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

Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

blog.kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 168 posts

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#81

Post by csdvrx »

freediver wrote: post #47
kid64 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

(Kagi founder) Kagi never did bait and switch tactics and certainly doesn’t have a “history” of this. This is the third time you are accusing Kagi using the same words although I have addressed this already in a comment to you before [1] I would like to ask you to stop spreading this nonsense or at least substantiate your claims so that we can have a discussion. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684449

While you're here, may I ask you a question?

I like duckduckgo but now I prefer bing, mostly for the bing chat inclusion. Yet I miss the ! shortcuts from DDG, and after trying it at a friend, I'd like to use Kagi too (so yes, I want everything and the kitchensync)

Would you have a product that would also use ! shortcuts and do some bing chat like search on top of Kagi?

By bing chat, I mean not just openai, but doing queries to augment the answer. I'd be happy to pay for it, especially if you offered an API to specify a few basics (ex: what is XX? Please augment your answer using results using this search query:" ")

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#82

Post by Josteniok »

I was an early adopter of Kagi but I cancelled the moment they started messing with the plans. I know I'd have the early adopter flag but I just felt betrayed by the messaging and I also don't want to use a search engine where I'm trying to think about how many searches I'm making and if I'm going over a certain number. The updates in the article look pretty good but I can't get past those two issues.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#83

Post by sickmate »

paiute wrote: post #79
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your privacy can't be retroactively taken: Kagi does not store your search history. The only search history you have is local, your own web browser.

I was interested in kagi, but it's not private at all. Your search term is right in the url, meaning the nsa can monitor your search terms. As an intellectually curious person, I search for things I shouldn't. I don't care if someone sees my local history, but I don't want to get put on a watch list for searching for production techniques for Compound B.

This is not correct. ISPs cannot see the actual URL being requested. Your DNS provider can see the hostname. The ISP may be able to see the hostname unless encrypted SNI is in place. The ISP can see the IP address you are connecting to.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#84

Post by runnerup »

cetra3 wrote: post #30
fafzv wrote: post #10

https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or…

~7 per day is on the low side for me. I will normally rerun the same search with different terms multiple times, especially if I'm looking for an answer to something highly technical, like easily 5-6 different searches for the same thing. And this happens multiple times per day. There's something perverse with the incentives here: they make more money if you have to perform more searches. It doesn't quite sit right i…

> they make more money if you have to perform more searches.

Their model pushes people who make a large # of searches towards the unlimited plan, where incentives are always aligned. I personally find that fair because I expect to get at least as much value from my search engine as I do from my IDE. $20/month seems reasonable.

Their model also allows them to have lower expenses against the lower tier plans if users of those plans make fewer searches than their quota. That's the incentive you're looking for. As long as users are not reaching their quotas, or are on unlimited plans, the user incentive is aligned with the business' incentives. And shortly after exceeding their quotas, users will probably upgrade their plan.

The perverse incentive only exists within a few "holes" between the plans, and serves to encourage the user to upgrade. I believe that by limiting the window of the perverse incentive, it should discourage goal-seeking to fit customers within that window. The more optimal outcome month-to-month should likely be to improve customer experience and get more signups, rather than juicing the current customers for limited additional gains inside those constrained windows.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#85

Post by iudqnolq »

paiute wrote: post #79
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your privacy can't be retroactively taken: Kagi does not store your search history. The only search history you have is local, your own web browser.

I was interested in kagi, but it's not private at all. Your search term is right in the url, meaning the nsa can monitor your search terms. As an intellectually curious person, I search for things I shouldn't. I don't care if someone sees my local history, but I don't want to get put on a watch list for searching for production techniques for Compound B.

How exactly does your search engine where the engine can't see the search term work?

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#86

Post by iudqnolq »

freediver wrote: post #57
solarkraft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their browser is irredeemably buggy Seconded. I gave it a few months, but it just wouldn't improve by itself. To be fair: With a detailed bug report (via Discord, making it excruciatingly hard to find duplicates/follow up), the problem would often be fixed in the next release. But it wasn't 1 or 2, it was more like 20 easily spotted issues. Come on, I can't do all of your testing. I think I've never said it this cl…

Fair enough. We do have over 2,000 open issues [1] for the browser, so buggy is probably an understatement. But we are getting there. More than 1,500 issues have been addressed. And Orion is the fastest browser on Mac and completely zero telemetry at that. Give us a bit more time.. [1] https://oriongeedback.org

*https://orionfeedback.org/

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#87

Post by ubercow13 »

freediver wrote: post #69
Jochim wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was vaguely aware of Kagi from their posts here in the past and thought it sounded interesting but hadn't bothered trying it out as I'm fairly happy with DDG. I just gave it a quick try there. While some of the features seem promising, the website ranking for example, what they consider a search doesn't feel great from a user perspective. Each step below resulted in part of my quota being used up: 1. Making the ini…

The first 8 sound about right, (9 is probably a bug) and all of them perform a new search which costs us about 1.5 cents to do. There are only three ways for the cost of that search to be paid today: - Advertisers paying it for you - VC money paying it for you - User pays for it Kagi is built for people who want a search engine built for them. There is no way around it but to pay for search like you would pay for don…

Most of the above examples of unnecessary searches could be avoided if the UI was designed to help the user avoid unnecessary searches instead of somewhat cloning Google's UX, which is designed around searches being effectively free for them.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#88

Post by keyle »

desro wrote: post #75
fafzv wrote: post #10

https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or…

FWIW I've been using Kagi exclusively since Nov 2022, and here's what my monthly usage looks like: Apr 2023 - 895 Mar 2023 - 1047 Feb 2023 - 650 Jan 2023 - 603 Dec 2022 - 1367 Trends much higher when I screw something up on my network! I have been asking GPT-* a lot of what I would have previously searched for. And there's still a lot of searching `+reddit.com` because they can't seem to solve search. I pay $10/mo an…

Yeah. It's just sad that it was what search was, for free, before. This idea that you search for things, and you find them, instead of paid per word shitty articles and ads. Nutty concept in 2023.

At this point, the free options are so bad I'm considering writing my own. It won't do 50% of what the big ones do but it will do it well.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#89

Post by freediver »

margalabargala wrote: post #78
freediver wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first 8 sound about right, (9 is probably a bug) and all of them perform a new search which costs us about 1.5 cents to do. There are only three ways for the cost of that search to be paid today: - Advertisers paying it for you - VC money paying it for you - User pays for it Kagi is built for people who want a search engine built for them. There is no way around it but to pay for search like you would pay for don…

Why would (3) also perform an additional new search?

Because we cache for one minute I believe, so if you wait a few minutes, it would be outside of cache.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#90

Post by freediver »

Jochim wrote: post #80
freediver wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first 8 sound about right, (9 is probably a bug) and all of them perform a new search which costs us about 1.5 cents to do. There are only three ways for the cost of that search to be paid today: - Advertisers paying it for you - VC money paying it for you - User pays for it Kagi is built for people who want a search engine built for them. There is no way around it but to pay for search like you would pay for don…

I appreciate the response and I'd like to reiterate that I might just not be the right user with the right expectations. Still, I hope it's useful to hear why someone might be on the fence about the product. > (9 is probably a bug) To clarify 9, the request is sent when clicking the cross on the Lens > Edit page rather on than visiting it. This also occurs when returning from maps. In both cases a new search is only…

> I do think that some aspects of the UX encourage billing superfluous searches and that, on a purely financial level, Kagi is dis-incentivised from improving this.

Kagi is selling searches at cost, and we make money on subscriptions. Making a suboptimal UX id definitely not what we are doing, as people pay us for UX to be optimal.

You point out some valid use-cases there and the reason we haven't addressed them so far is probably because they are rare and users didn't care enough to post and upvote them on kagifeedback.org for it to make a difference.

The one you noted has been suggested actually https://kagifeedback.org/d/844-dont-use-extra-searches-for-c...

and is planned on our roadmap, just not prioritized (just one upvote) and we had bigger fish to fry.

Hanlon's razor in general applies well when thinking about Kagi, expect it is not (always) stupidity but lack of resources.

Post reply on HN