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Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#131

Post by pbronez »

piva00 wrote: post #113
desro wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m a bit lower, but it’s also very consistent. Pretty interesting to see!

Apr 2023 343 Mar 2023 463 Feb 2023 450 Jan 2023 448 Dec 2022 493 Nov 2022 469

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#132

Post by emacdona »

emacdona wrote: post #130
freediver wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

> How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest? "Includes enough searches for X% of current Kagi users"

BTW, I'm a happy Kagi early adopter currently subscribed at $10/mo. I do have concerns about even my limit, though. After I switched all my browsers (on all my devices) to use Kagi as the default search engine, I regularly exceed 1k searches per month.

I'm very curious how you measure the "average" user's usage. It seems hard for me to believe that even an "average" user (which I grant I am not) who has switched their browsers' default search engine to Kagi on their (one) computer and (one) phone -- assuming an average user has a computer and a smartphone -- uses less than 200 queries per month.

We've all been trained for years now (by Google) to type searches (not urls) into our browser's address bar. For so many people, the first action they take to "access the web" is to type something that is not a URL in their browser's address bar. I suspect this behavior is even _more common_ among "average" users ("power" users seem more likely to actually type "mail.google.com" instead of "gmail", for example).

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#133

Post by pbronez »

jpalomaki wrote: post #92
cetra3 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~7 per day is on the low side for me. I will normally rerun the same search with different terms multiple times, especially if I'm looking for an answer to something highly technical, like easily 5-6 different searches for the same thing. And this happens multiple times per day. There's something perverse with the incentives here: they make more money if you have to perform more searches. It doesn't quite sit right i…

> they make more money if you have to perform more searches. I believe the reason for the pricing is Kagi's cost structure. Accessing for example Google index is not free. Since they don't show ads or monetize the user in other ways, they need to pass the costs to customers. Pay-for-what-you-use models are not common for consumer services, but I think it is a healthy pricing model. Better than fixed price packages, w…

It’s tricky because there are subtle psychological effects when marginal use directly incurs marginal cost. It makes each use a decision.

When you assemble tools for cognitive work, it’s important that they have low overhead. Thinking about the financial cost of using a tool is a small context switch that slows you down. Thus a bundle of prepaid stuff increases the utility of the service beyond what you’d get with pure pay per use, even though the latter is more economically efficient.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#134

Post by benhurmarcel »

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…

I currently subscribe to the $5 plan, and I'm happy with that.

Most searches I do are simple, any search engine will do. So I don't use Kagi for those. When it's not trivial, I just start my search with "k " to use Kagi. I easily stay below the 200 searches limit then.

For sure it would be more convenient to have unlimited searches, but I'm not willing to pay for a higher plan.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#135

Post by freediver »

danpalmer wrote: post #98
freediver wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

> How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest? I don't necessarily agree it's dishonest, but I think it's a bit weird to have a pricing tier than effectively doesn't work for anyone who would pay for the service. As you said, almost all Kagi users are not in this 99% of users. Having a plan that caters to these users probably doesn't benefit many people in that…

> but I think it's a bit weird to have a pricing tier than effectively doesn't work for anyone who would pay for the service.

When we had only the $10 plan, we were getting messages from users that that plan is too pricey for them when they don't search as much.

Hence the $5 month and now about 5% of our users are on this plan. (and Kagi still has zero marketing spend). You have to start somewhere. This gives us an opportunity to onboard almost everyone to Kagi.

> if unused searches rolled over month to month. This tends to feel fairer in general.

Yes, except something still has to pay for all the free trial searches and our salaries. Selling product at cost or below is something VC funded startups can do, which we are not.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#136

Post by freediver »

janandonly wrote: post #125
freediver wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Would you consider making a pay-per-search model for the occasional users? This way one search is maybe $0,05 or whatever, but at least one can use KAGI without signing up for an account. Several paywall solutions exist for this, like: - http://paywall.lightningj.org/ - https://medium.com/@infolightningj/lightningj-paywall-bringi...

Yes potentially, we found out that incorporating billing system is painful and takes away resources from our (small) team that we'd rather spend on building better search experience (like this update).

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#137

Post by pbronez »

csdvrx wrote: post #81
freediver wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Kagi founder) Kagi never did bait and switch tactics and certainly doesn’t have a “history” of this. This is the third time you are accusing Kagi using the same words although I have addressed this already in a comment to you before [1] I would like to ask you to stop spreading this nonsense or at least substantiate your claims so that we can have a discussion. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684449

While you're here, may I ask you a question? I like duckduckgo but now I prefer bing, mostly for the bing chat inclusion. Yet I miss the ! shortcuts from DDG, and after trying it at a friend, I'd like to use Kagi too (so yes, I want everything and the kitchensync) Would you have a product that would also use ! shortcuts and do some bing chat like search on top of Kagi? By bing chat, I mean not just openai, but doing…

Kagi doesn’t have a chatbot, but they have recently added some thoughtful Generative AI features. They tend to start with the search results and then summarize.

See https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#138

Post by browningstreet »

toastal wrote: post #95
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…

Do I have to be the guy to say that I still listen to music as whole albums and store my music for offline? Artists in a lot of genres still release the album as 'the music', where a song is like one chapter of the book and you wouldn't just read one chapter. I only stream during the discovery phase for new music and even then it's usually: one track good, okay then it's time to try the whole album. There has always…

I think individually we all have the right/option to make our choices, but I'm speaking to the market makers. If you want to be a vinyl shop (Kagi, Bandcamp), go for it. But you're not going to be Spotify -- or the Apple Music Store ($0.99 per track, remember?) -- in a world of TikTok and bundled music platforms.

And I have my personal version of vinyl, I listen a lot to soma.fm and Radio Paradise. It's very interesting to me personally how few other services like those really exist out in the world. There are things like DI.FM and Mixcloud, but I don't know anything else like Radio Paradise (music channels, forums, etc). I've scoured all the channels and platforms expose on TuneIn and the like, and there aren't quite as many variants as I would personally expect. So the niche music world isn't even as numerou$ as you'd want a long tail to be.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#140

Post by freediver »

Veen wrote: post #123

Amusingly, I searched for Kagi's founder and the new public records search section in the main results showed his citation for failing to stop at stop sign and a 2020 patent for "a search interface [that] allows the selection between multiple presentation modes". https://www.judyrecords.com/record/v6pvbppbw3c05

It is amusing - and just for accuracy it was 'failing to stop at a stop sign, on a bicycle'.
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