31–40 of 220 posts
Google's only advantage over other search engines is its ability to search forums more deeply. The build-in feature of diving into reddit, stack overflow, etc is often useful. After a few test searches, Kagi is adept at this as well.
Other free search alternatives that I've been happy with include: Ecosia, Quant, or even startpage.
I would have been happy to pay if the results were good, but unfortunately I was disappointed by them.
I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). This seems like a shame. I'd love to understand more re: how they come up with those prices in the first place, if any information is available. It would also be interesting to explore how many of the people praising it here and elsewhere are paying customers.
Recently I discovered there's no more "Non-commercial" lens. I'm still a happy Kagi user but I found that lens helpful for avoiding over-SEOd sites filled with affiliate links and was disappointed to see it gone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're paying Kagi for privacy.
Well, that speaks for itself -- my comment was more in regards to how they come up with pricing tiers in the first place.
> It’s impossible to both provide the best search results and try to optimize for the highest amount of ad-clicks. And if you’re a public company with an ad-based business model, you are legally required to optimize for the latter. This is a widely held misconception, but there's no legal requirement to maximize profits. They're required to act in the interests of the corporation and its shareholders, but this is ver…
Companies don't maximize shareholder value, no matter how much they talk about it. Companies are run by and for the managers of said company, and what gets them promoted. Sometimes that aligns with what the shareholders might want, often it does not.
I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). This seems like a shame. I'd love to understand more re: how they come up with those prices in the first place, if any information is available. It would also be interesting to explore how many of the people praising it here and elsewhere are paying customers.
At the risk of sounding like a kagi marketer/shill/peddler/whatever, if it helps at all, it's actually not just search. Sort of. Kagi is slowly rolling out some AI-backed features, and will probably work in other areas too. Two of the flagship AI bits right now are Quick Answer and the Universal Summariser. Quick Answer collates your search results and gives you a summary of them, with inline references included. Thi…
Oh yes, I've experienced a similar problem with ChatGPT. I asked it to look up a certain fact and provide references, and the ones it did provide ended up being quasi URLs which didn't actually work.
Perhaps they were from the old (2018, was it?) dataset and got replaced, not sure. I eventually gave up and used Google Scholar, though :-)
> It also has a beta chat feature
This seems interesting, though I'm secretly (or not so, now it's on here) hoping it's not another lazy ChatGPT integration (i.e. Discord, Snapchat, Bing Chat, etc.); ChatGPT seems to be the new Stories: everyone adds it, they're virtually the same, and they still somehow come in in varying degrees of usefulness (e.g. for some arbitrary reason, Snapchat's one can't output JSON...).
> And then I'm also finding the search experience to just be better than Google.
This is intriguing -- may I ask in what way it's better? Are there any anecdotes you could share?
To be frank, I've heard a lot of "Google is dead" talk on here, though if it's that bad surely people would have switched away? Market inertia and vendor lock-in are solid counteraguments, though.
I personally use DuckDuckGo, and find that acceptable; it does fall down in a few cases, where I have to rephrase my query to get something useful out of it. It's surprisingly good, though...
Maybe Kagi is worth a shot, but I still do find the pricing tiers quite unforgiving. Take the "Starter" plan, for instance: that's 300 searches; for me, that would roughly equate to 10 instances of research on really niche topics; that's not even counting the searches I do for things like Stack Exchange, or general engineering advice / questions.
According to DuckDuckGo[0] (which Kagi quotes in their informational), the "average person" makes one search a day -- that doesn't sound right at all.
[0]: https://spreadprivacy.com/how-many-people-use-duckduckgo/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies don't maximize shareholder value, no matter how much they talk about it. Companies are run by and for the managers of said company, and what gets them promoted. Sometimes that aligns with what the shareholders might want, often it does not.
For c-suite their comp is mostly awarded by the board which is controlled by largest shareholders. So therefore they are highly incentivized to make them happy which is usually achieved by stonk going up and to the right. For middle managers it’s more complex and is usually divorced from the stock price (and often reality too)