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Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

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Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#181

Post by justinclift »

ics wrote: post #178
justinclift wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with the "100 free searches" limit, it's not always really 100. If you click the "More" button at the bottom of the search results page it reduces the number of free searches left. In hindsight, it probably means they're re-running the search again with different parameters, thus "using" another free search. However it's not at all obvious to the user that asking to display more results from an existing li…

This is my only “complaint”, having used it as a paid service and now just on the free trial after cutting subscriptions en masse. I was doing some research and had maybe five tabs open to different searches, had a browser update, then after the reload I had five less searches available. In your example they are actually running a new query, mine I wish the result could simply be cached since I’m a logged in user etc…

In my case, if they'd just made the "More" button say something like "More... (search again and display new results)" it would have been clear what would happen.

That's very much how new/intro users should be treated, if not all users.

And I would have subscribed. Alas, they didn't, and I just can't mentally clear the hurdle of paying money to a place which I feel deceived me. So, I didn't become a subscriber. :/

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#183

Post by kuchenbecker »

lhnz wrote: post #114
aryonoco wrote: post #17

Every once in a while, I looked for an alternative to Google. I have given them all a go, but none of them stayed as my default for more than a few days. Until Kagi. I absolutely did not think I would pay for a search engine. Especially as I've recently been on a quest to cut every unnecessary subscription. YouTube Premium is gone (thanks to 83/% family plan price hike). Half of my dozen or so domains are gone... you…

I'm also a happy Kagi user. There are only two reasons I still visit Google: 1. I'm based in the UK and often it shows me shops based in the US high up within my search results. 2. Sometimes I specifically like to visit Google Shopping to find the lowest prices online for an item I'm trying to buy. Once Kagi has improved these two areas I'll have no reason at all to ever visit Google (other than Google Maps or Google…

Kagicis also worse at images, maps, and fresh results.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#184

Post by TisButMe »

justinclift wrote: post #181
ics wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my only “complaint”, having used it as a paid service and now just on the free trial after cutting subscriptions en masse. I was doing some research and had maybe five tabs open to different searches, had a browser update, then after the reload I had five less searches available. In your example they are actually running a new query, mine I wish the result could simply be cached since I’m a logged in user etc…

In my case, if they'd just made the "More" button say something like "More... (search again and display new results)" it would have been clear what would happen. That's very much how new/intro users should be treated, if not all users. And I would have subscribed. Alas, they didn't, and I just can't mentally clear the hurdle of paying money to a place which I feel deceived me. So, I didn't become a subscriber. :/

Heya, I work at Kagi. This sounds like a great idea, thanks for the input! We'll put it on the requested features list (which our users contribute to).

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#185

Post by unaindz »

justinclift wrote: post #76
throwaway81523 wrote: post #12

Kagi is ok but I don't understand the level of gushing over it that I see here. I got the 100 query free trial a few months ago and haven't used it up yet. So I'm not willing to buy a monthly subscription for something I'd rarely (won't say never) use. A flat $20 for 500 queries would be fine and might last me a year or so.

Be careful with the "100 free searches" limit, it's not always really 100. If you click the "More" button at the bottom of the search results page it reduces the number of free searches left. In hindsight, it probably means they're re-running the search again with different parameters, thus "using" another free search. However it's not at all obvious to the user that asking to display more results from an existing li…

I agree they should make you aware of that more directly when using the feature/before registering but to be fair it's in their FAQ.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#186

Post by strogonoff »

gostsamo wrote: post #46
strogonoff wrote: post #45

I’m wary of making Kagi a habit since I am positive in medium term they won’t be profitable with their current model. Flat rate won’t cover outliers and abusers, so once they really start losing money on expensive LLM-based features the regular users will get burnt—either I will have to pay more, or the experience will get worse due to cost-cutting measures, or they betray my trust by monetizing user data, accepting…

Just drop them when they fail/become bad. No reason to miss now for some future eventuality which does not affect the present.

Not sure if that letdown will trump whatever minor time savings I have accrued while it was good, though. To make it worse, first make it better, then make it back as before.

It’s the same reason I choose not to make use of insane promotions that ride app space newcomers tend to provide. I could use Bolt DeLuxe (or whatever is the new hotness in town) for a couple months, but the anticipation of how I will soon suffer as it becomes more and more of a ripoff with incompetent drivers and absent customer support, and how I’ll waste willpower on changing my habit again, makes me wonder if it’s really worth it. Instead I could in meantime exercise my taxi hailing skills (in this analogy, practice crafting queries and otherwise working around the limitations of worse search engines).

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#187

Post by TisButMe »

strogonoff wrote: post #45

I’m wary of making Kagi a habit since I am positive in medium term they won’t be profitable with their current model. Flat rate won’t cover outliers and abusers, so once they really start losing money on expensive LLM-based features the regular users will get burnt—either I will have to pay more, or the experience will get worse due to cost-cutting measures, or they betray my trust by monetizing user data, accepting…

Heya, I work at Kagi, and I did the math for this. Our unit economics are sound, and we don't plan on subsiding usage with ties-attached money. We have abuse prevention mechanisms, and we regularly review heavy use use-cases so we can either optimize for them or offer alternative workflows.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#188

Post by kkoyung »

I have been using Kagi as my default search engine for a month now. It really provides better search experience than google.

Nowadays, Google Search is flooded by SEO. When you search things on Google, you will likely get tons of listicles titled "Top 2023", " vs comparison", which barely contains some useful contents. Sometimes, you will even see some AI-generated gibberish articles repeating some basic information about your keywords. It becomes much harder to find useful contents from google than the old days.

Kagi search results have fewer nonsense articles. They groups those listicles together so that you can easily skip them. The feature I like the most is Personalized Results, which allows you to pin/raise/lower/block results from certain domains. For example, I pin wikipedia.org, and block quora.com.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#189

Post by sirn »

rplnt wrote: post #108

How's your experience with non-english searches? Google has become unusable to search in a foreign language if you do not happen to be in a given country. It's trying to be too smart. It's ignoring double quotes, tld restriction still searches for the sites in a language of the country I'm in, etc... it's really frustrating at times. Not to mention Google can't search anything old anymore. It's either news or spam. O…

Kagi has been pretty good for me for Thai and Japanese results.

I've had countless occasion Google's result is much worse than Kagi, as far as returning actual useful results is concerned. For example, searching for a product in Japanese, Kagi may find fewer results, but Google shows a page full of affiliate spam, which is not really useful.

The only occasion where I found Google remotely useful is for image search and map search.

Re: Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

#190

Post by strogonoff »

SushiHippie wrote: post #130
strogonoff wrote: post #45

I’m wary of making Kagi a habit since I am positive in medium term they won’t be profitable with their current model. Flat rate won’t cover outliers and abusers, so once they really start losing money on expensive LLM-based features the regular users will get burnt—either I will have to pay more, or the experience will get worse due to cost-cutting measures, or they betray my trust by monetizing user data, accepting…

Fun fact the LLM features are not expensive to them compared to their search product. Per search they pay at least 2ct.

Interesting, I wasn’t aware. I recall there was a post (from Vlad probably?) where they noodled over pricing plans and IIRC they considered low flat rate insufficient, I thought ML would be it but perhaps it’s the search.
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