Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 339 posts

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

#251

Post by freediver »

MauranKilom wrote: post #18
ezekg wrote: 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)?

Pay per use is a great model for search and I wish we could use it. But I don”t think the world is ready yet.

In our survey 90% of users told us they preffered fixed fee over pay per use and feedback we got was that pay per use would make them anxious to use search. Also it adds additional friction in the signup flow (where the idea of paid search is already a novelty and then pay per search?) and so we decided to go with a fixed monthly price.

Sweet spot would be $15-$20/month but this way we would not have enough users, and less users equals leas feedback to build product. Our pricing is subject to a change, we had to launch with a price and we’ve chosen one that was good compromise.

We are likely to introduce pay per use first in our enterprise plan. Pricing Kagi is an extremely difficult intelectual challenege. (Kagi founder here)

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

#252

Post by kgwxd »

Years ago, I made a FireFox addon for myself to do exactly this but everywhere on the internet. You specify a regular express to match attribute values and/or text, and the CSS to apply to the elements containing the matches. You can specify any CSS you want but if it's something like visibility: hidden or display: none it has this effect (and is the only thing I've actually used it for). It even worked on FireFox for Android when that supported proper addons.

It's really nice to never see a link to Facebook, Twitter, etc anywhere on the internet. It's almost like they don't exist. It causes a few oddities here and there (The text matching is problematic but it's optional, the attribute value matching works really well), but I've never missed anything important. I feel like if everyone had this power everywhere, it would serve as incentive for sites to not suck.

It took some fun javascript APIs I've never had to use before (like MutationObserver and TreeWalker) to get it to work right and efficiently, especially on sites that load content via JS (like Google).

Source: https://github.com/7w0/ssure (the interesting bits are in content.js)

Addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/

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

#253

Post by redox99 »

ezekg wrote: post #3

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

I tried Kagi a month ago, compared about 20 queries to Google, and all of them were either equal or worse on Kagi compared to Google.

Also showing the date on reddit threads was either broken or not there.

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

#254

Post by xtracto »

Belphemur wrote: post #26
ayushnix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was considering subscribing to Kagi but $10/month is almost as expensive as my fiber broadband connection and I don't think I can justify this expense. I would likely subscribe if it was $5/month.

I thought the same at first. Then I thought on an annual budget and price. Does Kagi worth $120 per year for me ? Yes, yes it does, it's barely nothing compared to the value of having proper search result. I checked ... I make more than 50 searches per day... $120 yearly is nothing compared to other expenses that I have like my broadband internet around $70 per month for it...

My thought process was like that: i do 50 searches per day, i lose on average 3 seconds per search filtering ads, pinterest,quota,geekforgeek,etc. results. This means 150 second or 3 minutes a day. Which means 1.5 hours a month. My hourly rate is about $70 USD, so paying $10 to give me back $100 of my time seemed like a good deal.

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

#255

Post by freediver »

geysersam wrote: post #184
ezekg wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd honestly rather see Kagi focus entirely on search and not try to branch out too much. These days, I think startups try to chew up too many markets at once instead of really honing in on one.

100% agree. Maybe I'm missing something but where's the synergy between search and email + storage unless you're harvesting data?

The synergy is in the fact that email and storage are high margin products. We are currently basically losing money on search. Cost of providing email per user is negligible (compared to search) but you could double the price and make the economics work.

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

#256

Post by dinkleberg »

prepend wrote: post #130
dinkleberg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re joking right? We’re on a forum where a good chunk of the people commenting have 6-figure salaries, some on the very high side of that. And some here have a lot more money than that. $10/mo for something used many times every day is a drop in the bucket for many. It’s not true for all, but for many.

It’s not the amount. It’s the value for me. $10 for something that is minimal value is the path to ruin, especially when done by many people. There’s opportunity cost (ie, what if I donated to charity, etc) but mainly I want to support high value products with some link to costs. All these “just the price of coffee” 4-hour-work-week type things are an unhealthy way of looking at the world. I like open source so I can…

To each their own. But to me, a search engine is a very high value tool.

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

#258

Post by freediver »

prepend wrote: post #133
corrral wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Perhaps amortizing really high salaries. $1M/month for a chief metrics officer or something.

Kagi is completely bootstrapped. It has basically 10 developers and me doing everything else. No managers. The expense is low as humanely possible as still coming out of my own pocket.

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

#259

Post by freediver »

MauranKilom wrote: post #93
Kuinox wrote: 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...

Correct, we are betting that avg user will cost us less than $10 in the future. Our current userbase is skewing towards HN - heavy usage. If that does not happen, we will have to change the price. Cost per search is unlikely to (significantly) change without (significantly) jeopardizing the quality of results we are known for.

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

#260

Post by freediver »

ipaddr wrote: post #227
rc_mob wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they now have a browser plugin that allows search in private tabs

All searches are logged to your account which is tied to your credit card / kpi.

They are not. See kagi.com/privacy
Post reply on HN