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Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#111

Post by skinkestek »

esafak wrote: post #13
radicalriddler wrote: post #11

Unfortunately I stopped using Kagi just due to it not being worth the money for me personally. But look at the company using bearblog.dev, that's awesome. bearblog.dev remains one of my favorite services I've found through HackerNews.

Same here. Too expensive after the pricing change and their browser is irredeemably buggy. I gave them a chance. On to neeva.

> their browser is irredeemably buggy.

Are we talking about Orion? It is one of my absolute favorites!

> On to neeva.

Not available where I lived last I checked, which also means I now don't like them.

Please someone who knows neeva let me know if they are good enough to forget that they disrespected me last time ;-)

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#112

Post by sph »

karaterobot wrote: post #2

One thing that'd be nice is if they saved your selection of temperature scales. Currently they always show Celsius by default, but let you switch to Fahrenheit if you dare. I know that preferring Fahrenheit makes me a reprobate, but is this a hill they want to die on? Are they being paid by Big Metric? I'm logged in, go ahead and save it to my profile.

Big Metric is a group of French scientists from the 18th century going around with a 1 metre long, 1 Kg heavy stick of pure platinum, hitting people's shins whenever they hear nonsense like "it's cold, it's only 50 degrees this morning" or "is that a 39 and 3/8ths inch stick in your hand?"

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#113

Post by piva00 »

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…

I started using Kagi exclusively around the same time, I'm almost exactly on the same boat as you. Interesting to see that even though you seem to have a bit more variance than I do we land around the same range of searches/month:

    Apr 2023  651
    Mar 2023  708
    Feb 2023  613
    Jan 2023  611
    Dec 2022  759

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#114

Post by viraptor »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #106
eitland wrote: post #97

Many talk about the pricing, but for me the value of having a working (unlike DDG) search engine that doesn't secretly think it knows better than me (like Google) is worth everything I pay now. Internet is I guess, next after a working computer with a working dev environment, the thing that makes most difference for many of us developers. For me it has value in two different ways: 1. time saved by arriving at the cor…

Yeah. This is a very good point. Overall I think the user experience of the web when accessed through google kinda sucks in an overtly annoying way. I also think it's one of the big selling points of GPT-like search engines. It's not that they necessarily arrive at the answer quicker, they're just so much less annoying to use than Google, not only because you don't have to wrestle with an ambiguous syntax, but you al…

> but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text

All that content was created with existing SEO rules in mind. As soon as GPT-likes have established behaviour, we'll get new kind of content that specifically targets them. But at least we can enjoy better results in the meantime.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#115

Post by marginalia_nu »

viraptor wrote: post #114
marginalia_nu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. This is a very good point. Overall I think the user experience of the web when accessed through google kinda sucks in an overtly annoying way. I also think it's one of the big selling points of GPT-like search engines. It's not that they necessarily arrive at the answer quicker, they're just so much less annoying to use than Google, not only because you don't have to wrestle with an ambiguous syntax, but you al…

> but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text All that content was created with existing SEO rules in mind. As soon as GPT-likes have established behaviour, we'll get new kind of content that specifically targets them. But at least we can enjoy better results in the meantime.

It's tricky to extrapolate from Google. It's fairly obvious that there are things Google could do to fix this problem such as to penalize ads. They are never going to do as long as their main income is those very ads they would need to penalize to address the search engine spam problem.

In general, a big part of why Google is struggling so much with search engine spam is that they are such a dominant force in directing web traffic that they're effectively re-shaping the web around them to optimize for their algorithm. If you had any sort of diversity in search, this would be much less of a problem because the economic incentives would be much smaller.

I don't think it can be taken for granted that any search ecosystem would struggle in the same way Google has been struggling. I think their SEO-problems is a direct consequence of their monopoly on search and a lack of real competition.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#116

Post by Jochim »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #103
ubercow13 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very much this. Probably 75% of my searches are “Just looking something up on Wikipedia” or “Just looking something up on StackOverflow”. If Kagi were to let me search these sites without the cost of a full Google lookup, its plan would work for me once again and I’d return to being a customer.

In the interests of fairness, they do support, and do not charge for, "bangs" that defer the search to that site. They even support creating your own custom ones which is really nice. Wikipedia is one of the default ones. According to their docs you can search it with "w! query", "!w query", "query w!", "query !w" or even add the bang to a "quick" list and use something like "w query".

Unfortunately, you do give up consistency and whatever filtering/ranking/customisation Kagi offer.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#117

Post by dcow »

freediver wrote: post #51
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…

(Kagi founder here) You are correct in saying that almost all current Kagi users are in the other 1% category (tech savvy professionals who search a lot). But this plan is not meant for then. This plan is literally made for the 99% of all users who search the web 2-3 times a day, as the statistics show. We would like Kagi to have much broader adoption outside the HN crowd, and a low price plan is essential. How would…

Don't change anything. Your marketing is just fine. The commenter you're responding to is just voicing their surprise at discovering that most people don't actually use the internet as much as they do, or they're realizing they don't user it as much as they thought they did month over month, and, either way, consequently feeling insecure. They don't understand the difference between current user base and target market. You don't market to your current user base. You market to your target demographic. Like you said, if Kagi wants to attract average internet users, then having a plan that suites them is pretty important and in no way dishonest. I experience the same knee-jerk reaction when reviewing your recent pricing plan changes/updates. Then I thought about it for two seconds and obviously understood.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#119

Post by dcow »

browningstreet wrote: post #93

I’m not going to count my searches and pay for tiers. Honestly, I could live without caring about search. It feels like another thing that could go by the wayside, like music albums. I have Apple Music because it comes with my family plan, and I have YouTube Music because it comes with YouTube Premium. If I had to pay just for a music service — like Spotify — they wouldn’t get my money. Even if it’s the better music…

I pay for Kagi and never once have I needed to count my searches. I think the FUD is largely unfounded once you actually use the product.
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