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

Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

blog.kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 983 posts

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#511

Post by Thorrez »

bee_rider wrote: post #425
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.

Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me. Like, I already want shoes, the ad isn’t going to wear holes in the soles of my old ones, the holes are there already, so the ad will just push me one way or another. So, I guess it is not just a tax on the poor and stupid. Everyone has to pay, company A buys ads, company B burns an equally large pile of money to cancel it out, and we’re just back where we started.

If you're a new company, buying ads can help you get customers who would otherwise have bought something from your older, more well-known competitor.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on ads.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#513

Post by linza »

prepend wrote: post #295
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but there's also the reality that maintenance costs increase over time for software projects as upstream vendors change their pricing models and codebases grow in size and complexity. I can see why a product like Kagi wants to keep their traffic tied to recurring revenue instead of selling a bunch of credits upfront.

People would need to buy more credits. I’m not asking for an eternal membership where I pay once and am done. There would be many customers buying on different schedules and that would aggregate into a predictable cash flow. This is a solved problem as companies have sold software for 50 years. Subscriptions are more profitable, that’s why companies do it. Not because there’s any realistic business reason (other than…

The incentive for the company is also different depending if they sell subscriptions or credits/usage. Kagi doesn't have competition in the paid search so space so they shouldn't need to go the subscription route yet as a differentiator.

Using dark patterns like subscriptions at this point seems to me that kagi doesn't trust their product or its users.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#514

Post by ldx1024 »

no_wizard wrote: post #438
freediver wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi founder here. You have my assurance this will not happen. Life is too short and I am not spending 10 years of my life building yet another ad-based search engine.

How do you feel about the name? “Kagi it” feels clunky to me. “Google it” while I’ve heard many instances of people using the phrase even when Google isn’t involved has a ring to it that’s easy to say and tools out well. Have you given thought to whet the Kagi equivalent would be?

I think if Kagi was the established leader and Google was the challenger you would be saying the opposite.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#515

Post by beefield »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #447
Grimburger wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's easy to click "block this domain" Friendly reminder that google had this feature a decade ago then removed it. Hopefully someone in the C-Suite got a few back pats for that decision. https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...

This seems the most obvious value add feature for search results at both an individual level and for reviewing overall moderation. I wonder what possible logic there could be to not allow it? The only one I can think of is they don't want bridgading to create a wider system block but that seems easily enough to resolve.

The easiest is to look where the money is. Might be risky to let your custo^H products hide the pages where you have most revenue generating ads.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#516

Post by Moldoteck »

hosteur wrote: post #507
climb_stealth wrote: post #502

Been using Kagi for 2 months now and am pretty happy. Have been using the $10 plan even though I didn't cross the threshold as I think it's a good cause. My two main complaints: - It's not very good with conversions. Say searching '120mph in kmh' doesn't work. Or the little widget with conversions that do work like '120cm in m' doesn't allow to change the input and change values on the fly. - The image search is supe…

> searching '120mph in kmh' doesn't work 120 mph in km/h does work, though. I don't think "kmh" is a normal abbreviation. This is the first time I see it.

It should be perceived as eeror correction maybe?

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#517

Post by eitland »

mongol wrote: post #19
crisp wrote: post #6

Happy customer here. Kagi is by far the best search engine there is. When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then. Now? Never. 10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. The results hit home virtually every time. There are variety of features to customize your searches but truthfully, I never found the need for…

Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the difference in results were like night and day, and Google's results were "wow!" Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?

Yes.

In four ways for me:

- it actually respects my search. If I search for "" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me.

- there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird.

- as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages.

- built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#518

Post by hyperhopper »

crisp wrote: post #37
mongol wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the difference in results were like night and day, and Google's results were "wow!" Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?

I think I belong to the generation that grew up using just Google so I cannot comment on quantification. The biggest difference for me is that on Kagi, the first results are always relevant instead of clutter/ads that you see on Google.

I, like any person in 2023 should, use unlock origin so I never see ads on Google.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#519

Post by davkan »

laserbeam wrote: post #469
magic_hamster wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Desktop) Linux, on the other hand, seems to be more of an intellectual experiment designed to please the people who are writing it rather than a consumer-focused product Honestly can't tell if you're joking, but I guess yes. Linux is the most stable OS I've ever used. There's a reason most mission critical and online services that require constant uptime run almost exclusively on Linux. Windows used to have a nice…

> There's a reason most mission critical and online services that require constant uptime run almost exclusively on Linux. That argument only applies to servers. Places where you don't need to wrangle x11, the audio stack, gpu drivers for less common cards, conflicting gtk and qt versions for different apps you might use on a whim, hidpi support in old apps, theming issues... I've no idea how many of these are still…

Audio has come a long way, pipewire just works in my experience. And Wayland is in daily driver territory, so X11 is only needed if you have some specific requirements. Steamdeck/proton has massively improved gaming.

That’s not to say it’s not still Linux, there will be some tinkering. But compared to a decade ago there’s way less banging my head against the wall.

If you’re already competent in administration Linux you might find it’s time to revisit the desktop.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#520

Post by retsibsi »

viraptor wrote: post #74
mongol wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the difference in results were like night and day, and Google's results were "wow!" Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?

In my experience it's not that there's better quality results found, but rather low quality results are skipped. There's a lot filtered by default + it's easy to click "block this domain" when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy. It means that when you're searching for code related things, you often get small relevant blogs in position 3+ rather than SEO spam. For example searching for "current time on JavaSc…

Is this after you've done a lot of blocking (or other customisation)? For me the top Kagi results are mostly similar to the Google ones, and when I scroll down a bit Kagi doesn't save me from articles with openings like

> Time is an important part of our life and we cannot avoid it. In our daily routine, we need to know the current date or time frequently.

and

> Time, a measure of the passing of moments.

Post reply on HN