Fair Pricing

Yandex is a godsend to get information behind the silicon curtain.

With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA.

When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks.

When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available.

In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it.

[0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes

Absolutely seconded.

What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".

Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.

You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).

Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.

Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:

  /*
  Hide pre-translated webpages.
  "sri-group" is main result, "__srgi"  are sub results.
  You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
  */
  :is(div.__srgi, div.sri-group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) {
    display: none !important;
  }*

Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually trying it out

* I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy. Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but how binding is that? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not versed in US/California law, and given all the obviously exaggerated claims in this domain by all kind of actors, I can't give it much credit. I guess Kagi has to pay for the whole industry's decades of malpractices in this regard and that sucks, but I guess you could do better if you opened more about your

* I don't trust the product's ability to stay around. Startups come and go, and I'm not subscribing to a paid service and switching workflow without a reasonably solid belief that I won't have to do it again in a near future. Your new pricing policy actually helps quit a bit in this regard, the other bit requires you to actually stand the test of time, so just keep on doing your best I guess.

* Pricing has is shown excluding taxes. I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out, and I'm not paying if I don't know how much. In Europe, VAT is around 20%, so it's a pretty significant figure, that would be 60 bucks a year for the Ultimate plan. I don't have the slightest idea if that's the order of magnitude expected in California. Have your lawyer or accountant figure it out, because I sure as hell am not. Allowing me to pay in euros would also be a quite large hurdle removed, for similar reasons: exchange rates fluctuate, banking operation costs fluctuate, and even if I can work it out more easily than US taxes, I'm not going to do because this should be your job, and whatever figure I work out will be obsolete by the next time I'm billed.

I remember when they initially announced their plans here a while back and that actually held me back from pulling the trigger until I figured out that they updated their plans. $10/unlimited was an easy sell for me. I did consider maybe giving the $5/300 searches plan a try, but I actually wanted the inclusion of the FastGPT you can invoke by adding a "?" onto your query. Unlike Google and their inclusion of Gemini, it's nice that it's not there if I don't want it, but there if I do.

But on search and paying for search: I'm all for paying for search, but if I'm going to have a search engine set as my default, I don't want to feel penalized for my mistakes, and the most common mistake I make is simply not quite getting a URL entered in correctly and having my browser redirect me to a search page instead, and if I'm paying for Kagi in any capacity, then it's going to be Kagi.