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DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

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Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#121

Post by throwaway2037 »

mardifoufs wrote: post #69

This might be related to the bing API. I'm pretty sure Bing hiked their API access prices, effective may 1st 2023. Custom search is way more expensive than regular search too. But I'd think duckduckgo wouldn't really be affected by public pricing, and that they have some sort of huge discounts and contracts that would protect them against this. If they pay anything that is, since I thought ddg generated revenue from…

Do the paid search results also include paid adverts? If not, I can understand why MSFT raised the prices so much. The initial costs were probably way too low, but they wanted to gauge market interest. After finding firm interest, raise the prices to ensure that no one will use the API to build their own search engine without adverts! The people who work on Bing must be very expensive. Not to mention hardware/network costs.

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#122

Post by geysersam »

remram wrote: post #38
dharmab wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi. See: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/filtering-results.html

$5/mo for 200 searches, $25/mo for unlimited? Loading more pages count as new search? Does anyone actually pay that? It looks like something a real search engine would post on April 1st.

$25 per month for a service you use every day. Sounds fair.

If you save 1-2 hours per month not having to use a search engine that tries to trip you, that's a net win.

However, personally I use Google with a browser plugin that lets me hide unwanted results, and I find it works quite well.

Although I don't do much elaborate searching using operators etc.

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#123

Post by Semaphor »

remram wrote: post #38
dharmab wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi. See: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/filtering-results.html

$5/mo for 200 searches, $25/mo for unlimited? Loading more pages count as new search? Does anyone actually pay that? It looks like something a real search engine would post on April 1st.

> Loading more pages count as new search?

I have not ever loaded a new page with Kagi.

I generally need fewer searches than with other search engines, between their general features, and customized ranking, they are just that much better.

That said, I’m also in the early adopter plan ($10 for 1000 searches) which is enough for me (unlike the non-early one, as I sometimes go over 700 searches).

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#124

Post by ThatGeoGuy »

palata wrote: post #72
Fabricio20 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200 searches per month at $5? Holy christ I might do that in a single day! I guess this pricing isn't meant to countries outside of the US.

Have you ever tried counting your searches? You may be surprised. I'm slightly above the 500/month.

I'm approximately in the 900-1100/month range.

Based on their existing pricing at the $10 plan, that's 700 searches plus up to 400 searches at 15c / search.

Total is ~$16 / month depending on how many searches I make. The unlimited plan is appealing, but I'm convinced paying something in the range of $16-$25 a month ($192 - $300 / year, or $163 - $255 / year with their 15% annual discount) is still a steep price.

Sure - search is valuable, and ~$160 / year could work for me, but the variable nature of the cost is off-putting. Part of the issue is the per-search unit pricing: why can't I pay up-front like in the unlimited plan for a whole year, at the benefit of a slight discount? As someone who does pay for SaaS plans and is willing, I'm not excited about surprise monthly bills as an individual user.

My advice to Kagi would be to find a way to do annual billing without resorting to such fine-grained unit pricing. Charge per every 100 searches instead of 15c/search (e.g. charge $1.25 for 100 /extra/ searches on top of whatever plan I'm on), and have a rollover period (e.g. two months) if I purchase an extra 100 searches but only use e.g. 20 of them.

This kind of billing (annual discount for all plans + broader unit pricing) would reduce the price shock and anxiety of worrying about how much a single search costs.

I think Kagi can be an interesting product, and even one I probably will pay for, but the amount of thought into their current pricing seems naive from my view...

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#125

Post by Semaphor »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #39
dharmab wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi. See: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/filtering-results.html

200 searches per month at $5? Holy christ I might do that in a single day! I guess this pricing isn't meant to countries outside of the US.

> I guess this pricing isn't meant to countries outside of the US.

Their issue is, that they pay the same to Google and Microsoft, no matter where the user searches from :/

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#126

Post by ianstormtaylor »

helpfulclippy wrote: post #112
wastewastewaste wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea, the tool tip says "200 searches is enough for 99% of Internet users", but I doubt their target demographic is the 99% that don't need more.

Just a datapoint, but I feel like I do a lot of searches… I’m always looking stuff up, and I’m also in the habit of using my search engine as a lazy form of autocomplete for urls. I apparently do about 700 searches a month according to Kagi. If I were on the basic plan, I think that would mean I’d be paying $5/mo. + $0.015/search * (700-200) searches/mo. = $12.50/mo. For what search is worth to me, that seems reasona…

Yeah, I similarly felt like I did a lot of searches every day... and if I had estimated my search usage I would have said easily thousands a month. But I'm also actually in the 600–800 range it turns out.

That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#127

Post by easygenes »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #118
xlii wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Kagi for multiple months and due to advocacy I made few people pay for it too, but I’m completely disheartened by their business model. The whole explanation of the recent “we want to stay afloat” was weird, unexpected (price doubling with my usage, to 20$/mo) and felt untrue (ordinary user doing 30 searches per day?). I felt like it was written by Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler - made sense but also very…

Not saying you're wrong, but they grandfathered me on the $10/mo plan with the new pricing changes, and that would cover your usage. I think on the new plans 30 searches a day would come out to $13/month. I know it may sound like a lot (and definitely is a lot for some folks), but when I think about it as literally being the window to a huge amount of knowledge I take in, the fact that it's way less than Adobe produc…

I've tried Kagi as primary search for a few months and used DDG as primary for a long time before that. Recently I default to using phind.com. Don't think they'll be able to stay free forever, but as it is the mix of free access to GPT-4 and the focus on being developer-friendly makes it feel much better than alternatives (perplexity.ai being the closest competitor, but not feeling quite right for me).

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#128

Post by geysersam »

bloaf wrote: post #94

I personally feel like negative filters are important because they create an incentive for advertisers/SEO/etc people to not spam every keyword into their product. If you're only allowed positive searches, the best way to get your product found is to maximize the number of positive search terms associated with your product. With negative search terms, every additional term you add is a potential exclusion criteria as…

I don't want incentives for ads-criminals and SEO spam :( I want the search engine to help me find high quality pages, not piles of crap.

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#129

Post by somenameforme »

ploxiln wrote: post #13
JasonFruit wrote: post #6

Things like this seem so arbitrarily hostile to intelligent people who just want to find what they're looking for in an efficient way. Why does this keep happening? Who benefits from these developments?

There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results. Companies can't help but cater to the 10x bigger market. They probably spend money less carefully too, so are more valuable to advertisers. I don't attribute any malice to this kind of thing. I just expect that if a project or product is trying to be more eas…

Sites like DDG explicitly require opting out of the 'Google economy' which is going to bias their userbase disproportionately towards higher information users. I can even give a specific example how this changes things. In March 2022 DDG decided to start downranking "Russian disinformation." You might reasonably claim that the average response to this would be no worse than neutral.

But the impact on DDG? You can see the results on their traffic here [1]. I have to use an archive link because they removed public reporting of traffic figures shortly thereafter. The graph there defaults to display traffic averaged out over 365 days, but the day figure (on the top left of the graph) is configurable, since the data is (somewhat oddly) all client-side. Change it to something like a 7 day average to actually be able to see what happened.

Basically smaller sites are serving different demographics. That's precisely how they succeed. And this is also where a lot of their word of mouth comes from, which is going to be a major factor in their growth. Take your users for granted, and you risk losing not only them - but also the growth they would have provided you with. You even risk getting the opposite - of negative word of mouth. In any case, it's a sure path to rapid decline for any smaller company.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20220511093804/https://duckduckg...

Re: DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

#130

Post by mike_d »

plaguepilled wrote: post #40

Ah yes, the classic corporate footgun. I am sure power users who are alienated will most definitely stay quiet and not complain to their peers, damaging the reputation of a once reliable tool. This has never happened before after all. :')

DDG does not have a search engine, they have a frontend UI to Bing. Search API pricing from Microsoft is going up, so they either have to cut the complexity of queries or just not be in business.
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