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uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

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Re: uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

#173
post #3

Alternatively, you could stop using Google and use Kagi ( https://kagi.com ), which offers the same feature. :)

I started using it a couple of weeks ago, absolutely love it. I haven't gone back to google a single time yet. I see people complain about a price, but I suspect also they complain about being tracked by google. I guess you can pick your poison. I think I'd rather pay a few bucks a month at this point, but to each his own.

[deleted]

Re: uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

#174
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi. Correction: they're saying 80 searches cost them ~1$. >Why does Kagi cost $10/month? >Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search has a non zero cost. With other search engines, advertisers cover this cost. But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. >Someone searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3. An average Kagi b…

How... do 80 searches cost them a dollar? That seems insanely high unless they're counting fixed costs that'll go down fast (on a per-search basis) as they get more subscribers. 8,000 searches costing a dollar, in actual resource use? OK, maybe. Still seems a little high, but maybe. 80? Are they paying someone to manually look things up for you?

It's new software, features are always prioritized over cost efficency at the beginning when pressure to ship product overrides all.

Re: uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

#175
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their usage panel, I do 50-200 research per day. In 10 days my usage cost is estimated at 11.69$. It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi. I don't want to be conscientious of the cost of my search usage, I fear it will inconsciously reduce my search usage and access to knowledge.

> I don't want to be conscientious of the cost of my search usage, I fear it will inconsciously reduce my search usage and access to knowledge. Sure, but this whole adventure won't last very long if the company loses money even on paying customers. If your usage costs them about $30 a month but you only pay $10, who will pay the remaining $20? Someone has to finance your access to knowledge in the end...

No, it's industry standard to operate at a deficit to gain userbase and subscriptions. They're certainly prioritizing shipping product right now over reducing COGS, but you can bet that if they're successful in the short-term that in a couple years they'll be able to significantly reduce cost per search.

Re: uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

#177
post #3

Alternatively, you could stop using Google and use Kagi ( https://kagi.com ), which offers the same feature. :)

Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do pay-per-use (1 cent per query)?

I'd love if more services worked this way. Same for streaming, YouTube etc.

Re: uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

#178
post #147
post #3

Alternatively, you could stop using Google and use Kagi ( https://kagi.com ), which offers the same feature. :)

I've tried Kagi a few times, but the results were not better than qwant.com (which is quite comparable to DuckDuckGo and Brave).

The results have been fine for me, the date filtering and archive.org results in particular have been really helpful. And as an FYI, Kagi runs their own web crawler, but also sources from Google & Bing.

https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from

Of course, I'm biased as I was a beta tester and now a subscriber, hoping they succeed.

Re: uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think charging per query would work for most folks, for the same reason micropayments to bloggers or what have you won't work: it discourages use. If you know that every time you hit enter on a search query will cost you something, anything, you'll hesitate. You might choose to just use Google and use your data to pay for your search instead.

But that's kind of the point: It always costs Kagi that amount when you do a search (according to their pricing page). If the relationship between user and Kagi is not supposed to be adversarial, then indeed the "price vs value" tradeoff needs to be resolved on the user side. At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And wi…

Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.
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