted to jump in on? Sure, that's a great question. And the answer is twofold. One is that in 2018, my daughter, the oldest one, started going to school, and she was given the Chromebook, the Google Chromebook, where Google pre-installed and everything else, and she was expected to use that every day. And it hit me that my kid will spend the next 12 years of her life until adulthood, being constantly tracked, her profile built on, targeted by advertising, her behavior changed and influenced.

And it just hit me really hard that we are consenting to that sort of state of things. And there was really no alternative. All search engines out there were ad-supported in one way or the other. And I did pay for YouTube premium for her and her siblings. There was nothing similar you could do in search. You could not pay for a service that will be user-centric and have your best interest in mind. And at the same time, I just noticed that Google search was getting really, really bad.

People talk a lot about it today, but even six years ago, it was getting worse. And what really triggered me in a way was, I think I was searching for something like GitLab or Target, and the poor company had to buy an ad on top for their brand name. And then there was the organic result right below it. But if you don't do it, somebody else just buys your keyword and people are misled to your competitor. And it just struck me that that was incredibly intelligence insulting for me as a user.

Like you're showing me two identical results. And this is when I understood that the search engine that we are all using is not built in my best interest in mind. It's built with advertisers' best interest. And so just having just sold my previous company, having some funds, I decided to tackle this problem. I had a fairly good idea how to do it. I knew from day one that the only way to do this right is to have a paid business model, which will automatically align all incentives and actually incentivizes you as a search engine to innovate and create better search results, better search experiences.

Otherwise, the people will not pay for it. And, you know, especially there are so many free alternatives outside free in air quotes. So, yeah, that's how Kaggle started. I assembled a small team and bootstrapped the whole thing. And in June 2022, we launched and had thousands of paying customers in month one. And it just kept going from there. Yeah, I think that's an interesting point that I didn't think of really before this is the incentives for search providers are quite perverse and not in the end user's interest.

Like I always just thought of it as like, they have to serve ads. Okay. Like that's a, that's an unfortunate part of it, but that's how they, they make money. And like you mentioned before, Kogi, as far as I know, there was no paid search engine. So you kind of just accept it as the norm. But when you think about the way that the incentives actually work, they're incentivized to serve you the results that they're paid to serve rather than the results that you actually need for your search.

And I wonder if that's a lot of the reason why it's just become widely accepted that Google's results are just absolutely awful now. And that's something like even my non-technical, non-privacy loving, like they don't care that Google is a, like a, an awful company who abuses data and ad monopoly, all those things. But they just realized the search sucks and I can't use it anymore. So it's, it's interesting. I wonder if that's that perverse financial incentive is what has kind of led to their downfall in the actual usefulness as a tool.

Yeah, when you think about it, even if you have an ad blocker in Google, the results that you get served are not the best possible results for you. And Google is incentivized that you spend more time searching. So you search, you don't find, you click through, you come back, you search again. So the more of that, the more, you know, possibility for interaction with ads there is. And so it's not just enough to have an ad blocker when the, the results themselves are just good enough.

They're just good enough to be, you know, time will be better than anyone else is what Google, you know, has as a goal basically. And they are optimizing for what puts money in their pockets, which is advertising money, right? You're not putting the money in their pockets. As a user, Kagi has it completely inverse. Like one of the most important thing for us is time to, to answer. Like we want you to spend the least possible time on Kagi. We want you to find what you're looking for in top three results.

Most of the time. And, you know, an adult evidence is that that is actually the case. And we had some people who counted their search history in Google before they moved to Kagi. And they reported having the number of searches they do in a month, for example, like they would go from thousand to 500 just because you're able to find things faster. And really, it's the alignment of incentives is if we are not able to do that, nobody would pay $10 a month for Kagi.

So, so that, that alignment of incentives is what drives creation of a user-centric product. And Google is user-centric also, or as soon as I say customer-centric also. The only problem is the customer is the advertiser, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. A little bit different from what people think of when they think of Google. Yeah. And that's, that's definitely, I think the clearest departure when you look at Kagi is obviously no ads, a model that is built around the user actually being the focus, which is, I think a key differentiation from the competition.

But is there anything else that kind of jumps out at you that you feel like separates Kagi from, especially at, like I'm thinking, especially for like the audience of Opt Out, separating you from things like DuckDuckGo or the self-hosted options like Circs and Google or Whoogle, these ones that are at least a little bit more privacy preserving if they're not necessarily fixing anything wrong with the actual results being served? Yeah. It's, it's definitely number one spelling point of Kagi is the quality of search results.

We have by far, and you know, don't take my word for it, but anyone paying for Kagi, that's the main reason they do. Kagi finds things other search engines can. Kagi optimizes the algorithm itself. The downrank sites.

10:00 that have a lot of ads and trackers on themselves. And we surface small websites, personal websites, blogs, forums, so human discussions. We uprank that. We actually have a project called MoleWeb, which is a collection. It's a manually curated collection of small blogs and personal websites that anyone can contribute to. It's open source, and it drives a portion of our index. And we actually surface content from these small blogs that otherwise never surfaces in mainstream search engines.

So the quality of search is one thing. The other one is just the innovation in the search interface. We stagnated for 20 years. Even non-Google search engine have not produced really any innovation in this space. All the modest minds that these companies are tasked with optimizing for ad click-through, not really the search experience. So we knew from early days that we would also need to innovate in the search experience. So, for example, in Akagi, one of the favorite feature of our users is you can block a website you don't like, and it will never, ever again show up in your results.

It's going to be dead. And we actually publish a public leaderboard of most blocked and most hated websites. And there's also where you can promote websites, so you can find all of that, kagi.com. And so this sort of search feed personalization where we are not trying to impose what we think are the best results for you and our own biases and whatnot, but we let you moderate and be in full control of your search feed. If you don't like, you know, particular website, you know, political affiliation, whatever, right?

You are in control, and you can blog these websites and promote the ones that you like. I'll give you another example that's very popular. We have a feature called Lenses, where basically you can create a search lens with a subset of websites and search only through them. So people create a lens for their hobby, size for recipes. We have a couple of built-in, like for programming or academic research. So basically you search only within the space of these websites.

So these are very, you know, two very simple, I would say, innovations. Now looking back, but it took 20 years for somebody to bring them to search because nobody was really interested in what the user wants. And so Kage really has, you know, at least 50 features like that. And most of our users don't even know or use all of them, but we are really investing a lot on bringing the search experience to the next level. Yeah, that was one of the things that jumped out at me.

I think it was available right when I started using Kage was the pin and block functionality. Because just the ability to know, like I have, I'm a huge fan of RSS feeds. And so I have a long list of personal blogs that I really appreciate. And I have a lot of good domain information for the searches that I want to do. So just being able to pin those, pin my own blog to be able to find the things when I'm quickly trying to share a link with somebody.

Instead of trying to go to my own blog and find it, I can actually find it faster and Kage by searching for something that's within it. And then I know that my site's going to be pinned. And then the block feature as well. Like I did just look up the stats because I was curious. And I'm not at all shocked by most of the ones that are up here, like Pinterest, which is polluted searches for a decade now. Quora, like things that generally are like the most useless results.

It is a fantastic way to get those things just purged from your list. And I think the most powerful part of it is it's not some supreme overlord deciding this site or these sites shouldn't be seen in ads or these should be deranked or these should be ranked higher. But you, the user, get to build your own filter. You get a really good base set of search results. And then you get to say, I really appreciate things from Reddit more than other things.

Or I really don't want to see Reddit replies. And I want to focus on things like small blogs like that. That type of ability to craft your own algorithm is something that has really stood out to me when using Kagi to make it something that's much more personalized. And that takes, like I will say, it's quite a barrier of entry for me at least because it's this whole novel idea. Like I'm used to just the search engine will do everything for me. And while Kagi does out of the box, it's interesting because there's so many features and so many toggles you can play with and so many new things that you can tweak to see what gives you the even better than the default Kagi.

And so it's definitely kind of like a kid in a candy store thing where you don't know what to turn on next or tweak next or add to next. But that's a great problem to have rather than just saying, please Google, please give me the result that I need here. Yeah, we do try to have reasonable set of defaults that, you know, is good enough for most people. But also we understand that, you know, most of our users are sort of power users, tech savvy, and they like their knobs and buttons and, you know, to be in control.

And we build these and you don't have to use them. But if you use them, you're going to improve the experience for yourself. You're probably going to enjoy the process of tweaking. You know, we even allow you to have a custom CSS. You can completely change the interface and people have published like numerous themes and whatnot. So you can really make Kagi your own. And that's the whole point of, you know, putting user in the driving seat and, you know, letting them decide.

Yeah, I mean, even the personalization feature that other search engines could easily adopt, they cannot because of this conflict of interest. And, you know, probably the advertiser wouldn't like people blocking them or whatever, right? So that simple thing, aligning incentives, goes very, very far. Yeah, it's wild how much just deciding to have a paid model, which isn't even like this wild, like altruistic isn't necessarily the right word here. But it's not like this crazy idea of giving something back or making something totally free because the actual benefit here is that it's paid.

So the incentives are aligned. And this is kind of a shift that has to happen in our mentality as well. And I know it's been talked to death, but just this idea of if you're not paying with your money, you're paying with your data. And everyone's just become so used to that, that it is like when I'm talking to friends, I was talking to a friend last night about Kagi. I was just sharing the pricing and he was like, I've never even thought about spending like $10 a month on search.

But he's really interested because of all the things that we've been talking about. And I think when you realize how much of your life you spend searching, it's a very worthwhile investment. So it is just a fascinating area how just shifting the financial incentives makes it so much more beneficial for the end user rather than, like you said, the customer of Google, who are the ad companies, not the actual end user. Yeah. And to be honest, it's very hard to compete with perceived free services out there.

We're in a very unique position. I don't know of a tech company that sort of helped to enter the market in such a way that they have to compete with free and well-established competitors. So it makes it extremely hard and not because there's something wrong with what we are doing. We are proving that this is the superior way to do it. But people have, you know, been exposed to this fate of things for 25 years. And it's one of the most entrenched habits in our society that the search is somehow free and God-given and, you know, granted to us where, you know, that's not true.

And it's one of the most profitable and biggest companies in the world and the world's biggest advertiser behind it. And so it takes time. It takes time for people to understand that and really start valuing access to information and specifically access to information that's provided in your best interest. I'd say that's a very, very important thing for everyone and the society in general. Yeah. Yeah. It's a much bigger issue than just being able to find the random search result for the thing you're looking for.

But if people can't freely access information that's out there on the internet and they're trusting a few centralized entities to serve the entire internet to them when they're searching for things, that presents a massive chokehold for those companies on how the free flow of information happens. So that is a much broader topic as well that I think we were talking a little bit before we started recording here about just kind of how the human freedom side of privacy alongside the view of privacy, just so that I don't have to be part of this crazy corporate ad monopoly world that we've fallen into.

Those things so easily intertwined because like I think that's an interesting example that most people don't think of as well as if everyone's using Google for search results. Guess who has a complete monopoly on the flow of information on the internet? Because unless you know the specific website you want to get information from, you're only going to be able to get it through their search results. And they have complete black box control over that, which is a kind of a human freedom angle of the search provider arena.

Well, there is another.

20:00 angle to that is that the kind of economy that incentivizes is this creation of massive amounts of low quality content that's monetized with ads and 99 of the web today is just useless spam that that you know the purpose of h is to to show ads and that even proliferated to bigger sites like you could barely find any uh you know news website that has high quality journalism the purpose of most news today is also to monetize with ad views um so this whole ad-based economy has not created the the largest surveillance system in history and the largest you know behavior changing system in history but also have ruined what what the basic idea of web was to you know be this place where we uh fair and self-express and you know be creative and things like that and and it's it's 99 driven by this ad-based economy today and which creates very very bad incentives for the overall healthiness of the open man yeah absolutely it makes it all the more essential that we we have these tools and we opt into these tools to to push back on that kind of that broken system that

unfortunately has become the web today um uh a question that's kind of always bugged me when it's come to kaki and i do want to get more into the other things y'all are doing because like i noticed i feel like i haven't been paying much attention to kaki over the last like 12 months maybe and i was just catching up getting getting my computer set up back to kaki and looking and you'll have a lot of things outside of search so i do i do want to touch on those as well but something that's kind of always bugged me from the privacy perspective is there is one downside that i see to the approach that kaki takes over a free search engine which is that you necessarily have to have an account and you have to pay for that account uh y'all do have some like some non id to payment methods like bitcoin and lightning that you support but it still means that all of your searches are potentially tied back to a single account um i know that y'all have a very clear no logging policy and you have mentioned as well that

just the the financial incentives are misaligned for you to collect user data um but i'd love to hear you speak more on that kind of that concern because i know that that's one that that i have had kind of since i started using kagi and was a little bit of the reason why i backed away from kagi initially even though i'm coming back and starting to use it again now but that's also one that i've heard repeated by several people in the the kind of sphere of influence that i have um so i'd love to hear more of your thoughts around the privacy expectations and the pros and cons of having an account for your search yeah so let me just say that we absolutely don't save your searches nor have any desire benefit or will to do that the user data is just a liability for us uh you know we we want your five or ten dollars a month that that's that's all we need and um so we we take this very seriously um one of the things that we did over time was allow people to create accounts well let me just say that you need to collect

money somehow so this is the reason we have an account and sometimes people uh you know forgot a password the contact support things like that so in a paid service you kind of need to have that um so over the years we have introduced several options one of them is first of all you don't even need a mail address like you can use a fake email address again you don't care about email address that's the thing you use to log into your account it can be anything if you use a fake email address then obviously you cannot restore that but other than that it's up to you um the other thing we added i think was last year was support for bitcoin and bitcoin lightning to further sort of distance yourself to any you know payment methods that could be trackable and things like that i'm not an expert in that community i know that bitcoin lining is pretty good i know there are some other alternatives like monero and things like that we haven't explored them yet because frankly we don't want to be in the

billing business we want to be in the search business so so we thought in these two you know combining uh you know reusable email address uh thing with bitcoin lightning you know provides you at least from from a user standpoint regardless of what do we say in our privacy policy uh a pretty good uh you know sense of of security uh the thing that we are working on right now that i'm happy to sort of announce is uh we're working on a blind authentication uh token method so basically privacy paths for search um and we we we're hoping to launch this in the next few weeks basically it will be a browser extension um and when you use that there will be a technical guarantee then that your search cannot be uh uh uh associated with your account even if you want it um so that that is i think will be the last piece of the puzzle that we have worked in on the last six months from you know proof of concept to now a fully integrated browser extension and after that uh the users will have a you know 100 percent

um secure method of knowing that what they do on kagi is going to stay private even if kagis somehow wanted to know what they're searching for um so we went like the full circle there and you know listen to our user community um and with the launch of this new technology i think we are accomplishing you know the older requirements by this community yeah no kidding that was going to be my follow-up question if you didn't mention that was i i would would have been very curious if you're working on any kind of blended auth scheme because that seems like the the perfect fit where you can still have paid credentials but you don't have to link them to your actual searches which is a an immensely powerful thing well and it's provable which is the main point uh so people you know want that peace of mind yeah yeah like you said the financial incentives aren't there for you to log who knows what could change in the future or how you could be coerced into logging searches or something in the future

so it's a it's really important to have that technical barrier as well to to prevent that ability to link together and honestly that was my kind of biggest biggest concern and drawback initially paying with bitcoin and lightning are very essential pieces of that because at least then you can do so you can have your account in a way that doesn't link your identity or link at least your real name etc from your credit card directly to your account so that that at least was kind of like the minimum bar that i i feel like you'll hit well and that at least allowed you to have a pseudonymous account and not have everything tied directly to your id but blinded auth will be a really really powerful move forward um and i think will be a a huge part of especially the communities i'm in being willing to jump in and and use coggy regularly especially with already having bitcoin and lightning because as we talked about before uh bitcoin and monero specifically are kind of a key part of the the things that i focus on for enabling human

freedom and i think there's a lot of aligned people in the the bitcoin and monero space that want more privacy preserving search and want to be able to pay for it directly so that's really really exciting and i know blinded off i'm sure that was a lot of work on the back end because that's not a straightforward thing but that will be a really really powerful tool and and we haven't announced that yet so folks you heard it here first we got the scoop yeah yeah absolutely it's it's that's fascinating to learn about and i will definitely look forward to trying that out if you do ever want to explore uh monero support and we can chat more about this offline if you'd like there's a really good tool for taking bitcoin lightning and monero payments directly to your own wallet um so we we should chat about that more if you're ever interested i don't want to don't want to show you on monero on the podcast but i think it would be a good uh a good set and there's a lot of monero users who would love

to be able to spend monero on kaki sure uh we would like to learn more about that as i say i'm you know not coming from that background so trying to be practical in terms of what we implement and you know billing is is a complex system so the more providers you add it's just adds more complexity and we are a fairly small team and we really want to focus on providing best search possible for sure we always need to make these you know balanced resources and things like that but i would be happy to learn more yeah yeah yeah absolutely we'll definitely want to chat more about that i i did want we've we've talked quite a bit about the search aspect of kagi but like i mentioned earlier y'all are doing a lot outside of just definitely put in quotes just a search engine because kagi as a search engine is is far more powerful and useful than i think really any other search engine right now but what are the things that you're most excited for or the most excited about that you've launched recently because

i know you'll have some ai products you have translate there's a lot of different things going on so what's going to get you most excited that you'll have out right now outside of search well what gets me more excited is most excited is this idea of having an integrated product portfolio that can replace

30:00 big tech effectively um so we're working on a browser called the ryan browser which is zero telemetry user funded famous kagi so completely aligned incentives uh you pay for it with your wallet not with your data and we are working on an email product so basically the idea is we would introduce an ecosystem of tools that will be cross-platform cross-device where you can really you know trust that the product has your best interest in mind at all times no matter what product is and there are a couple of products that you know people use to to consume the web searches one of them browser is another email you know in my mind these three are are sort of pillars of consuming the web um and interestingly like at least for browsers like browser is even more intimate in search we we are in our browser like 10 hours a day it's probably the most intimate piece of software we have on our computers yet most of us let companies that are you know advertising funded one way or the other uh and you know they let the advertisers pay for our browsing and that is also

something completely unacceptable for me so this is why we started working on a browser that will align incentives be zero telemetry really privacy friendly like not none of the mainstream browsers are zero talent or zero talent or for example while they claim their privacy respecting so that always sort of was astonishing to me uh and and yeah so we want to create this ecosystem of tools where people can trust people have will have a vote with their wallet people will be able to contact support people will be able to request features and we will be listening to that user community and and building better products together because all the incentives are aligned and i think the consumption of the web lacked something like that we used to pay for browsers up to 2005 i think maybe eight was the last paid browser out there that you sort of bought your browser and had it like it was yours that that that sort of vanished 15 years ago and i i don't see any reason for that not to be a thing like you know you buy many things in life

you buy that coffee at starbucks you don't expect the stranger to give it free to you every single day yet for something much more intimate like search and browsing you're completely fine with that expectation that somebody else is paying for our coffee right um so i think there will be a major shift uh in how we view consumption of web in the future and we will want to trust companies that have our best interest in mind simple as that so so kagi is building this ecosystem these are the three main products that we build we're building a lot of uh sort of secondary products like the translator we launched the other day uh you know i believe you should have access to high quality translation without jeopardizing any privacy uh and not only that you get with kagi translate but it it's beating google translate and depel on testing that our users do uh so um we have um we have the universal summarizer which summarizes any content to the web it's a browser extension and you can also use it in kagi search results to summarize any

any search results so we are slowly building this ecosystem of tools again we are not lacking ambition each of the small the team is small and you know we have to pick our battles um and most recently we have started working on an integrated ai assistant uh which basically is an ai experience a chat like experience that has access to all the top llms in the world but it's grounded in kagi search so you get not all not just all the models but when you're searching for something uh you get actually accurate results that are grounded in in kagi search results so so there's a lot of things going on um and uh yeah sometimes uh people tell us like we have these release notes every week and they tell us like it's very hard to keep up with the amount of stuff we are producing but we are we are incentivized to do that and uh oh good yeah yeah again those those incentives aligning it is it is crazy with y'all being a small team how much you're able to put out like it's uh normally if i step away from a project that i like

for 12 months or something and don't pay too close of attention there's not too much that i'm gonna miss but like i said i feel like i like y'all had orion the last time i was focused more on kagi and i had been using that and trying that out a bit when i was on mac os i'm not on mac os anymore so unfortunately i can't use it today that is a quick question that just comes to mind while i'm thinking about it do you all have plans i'm assuming to expand orion to other platforms than mac os on ios yes it's just a resource question we had to start somewhere and we started on mac os or the apple ecosystem so there's a mac os ios version of orion we have windows linux planned um so it's just a matter of resources again we picked some of the most complex software products in existence like search browser like you can go you know much more harder than that so it really takes time we have been spending five years now on orion and it's not out of data yet we're basically building it from scratch it's not using tromium it's

using webkit so there's no you know browser browser app framework like tromium you have to create from scratch every item every menu every interaction so we've been doing that for the last five years we are nearing the launch of v1 and once that happens uh we are planning to um you know start building a ryan for for another platform so i i can't say when but you know there's the will and so there's a will there's a way yeah that's what i was always taught growing up so yeah i uh i'm excited to see that i think that's another reason why that's another thing that i really appreciate about this model that you've taken on that i feel like some others in the space have taken on where it's actually a paid model is that there's also there's a sense of user investment as well like rather than me being a free user of google and having no attachment to google and not feeling at all like the things that i'm doing with google are creating things that will benefit me in the future there's this really cool aligned incentives that happen when i'm paying for kagi search and i see that kagi has

now been able to build all of these new tools that you're building a browser it's also a very different feeling for me as the user because you you get that sense of like i helped a little bit to get it there and every bit that you do helping spread the word on these kind of programs like obviously i'm not working at kaki y'all are the ones doing the work but when you're funding something with your money rather than funding some far off corporation with your ads with your ad clicks or your data there's a much more interesting kind of set of uh i don't know it just feels very different it's a very encouraging very more uh human-centric approach to the web where it feels a little bit more like you're a part of something and that you're helping something else to become better rather than just a part of the the system um so i don't know if that's a little bit too philosophical no it resonates with me a lot and our mission is to humanize the web and uh thank you for saying that and let me just say that user input

and contribution has been a major part not not not a not a small part and you know some of that through through the feedback and bug reports and things like that i think users build like 50 of our products the you know 50 at least uh of the features and things you see in the products and on the other hand spreading the word like we are not covered in in major tech media and you you you will learn about kagi through podcasts like yours and people spreading the word on social media on reddit and hacker news uh you know the the major tech media is is not interested uh so we are very very grateful for having such users that help us build this together and really you know there will be no kagi literally with all these users in every sense of the word so thank you for doing that and uh thanks to a lot of user community uh you you mean really a lot to us yeah yeah i'm i'm really excited to see what y'all will do in the future i think that's a probably a good place to to wrap is just ending with what's most

exciting to you that kagi's working on right now in the future i know we just talked about the current product so maybe that's email like you mentioned is something that you're working on in the background but maybe just kind of what's what's most exciting to you what are you most looking forward to in the future of kagi uh and then any just any closing thoughts or or less things you want to say before we wrap up here sure so i already mentioned the integrated product portfolio that's something i want us to focus on more so you can access kagi products on different platforms and devices and you know just really have this alternative way to consume the web that has your best interest in mind um

40:00 Second, I'd really love to see Cogni proliferate more with educational institutions. I think schools could benefit a lot from Cogni. I would love to see my children being able to use Cogni in their school versus Google and not be forced to change their search engine because they have Cogni set and then the teacher changes it back to Google and they change it back. That's so wrong on so many levels. No kidding. And so that's one of the things that I hope just like the society will embrace this idea of, you know, information having value.

And, you know, we don't put a lot of value on getting information today because it's so easily available. But we do forget that it is because it's not in our best interest. And finally, the futuristic vision of Cogni. For me, it was always I was always fascinated with these, you know, onboard computers in science fiction movies, like, you know, Alien or Star Trek, where you can just talk to the computer. And I always thought like we would get to the point where, you know, this will be a reality.

And it seems like we got a bit closer with LLMs, but it also feels like it's not that. And the technology seems to be limited. And I'm not 100% sure it will get us to that vision because nobody checked the output of a Star Trek board computer. It was always right. With LLMs, it's like hit and miss. And so I'm not sure that technology will get us there. But I'm really excited about possibility of, you know, having that sort of technology, you know, more readily available.

And you can sort of talk to a computer and it will, you know, sort of be efficient and accurate. There's a very interesting vision by Apple from 1987 called the Knowledge Navigator. And you can find this on YouTube and you can see what Apple envisioned in 87. So that's something I would like to try to build one day. But I think we are very far from that. And I say I don't think LLMs will get us there, unfortunately. There will need to be another breakthrough.

But an important part of that breakthrough will be that incentives will be aligned. Again, that Star Trek onboard computer, you cannot imagine it showing it an ad before or after it said something to you. Right. It needs to be in your service. So again, this idea of information being in your best interest, I think, will be a big idea or a bigger idea in the next five to ten years. Yeah. And I think, too, something that you mentioned earlier about kind of how the brokenness of the information that's available via search a lot of times is fed by the ad system.

I think that's probably a lot of the core of the issues with LLMs right now, too, is an LLM is only as good as the data that you feed it. And when the data that you feed it is overwhelmingly data that's driven by ads or that's driven by a kind of clickbait economy, there's a lot that would get better if the actual information that people incentivize to put out into the web improves. So I think there's an interesting thought that perhaps as we slowly fix the web and slowly build in better incentives and slowly break away from the ad economy, things like LLMs may naturally get better as the quality of the info that's out there on the Internet actually improves as well.

So certainly a tangent, but an interesting one where I'm curious how that interplay works out in the future. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Vlad. I know we kept this one relatively brief, but I wanted to make sure to let people know what you're doing at Kagi. Like I said, I've been a user for a couple of years now and really, really enjoying it and excited to jump back in, especially with the blinded auth that you're working on. I think that's going to be a huge breakthrough and fix the only real downside that I saw with Kagi at this point.

So really looking forward to it. Thank you so much for your hard work. And then last question, just where can people find more about you, find more about Kagi? Where do you want to send people? Sure. So Kagi.com. Please visit, try it. I think you will be pleasantly surprised what happens when 30 is optimized for you. We are active on all social media. We have a very active community on Discord. Five or so thousand people. Very dynamic. We love hearing from our community.

So make sure you say hello. Tell us what you think of Kagi, how we can improve. We appreciate all that. Awesome. Thank you so much, Vlad. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much, Sam. Thanks for listening. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Opt Out. If you did, please take a moment and subscribe to the podcast. Or if you're already subscribed, share it with one friend or family member this week. As always, you can check out the link to the guest content and contact info, as well as links to all of the tools we discussed in today's episode.

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