Live data from Hacker News

Kagi Search – Paywalled articles indicator and improved weather widget

kagi.com

231–240 of 258 posts

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

#231
post #61
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, also the same experience. Who would pay for search right? I signed up for the $10 plan, before they introduced unlimited searches. One month I went over and thought ok, I'm not really ok with making more than 10. A few weeks later they switched to unlimited. The lens feature is great. I have one for searching my company's public documentation etc. The redirect thing is great too, it can rewrite URLs on the fly,…

Reddit to old.Reddit as a feature is enough to make me look into this as a replacement search engine. My search experience for specific information that’s kept on subreddits has been hell since they introduced new Reddit. If it can automate for me navigating to Reddit, then modifying the url to old.Reddit, and hopefully not accidentally clicking on the page and needing to reverse back or get redirected based on the c…

Yup, that's basically it, I rarely even see new Reddit anymore. I know there are browser extensions that do the same thing, I think I even have one installed on my main Firefox profile, but it's handy for your search engine to just do it.

But it's not just reddit, you can do like a custom regex replace on any domain IIRC.

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

#232
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"doublequote" word to make it required.

Even this isn’t reliable anymore. I had a double quote word that was being spellchecked. Even the ‘-‘ operator would still include words i explicitly avoid. This isn’t all the time but it happens frequently enough to be annoying.

not only that it isnt the same and it sucks more, it is harder to type for me

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

#233
I think during the last three months or so, I only used the !g flag four or five times.

It seems as if Kagi has indeed become a truly viable alternative to Google.

Whenever I do use the !g flag, the results over at Google are just awful, sometimes I have to scroll 1.5 screens just to get past the ads. Imagine running a search engine and not delivering meaningful results above the fold.

Google is a zombie company now.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the story of browser extensions... In general is that you can't ever trust them apart from a few very large ones. A redirect extension is ripe for the usual blackmarket shenanigans.

They’re simple enough that you can fork an open source extension and review the source with relative ease, freezing it. I have my own omni extension made up of copy pasted open source extensions. I normally wouldn’t go through the effort but web browsing is crucial and frequent enough to be worth it and it took less than a weekend to get it up and running, especially with Plasmo. It’s also another reason to prefer Fi…

This is a fair call and something I should really do with the small enough ones.

It's the auto-update behaviour of browsers that should probably be criticised here, rather than having general distrust of all extension authors.

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

#235
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some other stuff works better at Google, like "train from Heathrow to London" gives you the next 4 trains right there in the results. In fact it can give accurate results, link ups, walking estimates between bus routes, where the official transport app or website sucks (like Dublin buses). Oh and shop opening hours, cinema times etc. Kagi has gotten better at directly providing answers (like 15lbs in kg) but it's sti…

I don't know the term for the box that comes up at the top of results and gives you suggestions. I'm going to call it the whatever-box. The google whatever-box is more frequent than the one at Kagi. Is it better? The number of times I have googled a question and had weird and probably completely false information inserted (using reddit as a source, no less) is ... well, it's more than I'd like. It's at the point that…

Fair enough. But when I'm getting a bus and train to visit my parents I will always use the whatever box because it's instantly there with the right info whereas the shitty official website is slow, horrible, demands precise start and end locations or just offers me a PDF of the timetable. Kagi links me to the shitty website.

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

#236

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…

> usage-based billing US corporations doing this never offer proper spending limits per timespan (f.e. Amazon and Microsoft offer this but don't offer real limits - their wording explicitly allows them to go infinitely over and you will just be fucked). If they started doing this I would probably unsubscribe tomorrow (I'm currently a paying user), the culture just isn't there for them to get that right.

They can implement a system where you top up your account with credits, like Skype and many others have.

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

#237

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…

> they won’t be profitable with their current model. Flat rate won’t cover outliers and abusers They went from "a few tiers + pay-per-use above that" to "one low tier + flat rate unlimited" not long ago, don't you think they a) thought it through and b) are flexible enough with their pricing and profitability?

Quite the opposite: I know they thought this through (thanks to them being quite transparent in their communication[0]), and that their own conclusion was:

> the $10 per month unmetered search plan was not financially sustainable for us.

This was in March; fast forward a few months and surprise, they offer a $10 per month unmetered search plan. With unmetered LLM usage to boot?

I think it is obvious from their own math that the only way flat rate would be profitable is if they go for growth-based approach, burn whosever investment money for a bit and accumulate enough light users that they end up fully subsidizing the power users. I.e., they are hoping that the tragedy of the commons will not apply to them. Good luck to them, I guess.

(That, or they have the infrastructure to enforce some limits on unlimited plans. Unlikely, as it is not mentioned on the pricing page. If true, this would mean some invisible and inflexible limits I would have to be constantly mindful of running against—which is significantly worse compared to pay as you go.)

[0] https://blog.kagi.com/update-kagi-search-pricing

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

#239
post #54

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.

I'm also not sure I quite get the love. I got the free trial, and I've set it as my browser's default search engine for now to get used to using it. The problem for me is that it's at best equivalent to, and at worst a lot poorer than the same search in Google. Which is a shame, because I've been finding Google less and less useful recently. Maybe I need to fiddle around with the settings more, get some better filter…

> it knows that I probably want programming results if I search for "rust" and things like that.

If you search for web stuff on Google, how often do you get MDN as the first result?

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

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

When we’re at it, could you add a (toggleable) remaining search count in the header so that it’s immediately visible when some action spends a search?
Post reply on HN