I got the opportunity to speak with Vlad, the founder of my favorite search engine, Kagi! Kagi is a Hacker News darling with a popular paid search engine (and an interesting philosophy on how to build better search than Google). Vlad and the team recently announced their intention to engage with and build for the Nostr community! We discuss ideas for how they can implement Nostr features as well a ton of other interesting topics, including:
Andy Weir’s The Egg as a model for reality
Vlad’s background as a physics student and early web & Wordpress developer
Was it inevitable for the web to centralize first before now (hopefully) re-wilding?
Why ads as a business model inevitably leads to low quality service for the user
Vlad’s manifesto: The Age of PageRank is Over
https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
Kagi’s business philosophy: pay for the product or be the product
Do Larry and Sergey use ad blockers personally? 800M people do. Vlad would be shocked if they’re not among them
Will people pay for search? 10s of millions pay for YouTube premium and search is arguably much more important
DKB’s article that blew up on Hacker News: Google Search is Dying
Workshopping Max’s thesis around building a “value rank” algorithm based on scarce bitcoin and nostr identity
Max explains the principles of Nostr and Vlad offers his initial reactions.
Max’s thesis that Nostr becomes the data/identity bridge layer between all kins of publishing clients (e.g. Twitter/X, Bluesky, etc.)
Ideas for what Kagi could build - e.g. embedded Nostr search in Kagi, a Lightning wallet in Orion, a beefy relay
Kagi’s collaboration with Stephen Wolfram and Wolfram Alpha
Vlad’s skepticism around “the singulairty”
Humanity has a ways to go to become a Type I civilization. This first wave of AI (LLMs) likely only gets us a small relative advancement
Learn more about Kagi
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