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Perplexity got ads

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Re: Perplexity got ads

#301

Post by scarface_74 »

gcanyon wrote: post #257
scarface_74 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep typo - 20K - fixing. I always thought Kagi was still the old Mac focused company that enabled independent software makers to collect payments from customers. I didn’t realize that the old company had been out of business for years until I heard the founder interview on the Talk Show podcast https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416

I knew Key back in the day, and I feel a twinge for him every time kagi comes up on HN.

The full story of what happened to the original kagi

https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...

And relevant to this submission. I couldn’t find any information on Google, I used the paid version of ChatGPT that has had web search for almost two years

Re: Perplexity got ads

#302

Post by qwertox »

Alifatisk wrote: post #253
schmorptron wrote: post #233

I'm conflicted on this. I use perplexity at the moment because they gave out a year of pro subscriptions, and it's geuninely pretty useful since it is so heavily based on web results. The one gpt wrapper product that I've liked so far. With the actual model producers now also adding web search, the question is how long they will survive and how much value they can realistically add. The third-party models are also ne…

When did they give out a year of pro subscription?

To iPhone users under certain conditions. For example, in Germany, last summer, as a customer of the Deutsche Telekom, if you had an iPhone and were using a certain marketing app from DT, they'd give you an invite code for 1 year of pro. One could trade or sell them.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#304

Post by wintermutestwin »

omnicognate wrote: post #189
pembrook wrote: post #123

Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet. I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over an…

I don't get your point. I pay for services wherever I can, including search and AI, and see few adverts online despite not using a blocker. The main source of ads I see is in news articles when following links from places like HN, which is because the news industry hasn't developed the microtransactions mechanism it would need to allow readers to pay while retaining the experience of being able to follow links freely…

I’d pay for youtube in a heartbeat IF they weren’t double dipping and stealing my data (which is now much more valuable to them because they can associate my data with PII).

Re: Perplexity got ads

#305

Post by wkat4242 »

pembrook wrote: post #123

Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet. I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over an…

The phone book in my country didn't have ads (well, except for descriptions of the phone company's services). It was just paid by the subscriptions. There was only one state owned phone company.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#306

Post by wkat4242 »

ryukoposting wrote: post #250
pembrook wrote: post #123

Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet. I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over an…

Do consumers refuse to pay for search, or has nobody asked them if they'd want to? Kagi is well-known on HN, but I guarantee my parents have never heard of it. I told my wife about it the other day, and she had never heard of it either. She thought it was a cool idea. $10/month is just too much. Sure, YellowPages had lots of ads. Hell, PCMag was ~35% ads. The difference was that their ads were clearly labeled and phy…

I won't pay for search either. I just filter the ads out like I do with every website. I also have SearXNG in between. I'm kinda hoping it'll get domain ranking like Kagi though. That would make it perfect (as well as integrating with my home AI which already works to some extent)

I don't really care about the sustainability of business models. And really, Google is not about search. It's an advertising company.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#307

Post by wkat4242 »

Aeolun wrote: post #222
wrasee wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing. But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter. I can't he…

$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 nothing for Americans. Here in Spain with much lower purchasing power it's considerable and there's VAT added too.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#308

Post by anothername12 »

chrisweekly wrote: post #133
pembrook wrote: post #123

Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet. I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over an…

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.

I would like to use Kagi if it had some kind of anonymous searching

Re: Perplexity got ads

#309

Post by ndriscoll »

pembrook wrote: post #251
seanhunter wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. You know what else does this but in a non-creepy, non-tracking way that doesn't try to artificially create needs/wants in people? Accurate search results. If I want something I can search for it and find it. SEO and advertising and sponsored results are the way companies try to skew search results (usually by making them less accurate and useful f…

The problem is the best way to weight the accuracy of results (as you say, SEO exists) is with skin in the game. A bidding-based advertising system ultimately results in the most valuable solution winning, since the ad spend will be marginally bid up as close to the value the consumer is willing to pay for the product/service minus producer input costs. The most successful companies ultimately have the most to spend…

An auction system for ads results in the most profitable solution winning, not the most valuable. Marginally bidding toward the largest difference between consumer price and input cost is a bad thing; that's the least efficient solution, and means you are maximally overpaying for value received. An ideal search would find products with the smallest difference between price and input cost, i.e. items near the Pareto frontier.

For a more distilled scenario, if you manually accepted open stock trade offers, and your broker took kickbacks to always show you the worst bids/asks that they think you might fall for and make it difficult to find the best quotes, that would obviously be bad. In fact not providing best execution is illegal. The ad economy runs on exactly this conflict of interest. Money flowing through ads represents inflated transaction costs.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#310

Post by carlosjobim »

wrasee wrote: post #278
i_am_proteus wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "right way"[0] to use Kagi is the unlimited search tier ($10/mo) and then aggressively rank domains in searches. Within a few weeks, the search quality improves tremendously, because I have filtered out the domains responsible for low-quality results, and up-ranked the domains I find to be most useful. [0]My opinion. Probably true.

I suppose my argument was essentially that $5/month felt on the high side, so I love that the answer is actually to pay $10/month. This is the way. In all seriousness, I am sure you are right and don’t deny the promise on offer. I’d also be willing to pay for search much more so than many other online services of more questionable value. But I just don’t think they’re going to get cut-through at $5, not least $10, in…

You've already spent more than $10 worth of your time arguing why you want a premium search engine for free. (Because let's face it, if it was $5 or $1, you'd still argue that it's too expensive).

Things cost money. Some people can't afford a certain product. Some people don't want a certain product. But you don't see people in the grocery store arguing all day why they don't want to purchase a certain product on the shelf.

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