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I was vaguely aware of Kagi from their posts here in the past and thought it sounded interesting but hadn't bothered trying it out as I'm fairly happy with DDG.

by Jochim 3y ago

I was vaguely aware of Kagi from their posts here in the past and thought it sounded interesting but hadn't bothered trying it out as I'm fairly happy with DDG. I just gave it a quick try there. While some of the features seem promising, the website ranking for example, what they consider a search doesn't feel great from a user perspective. Each step below resulted in part of my quota being used up: 1. Making the initial search. 2. Switching to image results. 3. Waiting a few minutes before switching back to the web results. 4. Viewing page 2 of the web results. 5. Ordering results by time. 6. Changing the sort order to descending. The previous step executed another search without allowing me to modify this. 7. Limiting the search to results from the past 24 hours. This returns a totally different set of results from when we merely sorted by most recent. 8. (Sometimes) Clearing the filters. 9. Opening the Lens > Edit menu, which has a big cross at the top right making it look like an overlay. Instead, it actually sends a GET request for the search again, using up your quota if you've exceeded whatever the grace period is. This, along with nearly tripling the price for existing subscribers that want the same functionality does not inspire confidence or goodwill. The change might've been more palatable if they'd kept a single subscription and put a monthly price cap on additional search fees to match the $25 unlimited tier. Maybe I'm not the target user but the 100 lifetime trial searches just means I probably won't return once I've ran out. 25/100 are already gone to evaluating what they charge for and I don't think I'll get a good idea of whether they're actually providing value over existing providers with the remaining 75. The amount charged isn't low enough that it's not a decision. The main justification for all this seems to be that adding AI to the search experience is expensive. The obvious rebuttal is that if AI is such a big value-add why don't they just charge for that service in a higher tier or as an add-on.

freediver 3y ago
The first 8 sound about right, (9 is probably a bug) and all of them perform a new search which costs us about 1.5 cents to do. There are only three ways for the cost of that search to be paid today: - Advertisers paying it for you - VC money paying it for you - User pays for it Kagi is built for people who want a search engine built for them. There is no way around it but to pay for search like you would pay for donuts you eat in a coffee shop. AI is no justification, search is just expensive. Google is making about 4 cents worth for every user search. We are selling search at 1.5 cents while building a completely user-centric product. If you know of other ways to do this, we are all ears.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  Why would (3) also perform an additional new search?
  - freediver 3y ago
    Because we cache for one minute I believe, so if you wait a few minutes, it would be outside of cache.
    - margalabargala 3y ago
      This makes sense, thanks for your reply.
- Jochim 3y ago
  I appreciate the response and I'd like to reiterate that I might just not be the right user with the right expectations. Still, I hope it's useful to hear why someone might be on the fence about the product. > (9 is probably a bug) To clarify 9, the request is sent when clicking the cross on the Lens > Edit page rather on than visiting it. This also occurs when returning from maps. In both cases a new search is only billed when the cache has expired. Interestingly, from a totally naive user's perspective, maps don't appear to use up a search. > If you know of other ways to do this, we are all ears. I don't have an issue with charging for individual searches. On the whole I think it's a reasonable idea. I do think that some aspects of the UX encourage billing superfluous searches and that, on a purely financial level, Kagi is dis-incentivised from improving this. Taking steps 5 and 6 as an example: there's no reason for these to be separate billable events. When viewing search results the user interface simply doesn't allow the user to select the sort order in the same operation they select the field. I sincerely doubt that this is intentional but it's easy to see the cynical take. I think there's also a decent case for longer caching of results, giving users the option to refresh results if it's important they aren't stale. This avoids the current situation where a user might spend some time visiting the firsts webpage in the result set, return wishing to continue perusing subsequent results but end up triggering a billable event. The same applies should someone want to swap between web and images. A quirk I noticed when trying to trigger shopping results was that searching for "best hair dryer" will display the shopping widget whereas searching "best hairdryer" does not, despite "showing results for best hair dryer" appearing as part of the search. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the feature but searching for variations on "cordless drill", "best cordless drill", "best cordless combi drill", "best cordless percussion drill" never returned any shopping results, should I have expected it to? To expand on my prior point as to why moving to a total number of trial searches might be harmful to conversions. In evaluating the billing rules and shopping results, I'm now on search 46/100. I haven't yet got into a flow with the product. That might change over the next 50 searches but I still haven't explored: redirects, lenses, personalised results, fine tuning search settings, or just the broader search quality.
lunatesi 3y ago
Thanks for posting this, I've been curious about what counts as a search to Kagi. On one hand, I get it: making requests obviously costs them money, and they certainly don't owe me anything as a non-user anyway. But I'm even less likely to switch to it with this knowledge, because this just doesn't fit well with how I search for things. It doesn't jive with the mental model of what I would think of as a search in my head as an end user, where changing the actual search terms is obviously a new search, but filtering, reloading, viewing the next page, etc, are just part of the same search.

by Jochim 3y ago

freediver 3y ago

The first 8 sound about right, (9 is probably a bug) and all of them perform a new search which costs us about 1.5 cents to do. There are only three ways for the cost of that search to be paid today: - Advertisers paying it for you - VC money paying it for you - User pays for it Kagi is built for people who want a search engine built for them. There is no way around it but to pay for search like you would pay for donuts you eat in a coffee shop. AI is no justification, search is just expensive. Google is making about 4 cents worth for every user search. We are selling search at 1.5 cents while building a completely user-centric product. If you know of other ways to do this, we are all ears.

margalabargala 3y ago
Why would (3) also perform an additional new search?
- freediver 3y ago
  Because we cache for one minute I believe, so if you wait a few minutes, it would be outside of cache.
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    This makes sense, thanks for your reply.
Jochim 3y ago
I appreciate the response and I'd like to reiterate that I might just not be the right user with the right expectations. Still, I hope it's useful to hear why someone might be on the fence about the product. > (9 is probably a bug) To clarify 9, the request is sent when clicking the cross on the Lens > Edit page rather on than visiting it. This also occurs when returning from maps. In both cases a new search is only billed when the cache has expired. Interestingly, from a totally naive user's perspective, maps don't appear to use up a search. > If you know of other ways to do this, we are all ears. I don't have an issue with charging for individual searches. On the whole I think it's a reasonable idea. I do think that some aspects of the UX encourage billing superfluous searches and that, on a purely financial level, Kagi is dis-incentivised from improving this. Taking steps 5 and 6 as an example: there's no reason for these to be separate billable events. When viewing search results the user interface simply doesn't allow the user to select the sort order in the same operation they select the field. I sincerely doubt that this is intentional but it's easy to see the cynical take. I think there's also a decent case for longer caching of results, giving users the option to refresh results if it's important they aren't stale. This avoids the current situation where a user might spend some time visiting the firsts webpage in the result set, return wishing to continue perusing subsequent results but end up triggering a billable event. The same applies should someone want to swap between web and images. A quirk I noticed when trying to trigger shopping results was that searching for "best hair dryer" will display the shopping widget whereas searching "best hairdryer" does not, despite "showing results for best hair dryer" appearing as part of the search. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the feature but searching for variations on "cordless drill", "best cordless drill", "best cordless combi drill", "best cordless percussion drill" never returned any shopping results, should I have expected it to? To expand on my prior point as to why moving to a total number of trial searches might be harmful to conversions. In evaluating the billing rules and shopping results, I'm now on search 46/100. I haven't yet got into a flow with the product. That might change over the next 50 searches but I still haven't explored: redirects, lenses, personalised results, fine tuning search settings, or just the broader search quality.

lunatesi 3y ago

Thanks for posting this, I've been curious about what counts as a search to Kagi. On one hand, I get it: making requests obviously costs them money, and they certainly don't owe me anything as a non-user anyway. But I'm even less likely to switch to it with this knowledge, because this just doesn't fit well with how I search for things. It doesn't jive with the mental model of what I would think of as a search in my head as an end user, where changing the actual search terms is obviously a new search, but filtering, reloading, viewing the next page, etc, are just part of the same search.