231–240 of 269 posts
Paying for a search engine makes no sense to me. Startpage is just as appealing and free. There is also Yandex, which is identical to Google's old search engine. By the end of 2023, the search quality of Duckduckgo and Bing have dropped. DuckDuckGo is also now directing me to scroll through rubbish on the front page "Explore our features", so I moved to Startpage completely.
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Personally I'm fine with the 300 searches/month, however that means I don't use Kagi for searches that are extremely simple.
I just prefix "simple" searches with !g or !gi, bangs don't count against the limit
Also you can enable browsing history and use bookmarks to autofill stuff without having to use a search engine.
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Kagi has a bunch of different sources, it doesn't seem like all results come from the same source, so without any particular insight into how each query works behind the scenes, I'd gather it be very hard for any of us to come up with an average cost per query like you tried to do. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Sure, that's why I explicitly stated it was a back of the envelope calculation. It wont be right to the penny, but it will certainly have the right order of magnitude. I'll assert that even a back of the envelope calculation is more useful than your initial "they must be sustainable unless the infra is inefficient, and it feels like it isn't" statement. Do you have an actual number rather than feelings? Is that numbe…
Kagi is slightly different than other SV startups in how we approach things because of the freedom given by being (nearly) completely bootstrapped and built with sustainability in mind since day one. Some companies buy ads to attract new customers, we buy tshirts to show gratitude to existing. We also reinvest any savings we make into lowering the price and increasing the value of the product (check our product velocity in release notes [1]). Our customers propelled us to where we are through word of mouth, it makes sense to keep investing in nurturing that relationship. And having 20,000 doggos walk around the earth soon is fun.
Winning in search is a marathon, not a sprint. We might as well enjoy the run.
Kagi having a small user base is actually an intrinsic advantage in that there is no SEO spam arms race. It is not worth it to website operators to spend money/time trying to game Kagi’s algorithms. Because of this, as a paying user, I hope they can find a sustainable business with a relatively small number of paid users, where they can make nice profits and have nice salaries for their employees based of selling a s…
Also do note that there isn't really a "Kagi's algorithm", since every Kagi user will received customized results based on how the set their account. To game Google, you do stuff on your website content ; try various keywords regularly with authenticated and unauthenticated requests and see how your actions on your website affects your position on the requests' results. With Kagi, you can't do unauthenticated request…
Of course, there is a "Kagi algorithm" that takes the website's contents and ranks it according to the search. The algorithm, of course, takes into account user preferences, but there is a massive amount of commonality. Yes, that ranking algorithm probably can be games, just like Google's algorithm is gamed now with SEO spam.
However, because of the size, there is no real incentive to spend time/money gaming it, but it is misleading to suggest that there is no algorithm.
Doesn't this sound like a substantial distraction? The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database. So, we basically ended up owning a merch production operation end-to-end, just so that we could ensure…
Am I actually reading that they spent 33.33% or $220k of their investor money on printing t shirts?
I signed up a month ago and this is the first time something “not Google” has stuck for me. The results are solid, the interface is clean, and it feels good supporting an ad free product. I wish them their best with platform growth.
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!expert takes me to https://www.expert.nl/ ...
!expert only works if you have access to the AI features. Right now, only available to users on the Ultimate plan. General release for all subscribers is end of February.
The returned search results are very similar, but:
* With Kagi I can up/downrank sites. Never again will my search return a result on TikTok or Facebook.
* Kagi’s AI stuff is really useful: summarize a site, get GPT style answers by using the “!quick” bang etc.
I still find $10/month steep but I think I’ll keep paying it.