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Perplexity got ads

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Re: Perplexity got ads

#291

Post by wrasee »

currymj wrote: post #283
wrasee wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they get 100x the customers on a $2 tier than a $5 tier then yes, they can be profitable. The question is, could they get 100x? Or even 10x? I don’t know, and I assume they’ve done their homework and believe that they can’t. I just wonder, what if they’re wrong?

for each Kagi search they hit APIs of other search providers etc., so they need to cover that cost.

Except for these types of services scale is in your favour. A bakery has a high cost of goods sold, whereas services like this tend to have high fixed costs but relatively light costs per customer. So scale is very much to your advantage (within reason).

Re: Perplexity got ads

#292

Post by tokioyoyo »

freediver wrote: post #280
tokioyoyo wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No hate to Kagi, but my non-techie friends would laugh at my face if I suggested them to pay for a search engine. Us, people in engineering and web tech operate in a fairly different mindset. Ads piss us off more than the average people, who have accepted it throughout the years.

Send them this https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html many people have started thinking differently after reading it. Trend wise I think it is like organic food - 30 years ago, many of us laughed at paying extra for it ("what's wrong with regular food?") But over time we started caring what we feed our bodies. The same shift is happening with information. It will not happen over night but we're s…

None of the things in the list is a dealbreaker for an average consumer. By the way, I used to pay for Kagi as well, so I get it from my perspective. For other people? Not so much.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#293

Post by scarface_74 »

fweimer wrote: post #287
scarface_74 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These two issues are directly correlated. > I think it's a bit of a cultural defect that we consider a product with 29K (supposedly satisfied) users a failure. > More problematic (for Kagi) is that it's not a free-standing engine (“Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major 20K subscribers can’t support the creation of a quality search engine.

Fair point. Creation might not be such a challenge, but sustaining operations might be. On the other, hand I feel like the amount of content that would be beneficial to me in search results has not grown as fast as computing and networking cost decreased, so maybe it gets easier over time.

That’s just like Microsoft Word

(Years later Joel cofounded Stack Overflow)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

> A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

> Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#294

Post by rrr_oh_man »

wrasee wrote: post #271
Aeolun wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5 is practically nothing. $2 is just not worth the cost of the CC charge. I think it’s really convenient that you can pay for extra searches, as you never have to worry about actually running out. They also need to be able to pay for the servers that run searches.

> $5 is practically nothing That’s quite a privileged thing to say. This forum is read by folk all across the world and I would say that it’s up to each individual to say how much $5 means to them.

Don’t get offended on behalf of other people

Re: Perplexity got ads

#295

Post by Dylan16807 »

jasode wrote: post #229
elorant wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're oversimplifying the narrative. It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. Make ads contextual like they used to be and there's no problem at all, actually they might turn to be interesting. Keep tracking me all over the web and you grow the desire in me to block the living shit out of everything.

>It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. No, people are irritated by just the existence of ads -- with-or-without the tracking. E.g. the "native" advertising of sponsors embedded in Youtube videos or podcasts have no technical way to track the audience and yet people are still annoyed such that they use Sponsorblock to get rid of it. https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock Lots of ads-without-tr…

Most of the people that object to ads that interrupt content are objecting because of the interruption and not because of a fundamental stance against ads.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#296

Post by fweimer »

scarface_74 wrote: post #293
fweimer wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. Creation might not be such a challenge, but sustaining operations might be. On the other, hand I feel like the amount of content that would be beneficial to me in search results has not grown as fast as computing and networking cost decreased, so maybe it gets easier over time.

That’s just like Microsoft Word (Years later Joel cofounded Stack Overflow) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... > A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. > Unfortunately…

I'm not sure that's actually true for the userbase that Kagi is targeting. I think they are mostly interested in curated, original content, mostly text, not derivative slop, often in video form. Locating that stuff for indexing might not get easier, but I suspect the index size required for that group isn't growing as fast as it did in the past.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#297

Post by rrr_oh_man »

carlosjobim wrote: post #238
chrisweekly wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Kagi is doing well, and I'm very happy to pay a few bucks a month to be their customer instead of their product.

Kagi has a very tiny user base and is barely growing. But they're paying their own bills, at least.

…unlike many "growing" "successful" "businesses".

Re: Perplexity got ads

#298

Post by bdangubic »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #295
jasode wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. No, people are irritated by just the existence of ads -- with-or-without the tracking. E.g. the "native" advertising of sponsors embedded in Youtube videos or podcasts have no technical way to track the audience and yet people are still annoyed such that they use Sponsorblock to get rid of it. https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock Lots of ads-without-tr…

Most of the people that object to ads that interrupt content are objecting because of the interruption and not because of a fundamental stance against ads.

ads by their very nature are interrupting. no one open the browser or turns on tv or … sayin “what a fine fucking day to watch some ads”

hence it is the ads - not the “interruption” that most people are against (s/most/all)

Re: Perplexity got ads

#299

Post by scarface_74 »

fweimer wrote: post #296
scarface_74 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just like Microsoft Word (Years later Joel cofounded Stack Overflow) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... > A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. > Unfortunately…

I'm not sure that's actually true for the userbase that Kagi is targeting. I think they are mostly interested in curated, original content, mostly text, not derivative slop, often in video form. Locating that stuff for indexing might not get easier, but I suspect the index size required for that group isn't growing as fast as it did in the past.

Kagi has their own crawler for that type of content.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#300

Post by nathanasmith »

nomilk wrote: post #120

What are the advantages of Perplexity over, say, ChatGPT? I use three LLMs atm (ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok), and have a decent sense for which is better at different tasks. For example, when asked about questionable web scraping ChatGPT and Claude give answers regarding ethics, whereas Grok gives more direct, technical response. What is Perplexity better than other LLMs at?

I like how it cites relevant Youtube videos based on the search and shows thumbnails of the videos in its results. As far as I can tell ChatGPT doesn't do this.
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