Update to Kagi Search Pricing • Hacker News Board

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#231

Post by Atlas22 » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 10:23 PM UTC

jlund-molfese wrote: post #216

Atlas22 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, ultimately this is what turned me off. Used the beta and loved it for as long as it lasted. When it ended it was hard to migrate elsewhere but I couldn't convince myself it was a good idea to continue investing in a service that was entirely at the mercy of its direct competitors and shows no signs its working to reduce that risk and cost. Unless they mitigate those risks they will only exist for as long as goo…

They have their own index[1]. It's not easy, when a bunch of sites block anyone who isn't Google or Bing. But this is the same strategy Brave seems to be pursuing, where they try to rely more and more on their own indices. [1] http://teclis.com

Good to know they are working on this.

Is there a legal issue with spoofing user agent to be the google crawler? Spoofing is certainly enough to get rid of article paywalls for 99% of sites Ive encountered. At least last I heard you can also work around cloudflare captcha by just routing requests through a worker on their service.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#232

Post by mdaniel » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 11:21 PM UTC

jlund-molfese wrote: post #216

Atlas22 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, ultimately this is what turned me off. Used the beta and loved it for as long as it lasted. When it ended it was hard to migrate elsewhere but I couldn't convince myself it was a good idea to continue investing in a service that was entirely at the mercy of its direct competitors and shows no signs its working to reduce that risk and cost. Unless they mitigate those risks they will only exist for as long as goo…

They have their own index[1]. It's not easy, when a bunch of sites block anyone who isn't Google or Bing. But this is the same strategy Brave seems to be pursuing, where they try to rely more and more on their own indices. [1] http://teclis.com

> The crawler is hybrid, using async python requests and puppeteer with uBlock Origin. The way detection works is we count the number of uBO blocked requests on the page, and if too many (threshold is set to 5), we kick it out, leaving only "clean" pages in the index.

Fascinating; cnn.com reports 47 on the front page, npr.org is at 16, developer.hashicorp.com is at 9. I don't think that metric is doing what they think it is, or rather maybe they're trying to target only savanna.gnu.org style sites or something

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#233

Post by sebazzz » Sat, Mar 11, 2023, 8:25 AM UTC

standbythree wrote: post #175

sebazzz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it will be possible to transfer unused searches from the current month to the next. If I have 400 in February and 760 in March it would be very annoying to suddenly be forced to pay or need change back to Bing.

It will not be possible. https://blog.kagi.com/update-kagi-search-pricing#faq (Third question.) The justification they give seems to be nonsense: "While we understand that this may be inconvenient for some users, it’s important to note that providing free trial accounts and supporting our team members’ salaries requires a delicate balance. "

Well that's a waste. I'll see how it goes but if it annoys me I'll cancel the subscription.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#234

Post by sdfhbdf » Sat, Mar 11, 2023, 12:12 PM UTC

pkulak wrote: post #183

What I don't understand is this idea that searches cost them 1.2 cents each. 1.2 cents is the cost of operating a 4-core, 16-gig, 5-gigabit server on AWS for nearly 5 minutes. If a single search cost Google 1.2 cents, Google would be paying $44 million a day to cover it. I cannot make that math work, and it makes me reticent to believe them and continue paying. Only thing I can think of, is that they have divided the…

It's Bing API usage cost as they mentioned, and Bing hiked the prices up 100%, as they mentioned.

Most of their searches are combining data from Bing, Google and other sources.

They never stated that this cost is their infrastructure cost.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#235

Post by MichaelZuo » Sat, Mar 11, 2023, 8:38 PM UTC

pkulak wrote: post #183

What I don't understand is this idea that searches cost them 1.2 cents each. 1.2 cents is the cost of operating a 4-core, 16-gig, 5-gigabit server on AWS for nearly 5 minutes. If a single search cost Google 1.2 cents, Google would be paying $44 million a day to cover it. I cannot make that math work, and it makes me reticent to believe them and continue paying. Only thing I can think of, is that they have divided the…

> If a single search cost Google 1.2 cents, Google would be paying $44 million a day to cover it. I cannot make that math work, and it makes me reticent to believe them and continue paying.

You don't believe that Google is spending at least $44 million a day on providing search?

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#236

Post by kid64 » Sun, Mar 12, 2023, 5:53 AM UTC

Wondering what kind of legal exposure Kagi has here? In the United States, selling something under false pretenses (like the promise of grandfathered pricing) is fraud.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#237

Post by mordae » Sun, Mar 12, 2023, 2:08 PM UTC

Yeah, I will probably subscribe as they introduce the family mode.

Quality of the results is way better than Google and derivatives. I can once again find small blogs, various fora etc. with genuine people discussing their first-hand experience instead of generic ad farms.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#238

Post by crisp » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 8:32 AM UTC

Yep, that's it for me. A loyal, paying customer all the way from beta days doesn't seem to matter much. I truly hoped they would have kept their word and grandfathered the old subscriptions.

Burning your money on the AI and browser nonesense is on you. Don't count me in.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#239

Post by kervantas » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 8:37 PM UTC

I tried it out today for a full day to see whether I should quickly subscribe to get the legacy professional benefits. I found having a limit on the number of allowed searches really uncomfortable. So it is a nope for me at this price.

Also, the search engine market is really heating up. We have - Bing with a GPT chatbot - Brave Search with lenses, similar to Kagi - DuckDuckGo with a limited chatbot - Swurl is cool as well (but I think that is just a frontend for Google)

...and they are all free to use. I am not sure if Kagi will survive another year with this business model. IMO, they should focus on freeing themselves from Bing's API and build their own indexes to drive down costs, and also drop anything AI related gimmick, and embrace the UNIX philosophy: do one ting well.