The whole explanation of the recent “we want to stay afloat” was weird, unexpected (price doubling with my usage, to 20$/mo) and felt untrue (ordinary user doing 30 searches per day?). I felt like it was written by Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler - made sense but also very abstract and shifting responsibility to the customer.
In the end I ran stats how many of Kagi results were on spot (i.e. weren’t repeated in other search engines). It was around half, probably ones that I “didn’t pay for”.
I was ready to move back to DDG but an acquaintance recommended Brave search to me (which has its own index). I was reluctant to use it due controversial opinions about them. Not only I found it more pleasant to use, but also the results are (in my opinion) slightly better than Kagis.
I know it may sound like a lot (and definitely is a lot for some folks), but when I think about it as literally being the window to a huge amount of knowledge I take in, the fact that it's way less than Adobe products, and similar to things like GitHub, Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc. feels pretty reasonable.
> ANSWER
> I am an AI language model powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo. My primary purpose is to understand and generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I can perform various tasks, such as answering questions, providing explanations, and even writing code snippets.
Looks like it's not on v4 yet.
It's a pretty big problem in internet tech, actually. Ad revenue has poisoned the well, creating a situation where it's really, really hard to create a compelling product that isn't based on advertising, because you end up having to compete with "free" alternatives. Thus from a consumer's perspective the cost of the product needs to be in the added functionality over the alternatives, since they see your base functionality's perceived value as $0.
It's gotten to a point where I don't think it's fixable at a grassroots level.
Brave Search also allows you to customize your search results with "Goggles". These are plain-text files that you can host on Github or Gitlab and use to boost or remove specific sites from your search results. For example, you could create a Goggle that removes "quora.com" from your results while giving priority to StackExchange sites and Reddit. You could also create another Goggle that shows results only from a predefined set of cooking sites.
Finally, multilingual users may find it helpful to create different search shortcuts with the `country=` parameter appended to them. For instance, if you add `&country=fr` to a search URL, you'll get French results.
I suspect there's a big difference between an ordinary user and an ordinary Kagi user.
I guess I don't search nearly as much as I thought I did. Still worth the $10/mo to me.
It's like anti-marketing. Target the paying customers most likely to talk a lot about your product – power users with heavy search workloads – and do stuff that makes them unhappy. And that's you, I guess: I'm reading your comment because you're the sort of person who *would* write HN comments reviewing their new search engine. And now I'm unhappy with it too, by contagion.
(30 searches/day is for illiterate gibbons)
They also made it very clear on that early-days pricing that it was essentially arbitrary as they just had no idea of how the economics of their business would develop, and that they'd need to revisit it. So it really seems unfair to use that as an anchor.
They're also being extremely open about everything. Anyone can join their Discord, and there is a channel there about pricing that had been going for months, prior to the change, where people could contribute to discussions and meaningfully get their grievances heard if they had any.
- Stay at Professional - $10 + $49.5 query cost = $59.5 total (495% price increase)
- Use grandfathered - $10 + $37.5 query cost = $47.5 total (375% price increase)
- Use Ultimate plan - $25 + $0 query cost = $25 total (150% price increase)
With absolutely 0 guarantee ultimate plan will be ultimate. Would I pay for search engine 25$? Of course. Does Kagi delivers 25$ of search quality - no. As I mentioned I did metrics. 50% of the queries had to be moved to other search engines, so Kagi simply didn't deliver.
I didn't find that weird at all: They were overly optimistic, both on how many people they'd be able to recruit for a paid service, and on the economics of how many searches these people do.
I'd be willing to bet that those skew heavily in the direction of power users and knowledge workers using search professionally, so they probably do a lot of searches. I was really surprised when I read my own numbers. In the survey they asked me to fill out, I wrote that I'd expect I'd be doing maybe five searches a day. Turns out the number is actually in the range of 30-70 most days.
One data point that seems to support that is that Kagi previously didn't take any outside investment, with the whole thing being bankrolled by the founder who had had a prior successful exit. But at the same time when they announced the pricing, they also announced they'd be willing to take on board small investments from enthusiast users. So it's looking like they really are starting to get worried about money.
I also indicated in the survey, that, for a really good search engine, the amount of money I'd be willing to pay would be a multiple of what their actual pricing is now. A good search engine is an investment that could pay phenomenal dividends for me, allowing me to make better decisions for my business by having better information as input. It allows me to waste less time, when searching for solutions to technical problems. It allows me to connect to the right people. So, I don't want to think of search as a commodity, like electricity. I think that, as a knowledge worker, I'm really only ever as good as the search engine I'm using, and I just want to hand somebody a pile of money to make me the Ferrari of search engines so I can have a competitive advantage against all those people still riding the bus. (The bus is full of billboards and paid for by people who never want the bus to reach its destination, so they can keep the passengers' eyeballs focused on the advertising).
It sounds a bit like the use case of ChatGPT/BingAI. Depending on your specific use case it might be the wrong fit - especially if you want to look up PI - however it is excellent as a rubberduck/idea provider.
You can also directly ask for the sources btw. In the end LLMs with access to the internet can be an abstraction to search engines. If it is good can only be assessed once you actually tried as it heavily depends on your use case and your approach.
LLMs are just a tool like everything else.
I want completeness (i.e. if source material is being skipped, I want to be the one to make the decision that it can safely be skipped), and I want consistency (i.e. I want to be able to double-check that the same set of sources wouldn't also support drawing conclusions that contradict those drawn by the AI).
In other words: I'd still want to use search as a product, and I'd still want someone to solve the search problem for me, even if question answering were a solved problem.
1. Force you to signup to see the content (pinterest, I'm looking at you).
2. Copy-n-paste SO threads onto a page that is 90% ads.
I expect that ChatGPT written content for sites that are 90% ads will soon make it difficult to determine the useful sites.
HN might possibly be the wealthiest collection of people on the internet. And if we’re complaining about $10-20/month here, there’s certainly no hope for the mass market.
if you know what an SRE III is, and where those exist, chances are you're in the global 1%, and top 25% of US earners.
and yah i get not everyone on HN is STEM, and not all STEM is super-lucrative, but the parent poster is directionally correct.
I'm happy to pay the current $120 I do for Kagi, but that's my upper limit.
I do have some web tools I pay $250 a year for, and they are significantly more complicated than kagi.
With Kagi's new pricing, I will be paying >$300 a year. That is too much. They aren't THAT much better. That is literally more than my beefy dedicated gaming server in a datacenter!
Hell, I probably built my entire career off internet searches.
In theory, HN people should have the most to gain from a better search engine, and be the most likely to pay for one. Yet, to your point, the alternatives are free and good enough.
The problem is, what the mob moralistically claims they want on HN (when upvotes/downvotes are a concern), vs. what those same people actually do in the real world on an individual level, are two separate things.
The lesson is, things evolved the way they have on the internet for a reason. It's not some "evil" companies shoving these ad-supported business models down our throats. We have all voted with our eyeballs and our (lack of) dollars, and will continue to do so. We get exactly the products we deserve.
The early resistance towards a paid model is to be expected. But if we can learn from the example of YouTube Premium (25M+ subscribers for a product available for free), there are millions of people ready to pay for search today, we just haven't reached them.
No reason both can't be true. evil companies can shovel ad-supported business models down our throats while the few paid options which have emerged haven't offered users enough value to justify the fees, being forced to be logged into an account, or having to worry about how many searches you make in a day.
That's a lot compared to my modest 20 searches a day on average. So I'd guess you're an outlier, since I do sit within their "30 searches a day" claim. I use Kagi on desktop while working, and on mobile outside of work. I've never hit my 1k searches/mo limit, but was honestly worried I would (and set hard limits to not exceed my limits). I guess I don't search as much as I thought I did. I really like Kagi and think it's well worth the $10/mo.
(I'd really like to hear how you're hitting that search volume, if you're open to share? I can't imagine hitting a search engine that many times a day, so I'm quite curious.)
An leisure example - I was checking various fidget toys. My ~10 minutes "research" took 15 queries like: "spring toy", "fidget stick", "worry beads", "kendama", "baoding balls" etc. (on topic: infinity cube is quite cool)
Another one would be preparing instrument study sheet with around 20 music instrument where I searched both for images & audio (~50 searches) - e.g. "acoustic guitar sound sample" & "acoustic guitar".
Those are simple, professionally I sometimes go quite wide to find hook point and then dig from there. 20-40 queries spread across various search engines.
I am aware that I'm outlier, yet thinking about usage in this case is a mistake for me.
Every time I'd tried DuckDuckGo over the years I found myself having to switch back to Google because I was never sure that there weren't better results going missing. Whereas Kagi often ends up with better rankings than Google—eg. Goodreads, which is great for real reviews, gets placed above all the random booksellers websites.
I'm very much interested in a high-quality search engine, and certainly willing to pay for it, but unless the above condition is satisfied, it's a non-starter for me.
The short answer to your question is: yes, you can use it without linking any real-world identifiers to your search queries. That is explicitly stated in the linked privacy policy. With that said, I guess it's possible that they are violating their own privacy policy. That seems like a bad idea from a legal perspective, and I don't have any reason to suspect they're lying, so I'm not too worried about it.
So the correct answer seems to be "we absolutely could link your searches to your identity, but we promise that we won't; however, you cannot verify that we are keeping that promise".
Which I'm afraid is not good enough. To be clear, I'm not saying that they are lying, and indeed I have no reason to suspect they are. But I'm looking for technological privacy, not contractual privacy.
I wonder if they'd even accept crypto, but their FAQ has nothing on their accepted payment and so it seems it needs an account even to just see that.
Don't rely on company promises if you can avoid it.
Anyway, GP's question was simply:
"Can I use Kagi without linking any real-world identifiers (including credit card details) to my search queries in any way?"
And the correct answer is no.
For the record, I'm signed up for Kagi with a disposable email, though I didn't bother to anonymize my payment.
You mean being way too expensive? I appreciate them wanting to stay afloat but they need to bring the cost per search down drastically. They are doing something wrong behind the scenes with regards to spend or optimization.
I disagree. You have to remember how disadvantaged the online ad market actually is. Many of those ad networks also are simply legitimizing fraud on the advertisers, but because the networks aren't big enough at competitors, and all existing implementations suffer the same issues you really don't get what you pay for as Uber found out years ago.
https://veracitytrustnetwork.com/blog/digital-marketing/uber...
For what search is worth to me, that seems reasonable. (Or I guess more to the point, how much I value a relationship where I’m the customer, rather than companies expressly interested in using psychological manipulation to influence my behavior…)
That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.
I agree, we will get there.
1.5 cents per search doesn't sound expensive, although if you do 100 searches per day that's $45 per month...
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...
Hopefully they can get volume discounts and reduce the prices.
Kagi will remain at ~$10 (and yes we will be replacing Bing).
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update
Unlike the other comments down-thread, this number feels right. I don't like it, and my gut doesn't want to accept this. If you're not harvesting user data and/or selling ads, and the monthly subscriptions are the only source of revenue then $14.50/month sounds right.
I'm still riding this fun'sies train so lets just kick some numbers around. I suspect their FAQ might be a little out of date, but lets go with it. https://kagi.com/faq says that, "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches". 1000 searches / 80 = $12.50, so they make $2 per month from me. I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx. If it doesn't, then that $2 per month gets a bit more sad. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months states that, "Kagi search is currently serving ~2,600 paid customers." from September 1st last year. Let's say they've grown 10x since then and we're at 26,000 paying customers and they're all me. $52,000 in profit on $377,000 per month in revenue. So they're clearing $624,000 a year on this totally hypothetical scenario.
Is https://moneyconnexion.com/per-second-earnings-of-top-compan... accurate? Who knows. If it is accurate, it takes Google just shy of 15 minutes to make that same $624,000.
Mostly this is just me thinking out loud. Like I said, I'm trying to wrap my head around this pricing.
> so they make $2 per month from me
That would be roughly right.
> I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx
It does cover only the search and infrastructure cost, not salaries and other operations.
According to some calculations, Google is making $5.60 on those same 80 searches from ads (roughly 7 cents per search), so $1 cost from Kagi is a bargain.
I still think it’s too expensive though and I wish prices would come down.
Anything in the world that's used by large amount of users are guaranteed to piss off some portion of them, because they can only focus on limited amount of features. Google had been like that. Firefox had been like that. When 70% of Firefox users are non-techies, Firefox has to start focus on the privacy niche to survive. Then the rest 30% vocal techies all start to protest and saying Mozilla has lost its direction and hope to regain market share.
When Kagi starts to gain popularity, I guarantee you they will start to polarize on their features, some of which you won't like, regardless of their business model, because the (majority) users they are catering to are also paid users, same as you. Only when they have only small amount of users could all of such be homogeneous enough so that every single feature they dish out is something you like.
The key difference that the previous poster outlined and you're missing is that with Kagi, you're the customer, while with DDG, you're the product. Kagi is thus incentivized to improve their offering to better fit your needs as a user, while DDG is incentivized to better serve their customers the advertisers.
20 seconds before a YT vid -- yeah maybe. Every 2 minutes during the vid? Not so happy.
ditto for a paid search. something on the side of the page, or something that's in the middle of results but still clearly an ad... maybe.
Also, saying 'no, this is why you think what you do' is not cool.
Non-techies don't give a damn about privacy.
Non-techies use Chrome over Firefox.
Non-techies use Windows and MacOS over Linux.
Non-techies use smartphones over phones.
Non-techies use smart TVs over TVs.
Non-techies use social media and have accounts using their real names.
I reiterate: Non-techies don't give a damn about privacy.
It's kinda like the cruelty-free labels on shampoo.
I’m _this_ close to going back to DDG with the occasional Google drilldown.
eg "You're getting close to your 1000 search limit at your current pricing (800/1000)".
I'm trying to think of better wording, but having a hard time of it. ;)
From a higher POV, I like GPT-4's smaller time windows way better (x queries within 4 hour window). I hate to be "locked out" of search for a whole week. A few hours wouldn't feel that bad.
What would be the point when your search history would just be a liability? That is the whole point of the paid search business model.
An expected retort might be "But consumer IP addresses are subject to change." True, but sometimes a "static" IP is non-negotiable. For example, in the past if one subscribed to ICANN's zone file access program, which is public information open to access by anyone, not only university libraries or corporations, a static IP address had to be provided. Of course one could use a consumer IP address because those can change infrequently, sometimes on a timescale of years. If it ever changed then one had to execute a new agreement. Perhaps the requirement for a static IP has been dropped but I honestly doubt it.
Rate-limiting/access control by IP address is common and straightforward.
However so-called "tech" companies have shown they cannot be trusted when collecting information from users. For example, Twitter and Facebook each claimed they were requesting phone numbers from users for "security" reasons but it turned out they were using them for commercial purposes.
They made the critical mistake of not keeping it simple. If they wanted profits, why make it hard for people to pay them? If they wanted market share, why not have a free tier so people can try before they buy. They're only staying afloat in tech-circle hype imo.
How would you keep it simple while running a paid search service with non-trivial search cost?
If many users all send their search queries through a proxy that forwwards them to, say, Google, then one can argue these queries are "anonymised" to some extent.
This has been tried. But AFAIK, no one has ever tried to charge money for it.
In 2003, there was Scroogle which lasted for almost 10 years and was reputedly processing hundreds of thousands of searches per day.
Scroogle used to have its own Wikipedia page before it was deleted then merged into the "Criticisms_of_Google" Wikipedia page.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/privacy-what-should-google...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AScroogle
In 2010, there was GoogleSharing, a Firefox plugin. It did not last very long and unlike Scroogle I cannot recall any explanation was ever given why it was shut down.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/10/04/a-bett...
Criticisms of Scroogle or GoogleSharing might include having to trust the people operating the proxy servers.
For example, if operator gets a strongly-worded letter on law firm letterhead then will he share a user's search results. What if he receives a directive from some legal authority demanding that a user's queries be monitored and/or preserved. Will he notify the user. Will he fight such requests. How good are his lawyers. Does he even have any that are prepared to handle these matters.
All these issues apply to Kagi as well.
Being a paid service might actually improve the trust problems, assuming there is a contract with the user. The last time I looked for Kagi's terms, it was not reassuring. What does Kagi promise to do or refrain from doing. If Kagi agrees to zero liability for almost anything, then to me that's a red flag. Why would anyone trust him. At the very least, users should be able to sue for up to the amount of the fees they have paid if Kagi breaches the agreement.
NB. I am not for or against Kagi. I like the proxy server idea and wish there were more options to use proxies. However I do not agree that merely paying for web search solves all the problems. I wrote scripts for own use that search multiple indexes, filter out garbage and combine results into a simple, minimalist SERP with unprefixed URLs suitable for a text-only browser. For me, that addresses the paid placement ads and ranking algorithm problems. As for the privacy problems, I cannot find anything that promises Kagi will not collect data about users. The same problem of trust as in 2003 through 2012 exists today. Arguably things have gotten worse. As we've seen from so-called "tech" companies offering "pay to stop the ads" subscriptions, paying fees does not stop the data collection. It does not solve the privacy problems unless the search engine operator is actually bound by an agreement or laws that prohibit it from collecting data or resticting its use. And even with that, how does one ensure compliance.
This isn’t 2008 mobile contracts, I don’t want usage caps for basic functionality.
That is exactly what you can expect from Kagi. Here is user submitted feedback marked as 'Done'.
Yeah it's paid, but I am getting the best results and experience. Not everyone needs great search, but I do and I'm willing to pay for it.
I just recently got my brother to sign up, he's also gotten so tired of Google and DDG. Already a few days later he's really digging Kagi.
I think a lot of the pricing sticker shock is just because we've been price anchored to $0/month for the last twenty years. The $15/month for Kagi is what most people pay for a single coffee and sandwich, which saves them like ~5 minutes making by hand. Kagi probably saves me at least an hour a month, so from an ROI it's at least 12x better than a coffee and sandwich at the shop.
Kagi gives you so much power over your search experience. I don't even have to use site:Reddit.com anymore to find non-SEO-optimized content. It's like using Google in the early 2000s!
I moved to Kagi for this feature. I think that if a search engine does not offer this kind of feature, it does not have the user experience as a priority.
This was after getting tired of using "!g" in all my DDG searches because the results were so bad (and with so many "junk" sites).
It's a paid search service, and I'm honestly really happy with that distinction and what it entails. Being paid means that they can deliver on and support features that users can use to get the best results for them, without worrying how those features may affect potential advertisers and their opinions of the service.
For example, you can block a whole site from your search results - and it's an easy-to-find button directly in the search results, not hidden deep within some settings or done via a manually-installed extension. They already deprioritize a whole lot of "junk" sites -- for example I very rarely see the kinds of technical results that are just reposts of Stack Overflow but laden down with their own ads, and if I do see them I can nuke the site from orbit, never to be seen again.
They are working out the kinks with the pricing scheme currently, but I've always found the plans fair and very transparent. If you are interested in good search and potentially giving the industry a bit of a hint that search is important enough to pay for, and all this advertiser-prioritized bullshit is unacceptable, I can wholeheartedly endorse them.