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Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

blog.kagi.com

701–710 of 983 posts

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#701
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, but it's also really hard from the service provider's perspective because - for many people at least - the allotment of searches starts to become a hinderance on using it. By making it feel a finite resource, some percentage of the users will start to ration their use of your service and/or do some deliberation before using it ("I kinda want to look that up, but I don't know if I want to spend one of my s…

Yeah, exactly. I looked at Kagi last week (first time I had heard of it), when the $10/month plan was "only" 1,000 searches a month and "unlimited" was $25. While I think that I'll probably stay well within 1,000 searches, I'm also not sure, and it's just not something I want to have to worry about (it's ~33/day on average and I doubt I'll ever hit it, but still...) One of the reasons I decided to skip Kagi for now.

You can set notifications and hard limits. I had this reservation and 6 weeks in have gone to the $10 plan and have other family members liking not, so will likely upsize again.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#702
post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misaligned incentives (in corporate terms, $$$). I can't tell you what they are, but there are probably internal Google incentives to filter and internal Google incentives to not filter, and the ones to not filter are probably stronger.

My theory is that google went from ads in search results to ads on visited pages. By buying doubleclick etc they are suddenly incentivised to drive traffic to ad-supported websites. Almost all the interesting factual websites are not ad-monetized. The SO spam etc are all scraps of the factual websites with ads injected. If google simply deprioritized ad-supported websites the search results would be much cleaner, but…

We could test this. Take a few hundred search queries, strip the pages that display Google ads, and see if the remainder of the search result is better or worse.

We'd need to get some humans in to rank the results, but that's not a big problem. "How well does this web page answer this query, on a scale of 1-10?"

With a collection of ranked pages, we can answer other questions as well. I'd be interested in running the same test but for google analytics, not google ads, as I think there might be a misaligned incentive there too.

It's worth bearing in mind that the stackoverflow clones may actually answer the query just as well as the original site - that is, it might be our definition of "a good result" that's out of whack (because we have an unnecessary bias towards the original source). I doubt this, but again it's something that's testable.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are the one thing I don't want to buy. It's not an asset. It depreciates. I'd like to pay a reasonable monthly subscription with a small fee per mile once I go over some minimum for my tier. Once autonomous vehicles are stable, I'm presuming I'll be able to hail a car in 5 or 10 mins via app. I guess the only question is what to do in full-on emergencies. For example, when the zombie apocalypse begins, or the al…

Food depreciates after you buy it. Do you buy it? Or do you lease food subscriptions. I use a car that it’s more efficient to buy it. Not because I love buying cars. Cars are just an expense and having a fixed cost is nice. Id love to live in a city that doesn’t require a car. Maybe one day again.

Yes and no. Mostly no.

You can live without a car. You can't live without food.

You can take raw food goods. Prepare it. And charge more than the cost of the goods. Restaurants do it all the time. Or even if you prepare it for yourself, you saved money.

I think we can do better that car v food :)

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#704
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly use an ad blocker. That page is over 50% ads.

Well I did not see any thanks to Brave and the content was spot on and that is all that really matters to me

And by that, you are telling google you liked that result (by clicking on it), even if in the end ads revenue is not increased by your visit. Maybe Google consider less important signals coming from ad-blocking browsers, that I don't know.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#705
post #168
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…

> 10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. This number really varies based on where you live, and there is no pricing model that accounts for this. I suppose it is mostly just aimed at Americans.

There is a hard price floor. They have to pay the Bing/Google search API costs.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#706
post #426

How does Kagi perform for non-English websites? Eg german, Japanese, Chinese?

I can only comment on german. For general stuff, like articles, blog posts, etc. it performans really well. For local stuff, like finding restaurants, opening hours, etc. it's okay-ish, but switching to google with the bang commands is easy enough to not annoy me. It is the weakest part of the product though.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#707

A lot of comments mention privacy. Could someone explain who can see my searches at Kagi? My experience working at startups is that companies are very lax with customer PII. With a product like this, I have to assume every engineer at Kagi can see every search I make.

Technically they are a for profit company, just like their competitors. They are based in the US, which is a bit hand wavy on privacy and user rights compared to e.g. the EU. And regardless of their intentions, they might transition to being a public company where the share holders run the show. In that case, all bets are off. Google started out with an intention of doing no evil. That didn't survive their IPO for very long and got replaced with sell the hell out of our user data any way we legally can and seek out the darkest areas of what is legally a bit grey. That's why they keep having to pay fines in the EU.

So, I would take these promises with a few grains of salt. For the purpose of improving their product they actually need to know how people are using it. So, they have to balance quality of their product with privacy. More privacy means their engineers are not getting all the information they need to do the best that they can. And they are competing with companies that are not holding back on that front. So, there's a bit of tension there.

Of course the fact that it's a paid product, allows them to make some stronger guarantees and build in business friendly wording into their terms of use beyond just promising that it's all fine. The flip side is that you have to sign in to use the product and prove that you paid for it. So, you can't use it anonymously.

IMHO, they should target the SAAS market and offer to make stronger guarantees to companies that are legitimately worried about their intellectual property leaking via search queries. Having people happily dump whatever in a Google query actually potentially gives Google a lot of insight into what these companies are doing. Including their direct competitors. And I'm sure they solemnly swear that they'd be doing no such thing but the temptation to tap into that is probably enormous for them. I can imagine a few companies that would pay a premium to cut off that particular flow of information. Those per seat deals that get sold by the dozens/hundreds are potentially worth a lot. B2C sales is a lot harder than B2B. And of course access to services like this is also a nice perk for employees.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I participated in this kind of experiment in 2007 comparing Google to Bing, and ho boy, the Bing results were abysmal. (Then again Google results today are so abysmal that it wouldn’t surprise me if Bing is now dramatically better.)

Even when Bing was specifically advertising their head-to-head site, every time I tried it, google won. I don't remember when this was -- maybe 2012? -- but I tried it at least a dozen times, and Bing didn't win even once.

2012 was 11 years ago. things have changed, i'm now happy with bing being equal to google. i mostly use duckduckgo.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you're wasteful does food depreciate, but I'd argue that's not the correct word. Food is consumed after you buy it. It was used precisely for what it was intended. That's not depreciation, but I'm guessing you know this and trying to be cute?

My car that I bought was used precisely for what it was intended. And it depreciates through its life until it is no longer useful and its value is zero. We buy lots of depreciating assets because we need them. That’s not bad, necessarily. But don’t buy a car as an investment. I brought up food because it’s a depreciating asset. You buy it, you eat it, its value depreciated to zero. It’s not cute, just pointing out t…

Yes. But cars are expensive *and* for the most part they are unutilized. When you're slepping...the car sits. When you're working...the car sits.

An given society that's based on personal transportation (e.g., USA) at any given moment has a significant amount of resources sitting around doing nothing. In a world now based on not-so-infinite resources less cars (via, car on demand) is more than just a biz model. It's good for the world we live in.

Re: Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

#710
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are the one thing I don't want to buy. It's not an asset. It depreciates. I'd like to pay a reasonable monthly subscription with a small fee per mile once I go over some minimum for my tier. Once autonomous vehicles are stable, I'm presuming I'll be able to hail a car in 5 or 10 mins via app. I guess the only question is what to do in full-on emergencies. For example, when the zombie apocalypse begins, or the al…

Isn't that a lease?

Not really. Another issue I have with ownership (or leasing) is usage. While I'm sleeping...the car sits. I'm at work...the car sits. In fact, a whole lot of resources and effort goes into something that spends most of its life under utilized.

Car on demand would mean less cars per person. Perhaps the UAW sees this coming?

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