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Awesome, I've been using kagi for a couple months now, and it's been awesome! I love thee ability to open internet archive quickly or bump the ranking of certai

Awesome, I've been using kagi for a couple months now, and it's been awesome! I love thee ability to open internet archive quickly or bump the ranking of certain sites. I am still a little confused about the pricing situation though. As I understand you guys plan to offer "free with limited usage" and a paid 10$/month unlimited use plan. But I can't seem to find any information on what the "limits" are? I do not have any insights on how much running a search engine costs, but 10$ a month seems quite high for most users. I really like the flat pricing model though. Another issue I feel like that largely goes unnoticed is, privacy in incognito mode, if I use kagi in incognito, all my searches are associated with my "account", even worse for some people their payment information!, which is something I'm just not comfortable with. EDIT: So I thought about it a little, and I'd say 10$ a month is probably worth it (to me)! Just for the features and search result quality. Considering how much of a value a search engine has in my life. I was initially skeptical if it would cost them THAT much. But I see it from a different perspective now. I would still not use Kagi for private searches though, and that's just me. Privacy is something I would rather trust someone without my full name with, that just my opinion though.

zamadatix 4y ago
Free plan is limited to 50 searches per month and 80 searches costs them about $1. https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing You can also see your actual usage cost at https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption As for the incognito side I'm not convinced it's any less connected than switching to Incognito and searching with your normal search provider. Yeah, the sign in info is explicitly sent but it's not like Google et al don't know it's you just because you didn't send the sign in info. If you're worried about that threat vector (your search engine tracking you when they say they won't) I'd use a different than your normal search engine through something like TOR.
- Anunayj 4y ago
  gosh 1$/80 searches is somewhat expensive... are these pure infrastructure costs or does this include development costs which I hope would scale down as the search engine grows?
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    They use a lot of 3rd party APIs rather than try to beat everyone at quality and the only monetization is via direct payment so those 3rd party API costs get baked in. For an idea how many things a search might call https://kagi.com/faq#:~:text=Where%20are%20your%20results%20coming%20from%3F https://kagi.com/faq#:~:text=Where%20are%20your%20results%20... > Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. ... And of course, we answer quick queries like “How far is the sun from the earth?” or “10kg in lbs” with our instant-answer systems that use dozens of sources and APIs, all connected to you quickly yet transparently. Cost of their infrastructure to tie it together and development/maintenance may go down with scale but it's not really expected to get significantly cheaper to provide the search results without either lowering quality or using alternative monetization, both of which Kagi is against. I'm not associated with Kagi I just happened to ask very similar questions a few days ago in their Discord.
richardsocher 4y ago
Yea. This is why we made our private search completely open on you.com and track absolutely nothing in that mode, not even bugs/warnings/etc.
- Croftengea 4y ago
  Are the search results outsourced?

zamadatix 4y ago

Free plan is limited to 50 searches per month and 80 searches costs them about $1. https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing You can also see your actual usage cost at https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption As for the incognito side I'm not convinced it's any less connected than switching to Incognito and searching with your normal search provider. Yeah, the sign in info is explicitly sent but it's not like Google et al don't know it's you just because you didn't send the sign in info. If you're worried about that threat vector (your search engine tracking you when they say they won't) I'd use a different than your normal search engine through something like TOR.

Anunayj 4y ago
gosh 1$/80 searches is somewhat expensive... are these pure infrastructure costs or does this include development costs which I hope would scale down as the search engine grows?
- zamadatix 4y ago
  They use a lot of 3rd party APIs rather than try to beat everyone at quality and the only monetization is via direct payment so those 3rd party API costs get baked in. For an idea how many things a search might call https://kagi.com/faq#:~:text=Where%20are%20your%20results%20coming%20from%3F https://kagi.com/faq#:~:text=Where%20are%20your%20results%20... > Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. ... And of course, we answer quick queries like “How far is the sun from the earth?” or “10kg in lbs” with our instant-answer systems that use dozens of sources and APIs, all connected to you quickly yet transparently. Cost of their infrastructure to tie it together and development/maintenance may go down with scale but it's not really expected to get significantly cheaper to provide the search results without either lowering quality or using alternative monetization, both of which Kagi is against. I'm not associated with Kagi I just happened to ask very similar questions a few days ago in their Discord.

richardsocher 4y ago

Yea. This is why we made our private search completely open on you.com and track absolutely nothing in that mode, not even bugs/warnings/etc.

Croftengea 4y ago
Are the search results outsourced?