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Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

kagi.com

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Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#111

Post by sytelus »

Nextgrid wrote: post #9
deanc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I can be frank, nothing google has done or is doing with my search data bothers me in the slightest. If it uses my data to help target advertising - so be it. It doesn't bother me either as I use uBlock. So whether I pay or not, the only thing I care about is the quality of my search results. What makes you think you can do better than a company with over 20 years experience, 10s of 1000s of engineers working on t…

Other people may have different opinions about their personal data. The advantage Kagi has over Google is the different business model. Google would never for example introduce a "non-commercial" filter as it would go against their advertising-based business model. Kagi doesn't give a shit about ads and will do whatever that keeps its users paying and so has a non-commercial "lens" (as they call it). I'm not sure how…

If Google went completely add free, they would need to charge $57 per year to entire US population. I bet vast majority of population will rather be willing to endure ads. HN bubble often forgets how small it is relative to whole population.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#112

Post by rytill »

Tepix wrote: post #77
freediver wrote: post #3

Founder here. Thanks for submitting it, but I am afraid there is not much to see right now. We are still in closed beta (mostly to control cost and gradually improve user experience), with much more left to do. There are some examples of what Kagi can do in my twitter feed. [1] Main idea of Kagi is to offer a paid search product, where user is also the customer and is central to everything that happens. Btw. Kagi is…

Is there a way to prove that i had paid yet remain anonymous (ideally without a session attached to me)? You offer pay-per-use or pay-per-month or both? Also feedback regarding your current website: So there is merely one sentence: It says "Premium search engine where everything on the page matters. " Yet, to the left and the right of this sentence are wiggling clouds that don't matter at all and distract the reader.…

There is a lot more on the current website than that sentence and the clouds.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#113

Post by Nextgrid »

sytelus wrote: post #111
Nextgrid wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other people may have different opinions about their personal data. The advantage Kagi has over Google is the different business model. Google would never for example introduce a "non-commercial" filter as it would go against their advertising-based business model. Kagi doesn't give a shit about ads and will do whatever that keeps its users paying and so has a non-commercial "lens" (as they call it). I'm not sure how…

If Google went completely add free, they would need to charge $57 per year to entire US population. I bet vast majority of population will rather be willing to endure ads. HN bubble often forgets how small it is relative to whole population.

That's fair enough, but the option should be available for those who are willing to pay. $57 per year sounds like a steal for anyone doing any kind of productivity work with computers.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#114

Post by memsom »

amatecha wrote: post #30

Whoa... this was really confusing to me for a moment. Kagi.com used to be one of the premier digital commerce platforms for software and shareware, especially Mac games, serving customers from 1994 until 2016. [0][1][2] Anyone who registered one of Ambrosia's awesome shareware games used Kagi's services, for example. It's really weird to see the company name and domain return again in this way! Best of luck to the te…

Yes! This was my first though - I didn't realise they had gone under. I think I bought at least one app via them.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#115

Post by tjungblut »

Semaphor wrote: post #15

Been using them for about a week, very happy with it. Regional results (especially since the last update) feel as automatic as google. While I still hope they’ll add my suggestion of a bang for region switches, most queries I do don’t need one, and it properly switches between English and German. All of the DDG bangs. Seriosuly, search without bangs is nothing I’d ever want to go back to. Built-In Domain Blacklist. G…

Agreed, I'm also very happy so far and only had to use !g twice so far.

Interestingly enough I haven't actually seen that much cross-language results (also DE/EN), even for ambiguous queries.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#116

Post by speedgoose »

jpalomaki wrote: post #103
skinkestek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody asked the other day. Kagi pay for api access to both Google and Bing.

I'm actually super surprised Google does this kind of deals. I've thought they don't do this, becuase it would help competition to get started. Once you get traction, then it might be possible to drop the Google access. This is what Kagi says in the FAQ. "Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We…

I'm guessing Google does not this kind of deals unless very rare exceptions like Ecosia. You have some companies parsing Google results, like SerpApi, but it is a bit shady.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#117

Post by speedgoose »

skinkestek wrote: post #76
speedgoose wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please link me to the API that you are thinking about ?

Last I looked into it was probably before 2017 at a time when Google insisted I was maybe a bot probably because I used very narrow searches. I don't have time now but try searching with your preferred search engine or ask someone else.

I couldn't find the API you are thinking about. I don't think it's public and it would require a specific deal with Google.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#118

Post by omnicognate »

pelasaco wrote: post #100
omnicognate wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If more people would pay it would cost less. If everyone paid it would barely cost anything at all. The alternative is to have your search paid for by someone else, in which case all the incentives are aligned towards tracking and manipulating you for their benefit and away from providing decent search results for your benefit. The marginal cost per user for a service like this is tiny, but there's a huge fixed cost…

> If more people would pay it would cost less. If everyone paid it would barely cost anything at all. Are you assuming it or do you know for a fact? That's normally not how startups work.. as long there is an increasing paying demand for their product, I don't see why they are going to reduce their price, quite the opposite actually.

If it were culturally accepted that search is something you need to pay for then yes, I am extremely confident it would come to cost very, very little per user. A startup with a small user base may well grow the way you say, but in a mature industry providing a commodity service to most of the population, margins will be squeezed razor thin and the prices will reflect the actual cost to provide.

Note that I'm not saying this is what will happen. I replied to a comment that was more about how we should want things to turn out. I'm saying we shouldn't denounce customer-paid startups for charging what they need to succeed in traditionally ad-funded industries, even if that means they start out as premium services for those willing and able to pay. Rather, we should cheer them on and advocate for the benefits their funding model brings, in the hope that they will succeed, grow, become commoditised and benefit everyone for pennies.

The alternative is to stick with the ad-driven, dross-filled panopticon we already have.

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#119

Post by [deleted] »

Tepix wrote: post #77
freediver wrote: post #3

Founder here. Thanks for submitting it, but I am afraid there is not much to see right now. We are still in closed beta (mostly to control cost and gradually improve user experience), with much more left to do. There are some examples of what Kagi can do in my twitter feed. [1] Main idea of Kagi is to offer a paid search product, where user is also the customer and is central to everything that happens. Btw. Kagi is…

Is there a way to prove that i had paid yet remain anonymous (ideally without a session attached to me)? You offer pay-per-use or pay-per-month or both? Also feedback regarding your current website: So there is merely one sentence: It says "Premium search engine where everything on the page matters. " Yet, to the left and the right of this sentence are wiggling clouds that don't matter at all and distract the reader.…

[deleted]

Re: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

#120

Post by texasbigdata »

Nextgrid wrote: post #47
gkasev wrote: post #44

There have been a couple of discussions on HN lately [0][1] about the current state of search engine results, be it served by Google, Bing, DDG or other. Also, it seems like there is a lot of work on search engine alternatives as in the case of Kagi and also here [2] to name but a few. Of all alternatives, Kagi seems to be off to a very good start and I personally am a very happy beta user. What I have not seen so fa…

For purely search, 10$ is about the max I would pay. For a full equivalent to Google's services including Maps, Docs, Drive, etc, I'd be happy to go much higher up to 50$.

Superhuman is $30.

So upper end might be higher for an "apple like" slice of the user base.

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