341–350 of 380 posts
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I wonder how much the per-search cost is marginal cost vs. amortized fixed costs. If their paying user base grows by 10x, do the searches drop from 4¢ each to 2¢ each?
Most of their cost comes from API accesses to other services (e.g., Bing), so unless they can replace those API calls the price cannot go down very much.
That being said, I'm beginning to think that having a price tag as entry barrier is a good thing for a search engine.
One of the reasons for Google's downfall is that they had to cater to dumb and easily controllable masses.
Also, the aggressive SEO that made the search results so bad made economical sense as soon as those masses flocked at the platform.
Kagi may only stay this good if it does not become too popular. I hope the developers think about the fact that their best strategy might be focusing on their current sizeable niche market of nerds and intellectually curious people.
I've been using Kagi the last few months. I've never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I don't really 'notice' them. Like most, I now search reflexively, as an extension of the mind, so I only 'notice' search when it's bad. What really excites me is that is that I'm paying them. That sounds odd, but seriously. It's incredibly refreshing to know th…
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"This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads" I think another factor is the paradox that the user who has enough money to be willing to pay to not see another ad is exactly the most valuable user to advertisers— they've pre-qualified themselves on multiple axes. So there is always going to be an enormous moral hazard here with the ad-driven-freemium model— always a temptation to run an occasional high-value ad to…
One of the problems is price point. They are charging $10/month. While increasing the price will certainly decrease the number of users, a much higher price point could select for "power users" that will churn less and pay substantially more. In the long run that could lead to greater revenue. Of course this depends on how the supply demand curve looks like for their specific business.
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The blogspam has made Google and Bing/DDG almost completely unusable for technical searches. Go search for something like "postgres cte" and you won't find anything useful until probably halfway down the page. And maybe not at all.
For HTML, CSS, Javascript, and browser APIs, I simply add "mdn" to the search to guarantee I get the official-ish MDN docs. From there, I can dive in to W3C specs, etc if needed. Those training wheel search results are annoying but they're highly ranked probably because most people like and use them.
I've been using Kagi the last few months. I've never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I don't really 'notice' them. Like most, I now search reflexively, as an extension of the mind, so I only 'notice' search when it's bad. What really excites me is that is that I'm paying them. That sounds odd, but seriously. It's incredibly refreshing to know th…
Google's revenue is over 280B annualized from last quarter's numbers. Let's just assume that every person on earth is using Google at an equal rate. That's $35 worth of revenue per user per year. There is no way that you can come close to that without doing ads; the median global income is less than 4000 international dollars per year. So naturally, there is a strong pressure for companies to pivot to ads once they r…
Yep, but the main problem here is the perverse pressure to grow indefinitely.
And that comes from it being acceptable for public companies to pay no dividends and instead rely on share price increases to deliver a return on investment.
Something that slows down this growth spiral would fix things partially. Require profitable companies to pay a % of the profit as dividends to their shareholders?
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The blogspam has made Google and Bing/DDG almost completely unusable for technical searches. Go search for something like "postgres cte" and you won't find anything useful until probably halfway down the page. And maybe not at all.
Just Googled it, the first result is official postgres documentation, second is a tutorial, what exactly you get / expect when you search for it?
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The difference is Google is trying to do this with the data extracted/mined/tracked from the user (pulled), while the model proposed in the article is based on users volunteering their data to the search engine (push) because incentives are aligned and they trust it. A sbtle difference, but the latter can produce vastly better outcomes as the quality of the data would be presumably much higher. (auther here)
You said >In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. This is what Google is doing under the hood and they have the upper hand because they collect absolutely everything about the user. Yea there is a lot of noise but their advantage is enormous because theoretically the more they know about you the better se…
Better from whose point of view? ;)
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But then, you can't really search youtube as efficiently as you can texts. That's the only downside for me, sieving through tens of videos just to find something that might be in the middle that's releavant to what i'm searching.
That’s true but there’s also a steep positive benefit in information density and fidelity. Compare written instructions for e.g. fixing a car vs a video of a person showing you how to do it. Latter is much more helpful
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Google didn’t gaslight the web: Web directories died out because they go stale, fast, and require far more human curation than is economically viable. I remember Yahoo effectively deprecating their directory pages long before I heard of Google, back when I was using Dogpile and CompuServe.
It's not quite the same as the web directories of old, but I find the links and content contained in the "Awesome [topic]" lists on GitHub to be a useful resource. The curation aspect is managed via pull requests just as any other open source project, although this doesn't make it immune from going stale.