Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Perplexity got ads

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 369 posts

Re: Perplexity got ads

#351

Post by heraldgeezer »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #316
heraldgeezer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very recently free, and I find less sources than you.com or perplexity in my experience.

Quality over quantity perhaps? Can't see why you'd want _more_ than about 3-5 sources returned each time. Anything more is information overload and defeats the purpose of being able to vet the claims in a timely manner.

Not if I am looking for something specific like Reddit threads.

Anyway. I want more and you.com and perplexity does that so I will use them over chatgtp.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#352

Post by nottorp »

LunaSea wrote: post #350
nottorp wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. Let's try again. Very few services that ask for "the price of a Starbucks coffee" subscription are actually worth that much to consumers. Search or not search. As long as the service providers don't understand that, they'll be limited in audience to high income techies and won't be able to grow any further.

Subscription prices are also determined by overal company costs. And until users understand that, they will continue being tracked and shown advertisement.

> are also determined by overal company costs

In the average tech case (maybe not Kagi but definitely a lot of others) by managers fighting for dominance by increasing their departments head count.

And generally speaking, aren't you supposed to charge what the market will bear? What has that to do with costs?

Re: Perplexity got ads

#354

Post by wkat4242 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #346
wkat4242 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No probably not for me. I really don't use search an awful lot. It's not that important to me for my internet use. What I do a lot is read sites like HN here and find things I like and then dig down and keep notes. My notes are higher in my priority and I do for example pay the $4 monthly for Obsidian notes (though I'm considering to set up my own sync server, not really to save costs but to have more understanding a…

Now I understand. You don't want the product and you're not interested in that kind of product. Then of course any price asked is too expensive for your taste. I don't like breakfast cereal. That doesn't mean that they're too expensive, it just means I'm not the customer. But there are people who like the product and to them the price asked is cheap. When I go to the super market I walk past thousands of products whi…

Hmm if it was $20 per year I'd do it. Just saying. I'm not interested in the product for the price. It's just not $60 per year important to me.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#355

Post by rajup »

pyth0 wrote: post #267
rajup wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally pay YouTube to avoid ads, watching the mental gymnastics folks on here do to complain about YouTube Premium is my favorite pastime.

I pay for YouTube premium. But it simply would not exist to the same scale or utility if that was the only model that was funding it. Incredible to see the mental gymnastics needed to avoid that fact.

> But it simply would not exist to the same scale or utility if that was the only model that was funding it.

Citation needed. Are you saying that if there were a billion YT premium subscribers, YT would still need ads for its scale? I doubt it.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#356

Post by rajup »

asdf147 wrote: post #168
rajup wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally pay YouTube to avoid ads, watching the mental gymnastics folks on here do to complain about YouTube Premium is my favorite pastime.

Why would you pay for something that treats you as a product? I would gladly pay for youtube if there was: no paid sponsorships, no ads, no algorythm manipulations, no collection of behavioral information, no clickbaits, no shitty content promoted and so on and so. Basically a service where the side paying is a consumer, not a product. Paying for service that is already extracting value from you in ways that are not…

> no paid sponsorships, no ads, no algorythm manipulations, no collection of behavioral information, no clickbaits, no shitty content promoted

There are plenty of channels that do none of these. As for "algorythm manipulations", YT recommends more of what you like or subscribed to. Not sure what you expect a content aggregator and provider to do. Just have a search bar? I've come across so many interesting channels thanks to the "algorythm manipulations".

Re: Perplexity got ads

#357

Post by hakfoo »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #230
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…

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'd wonder if they'd be better off hiding the 300-search option from the pricing page, in that it immediately sends people to thinking about "can I deal with search as a metered resource?" Arguably it derails the conversation about paid search entirely.

Another idea might be if they partnered with some other service provider so they were a line item on something people are already comfortable paying for. I could imagine a cross-promo where you paid a few bucks extra a month when subscribing to like Fastmail or Proton to get Kagi with it. There's likely a fair cross appeal there.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#358

Post by hakfoo »

pembrook wrote: post #231
Aeolun wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think ads fundamentally help people.

Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however. Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.

Ads can be a matter of quality and relevance, just like search. I'm happy to read ads relevant to my interests in an appropriate context.

Unfortunately, this is a clear clash of "line goes up" versus "corporate integrity".

In the print media days, there was somewhat of a code of conduct-- publishers generally didn't want to run outright fraudulent or misleading ads because it damaged the image of the publication itself.

I'm not sure that Google has proven itself capable of rising to the same standards.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#359

Post by wkat4242 »

eesmith wrote: post #342
wkat4242 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here's an example of a US phone book from the 1980s, https://archive.org/details/1981-12-mc-lean-county-phone-boo... . It has two sections, typically called 'white pages' and 'yellow pages' because the paper for the latter was tinted yellow. The white pages had subscriber phone numbers, listed alphabetically, with no advertising except that one could pay extra to have the entry in bold, to grab attention. The yellow…

Ah yeah for us they were always different, and by different publishers too.

The funny thing was that the yellow pages used to be printed on yellow paper but they switched to white with a lot of yellow printing ink because some advertisers wanted to use white in their ads :)

The yellow pages used to be called "the golden guide" here.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#360

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

chgs wrote: post #322
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still unsure why the BBC doesn't make it possible to pay for a "license" outside the UK. At least, it didn't back in 2012.

Rights issues. Have international viewers of eastenders or Blue Peter and you have to pay the cast more, and pay more to license the music used in the background, etc.

But you know what is being watched when streamed (much more accurately than via broadcast) and you have the revenue to pay those costs.
Post reply on HN