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It really bothers me that Kagi sample search is a canned response. If you would carefully look at "Best headphones" example, the reddit result card shows '2 da

It really bothers me that Kagi sample search is a canned response. If you would carefully look at "Best headphones" example, the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old. Similarly the Sennheiser headphones results card shows $379 on Amazon, when its actually $400 today. No offenses to how well it works, but if I had to be sold to get a subscription, I would rather like to see a real-time example. A canned example FWIW could be a completely scripted search result.

deleted 4y ago
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freediver 4y ago
Kagi founder here. I am of the opinion that things are not and do not have to be perfect. We do not want to market Kagi as a perfect product, without flaws. What you see is what you get. We have a lot of work to do. Google, a trillion dollar company with nearly 200K most talented employees, still gets many things wrong in their results. We are a ten people bootstrapped team, and the web is a vast problem, just to align expectations. I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall, I believe we also have superior results to Google, please try it for a few days and share your thoughts. Kagi is in some ways broken and flawed and it is what makes it feel more humane to use. If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our current resources.
- CobaltFire 4y ago
  I was a beta user and paid for a while, but my search results were too intermixed with my wife's and my child's. It's absolutely worth it to me, but paying $30 a month for 3 users was a little too much for me to stomach. To be clear, I pay $20/mo for ProtonMail Visionary so I'm not averse to paying! I just can't see the value at $30/mo when the other family members don't use it nearly as much as I do. Maybe this is an untenable problem due to your costs and you need those low use paying users. I'm not sure. To clarify: by intermixed I mean our tuning was different so it became somewhat interesting, as we all wanted to tune the settings differently. It's not a huge thing, but between that and feeling bad for having three people using one sub...
  - freediver 4y ago
    Good news, reduced price family plans are coming soon (we are aiming January). You'll get three users for $10/mo, four for $12/mo as a base membership. A lot of discussion about it going on right now in our discord server.
    - CobaltFire 4y ago
      I'll be signing up the day those are available!
- srvmshr 4y ago
  Most of your arguments regarding resources are in general valid points, but when you are showcasing 3 results as selling points how hard is it to keep them updated. If you're not personally bothered by this showcase -- which is your product advertisment -- you perhaps should be. Going against a trillion dollar company needs a very convincing pitch IMO to average user. > We are a ten people bootstrapped team. We are a 2-engineer startup. We give business analytics/market trends on mined webdata (through our B2B dashboards) with a 48 hour live data guarantee. Every time, user queries crunch through about 9 million data points for every day over last 36 months - in real time. Sorry, but it isn't a very good reason to have stale results.
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    You're demanding an awful lot out of a $10/mo product here. And I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's still an as-good-or-better search engine than Google with no ads and a focus on privacy. The fact that it lists ballpark prices rather than exact prices is really not that important in the grand scheme of things.
    - srvmshr 4y ago
      I never once mentioned the price point. My critique was about the accuracy of the results, and staleness of their showcase. If I would be a paying customer - be it $1 or $10/mo - I would expect it to be better than something I get for free. I already mentioned in another comment that Google shouldn't be a baseline to improve on, when so many competing innovative search companies such as DDG, Ecosia, You.com exist. Even DDG, Ecosia aren't visually that spammy either. For Kagi to win, the product strategy should win over by a visible margin. You like it. To each his own.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    They're not pitching to the average user. Average users won't pay for search. Also kind of a dick move to compare to your startup to Kagi to justify it sucking. Analytics is very different to search. Your products sound completely different.
- sroussey 4y ago
  There are startups that index only products and prices, so you could use their API. Maybe it’s a cost issue though.
cheeze 4y ago
It doesn't seem like it works all that well either... Their example is the headphone search. That Reddit post is a few months old, and has _one_ comment on it. The thread asks specifically about closed-back headphones under $150. Something like this would be much better as a result: https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/nq0pt/headphone_recommendations_by_price_range_updated/ https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/nq0pt/headphone...
- freediver 4y ago
  For sure it can be improved, but at least it points you in the right direction (/r/HeadphoneAdvice) Remember we are comparing this to Google where the entire first page for this query is either ads or results full of ads and affiliate links.
  - srvmshr 4y ago
    No offense again to the product. Please take this as positive criticism Please don't compare yourself to Google. Most people on HN are well aware that Google search has become a terrible baseline. DDG, appending Reddit to query etc., are workarounds discussed a lot of times on the forum. I have no beef against Kagi. I wish you guys succeed, but please have a better product argument. At this point, I actually find equally good suggestion on 'headphones' from both DDG & Ecosia. If Kagi needs to win over, it should be doing better vis-a-vis the upcoming search engines, not Google which has been SEO gamed over & over.
    - freediver 4y ago
      Non taken. I mentioned Google as for most people, 'better than Google' is already worth paying for (and for most people Google is also still the "king"). We may differ perhaps on what 'winning' means. For us having thousands of people pay for Kagi despite such strong and free competition is already winning. We do not have ambition for global domination, but are creating a search experience for people that want an alternative that has their best interest in mind. And when we have a product glitch, it is not like we are delibarately not achieving even higher quality - we are constrained by our resources. Also have in mind that we launched our public beta just 7 months ago, give us a bit of time (Google has been around for 25 years, DDG for 15 years, Ecosia for 14 years) and we may reach your standards of quality. Fact that generally speaking Kagi already brought more innovation to search experience in such short period time than these legacy search engines did in decades (by legacy I mostly mean using legacy business model - ads) means that we are serious about it. Just need a bit of time.
adamhp 4y ago
> the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old. This happens on Google too, all of the time. I think this is a reddit issue, with how they have their meta configured...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

freediver 4y ago

Kagi founder here. I am of the opinion that things are not and do not have to be perfect. We do not want to market Kagi as a perfect product, without flaws. What you see is what you get. We have a lot of work to do. Google, a trillion dollar company with nearly 200K most talented employees, still gets many things wrong in their results. We are a ten people bootstrapped team, and the web is a vast problem, just to align expectations. I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall, I believe we also have superior results to Google, please try it for a few days and share your thoughts. Kagi is in some ways broken and flawed and it is what makes it feel more humane to use. If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our current resources.

CobaltFire 4y ago
I was a beta user and paid for a while, but my search results were too intermixed with my wife's and my child's. It's absolutely worth it to me, but paying $30 a month for 3 users was a little too much for me to stomach. To be clear, I pay $20/mo for ProtonMail Visionary so I'm not averse to paying! I just can't see the value at $30/mo when the other family members don't use it nearly as much as I do. Maybe this is an untenable problem due to your costs and you need those low use paying users. I'm not sure. To clarify: by intermixed I mean our tuning was different so it became somewhat interesting, as we all wanted to tune the settings differently. It's not a huge thing, but between that and feeling bad for having three people using one sub...
- freediver 4y ago
  Good news, reduced price family plans are coming soon (we are aiming January). You'll get three users for $10/mo, four for $12/mo as a base membership. A lot of discussion about it going on right now in our discord server.
  - CobaltFire 4y ago
    I'll be signing up the day those are available!
srvmshr 4y ago
Most of your arguments regarding resources are in general valid points, but when you are showcasing 3 results as selling points how hard is it to keep them updated. If you're not personally bothered by this showcase -- which is your product advertisment -- you perhaps should be. Going against a trillion dollar company needs a very convincing pitch IMO to average user. > We are a ten people bootstrapped team. We are a 2-engineer startup. We give business analytics/market trends on mined webdata (through our B2B dashboards) with a 48 hour live data guarantee. Every time, user queries crunch through about 9 million data points for every day over last 36 months - in real time. Sorry, but it isn't a very good reason to have stale results.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  You're demanding an awful lot out of a $10/mo product here. And I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's still an as-good-or-better search engine than Google with no ads and a focus on privacy. The fact that it lists ballpark prices rather than exact prices is really not that important in the grand scheme of things.
  - srvmshr 4y ago
    I never once mentioned the price point. My critique was about the accuracy of the results, and staleness of their showcase. If I would be a paying customer - be it $1 or $10/mo - I would expect it to be better than something I get for free. I already mentioned in another comment that Google shouldn't be a baseline to improve on, when so many competing innovative search companies such as DDG, Ecosia, You.com exist. Even DDG, Ecosia aren't visually that spammy either. For Kagi to win, the product strategy should win over by a visible margin. You like it. To each his own.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  They're not pitching to the average user. Average users won't pay for search. Also kind of a dick move to compare to your startup to Kagi to justify it sucking. Analytics is very different to search. Your products sound completely different.
sroussey 4y ago
There are startups that index only products and prices, so you could use their API. Maybe it’s a cost issue though.

cheeze 4y ago

It doesn't seem like it works all that well either... Their example is the headphone search. That Reddit post is a few months old, and has _one_ comment on it. The thread asks specifically about closed-back headphones under $150. Something like this would be much better as a result: https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/nq0pt/headphone_recommendations_by_price_range_updated/ https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/nq0pt/headphone...

freediver 4y ago
For sure it can be improved, but at least it points you in the right direction (/r/HeadphoneAdvice) Remember we are comparing this to Google where the entire first page for this query is either ads or results full of ads and affiliate links.
- srvmshr 4y ago
  No offense again to the product. Please take this as positive criticism Please don't compare yourself to Google. Most people on HN are well aware that Google search has become a terrible baseline. DDG, appending Reddit to query etc., are workarounds discussed a lot of times on the forum. I have no beef against Kagi. I wish you guys succeed, but please have a better product argument. At this point, I actually find equally good suggestion on 'headphones' from both DDG & Ecosia. If Kagi needs to win over, it should be doing better vis-a-vis the upcoming search engines, not Google which has been SEO gamed over & over.
  - freediver 4y ago
    Non taken. I mentioned Google as for most people, 'better than Google' is already worth paying for (and for most people Google is also still the "king"). We may differ perhaps on what 'winning' means. For us having thousands of people pay for Kagi despite such strong and free competition is already winning. We do not have ambition for global domination, but are creating a search experience for people that want an alternative that has their best interest in mind. And when we have a product glitch, it is not like we are delibarately not achieving even higher quality - we are constrained by our resources. Also have in mind that we launched our public beta just 7 months ago, give us a bit of time (Google has been around for 25 years, DDG for 15 years, Ecosia for 14 years) and we may reach your standards of quality. Fact that generally speaking Kagi already brought more innovation to search experience in such short period time than these legacy search engines did in decades (by legacy I mostly mean using legacy business model - ads) means that we are serious about it. Just need a bit of time.

adamhp 4y ago

> the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old. This happens on Google too, all of the time. I think this is a reddit issue, with how they have their meta configured...