8 ms·

Kagi Search Stats

62 points by dfee 3y ago

asicsp 3y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082 (986 points | 25 days ago | 485 comments)
- dfee 3y ago
  Yeah, except it’s not. That’s why I appended the empty query string to the url. This was apparently a re-used URL, announced today: https://kagifeedback.org/d/1899-aug-29th-2023/1 https://kagifeedback.org/d/1899-aug-29th-2023/1 * also, am one of the family subs; come join us :)
nexus7556 3y ago
I’d be interested in the subscriber breakdown between the Standard Plan and Professional Plan. I’m in my first month on the standard plan, 20 days in, and I’m at 287 searches. I will have to start paying for additional searches later this week. The 300 limit feels just a little bit low for me.
- n_ary 3y ago
  > I’m in my first month on the standard plan, 20 days in, and I’m at 287 searches. The 300 searches/month is typical for the general populace, who mostly stay in mobile mode(fb/tiktok/youtube/tumblr etc.) and occasionally open a browser to typein a website in search engine to visit it. Sadly, from my best guess, these users will never pay for a search engine and they are not tech savvy enough to even find kagi. The professional one is targetted at tech savvy people who frequently uses searches on daily basis to find things. The basic $5/month one is sort of trial equivalent. P.S. anyone claiming to be never crossing the 300/month quota is probably not searching enough not only on Kagi but in all other ones(excluding Google, where you need to seatch thrice to find anything these days). Entirely my opinion and I am sure, I am very wrong.
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    There are a lot of professions were google or Kagi isn't really that helpful for knowledge extraction so yes you are techy biased and totally wrong.
    - emanuele232 3y ago
      uhm cite a couple, maybe? off the bat i can't point at a profession that does not benefit of the internet knowledge
- Hamcha 3y ago
  Same, I don't buy their metrics because sure, the average person might search 3/4 times per day, but the average person isn't gonna pay for Kagi. A quick glance at the most popular search queries[1] shows a very likely scenario where people type what website they want to go to and then just stay there. I'm a heavy Google user, to the point that I can't switch to DuckDuckGo because the quality just isn't there, and by exporting and analyzing a month worth of web history I counted 4507 searches (not counting going after the first page, which Kagi counts as a separate search). I don't really see who the standard plan is aimed at. Sadly the ultimate plan is way too expensive for me, 25$/mo is what an internet plan costs here! 1. Using Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US) gives me: "google" "youtube" "weather" "facebook" "translate" "whatsapp" "amazon" "instagram" ...
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    You are not banned from searching after exceeding the quota, this is a common misunderstanding. Instead, each search after the quota is billed at 1.5c I'm also a very heavy searcher, and at most I've been at 1200 searches in a month. Do you let the browser auto-fill URLs you frequently visit, or do you use the search engine for that?
tamimio 3y ago
[flagged]
- dfee 3y ago
  I'm sure that's fine. That's where I was. Except the quality of results I was getting was quite poor. And, that was my reason for giving Kagi "a go". I think your point about total privacy is legitimate, though.
- scrps 3y ago
  I am just using free tier right now but I think the privacy bit is a sweetener, the value with kagi so far for me is you can scope searches really well, add preferred sources, filtering. It's a bit like if you slapped a nice interface over all the google hacks that used to be possible. Lack of SEO junk is another sweetener. Yeah, a lot of this is technically possible without kagi but if kagi doesn't suck I'll pay to not have to deal with the extra cognative load of wrangling google or ddg into spitting out sensible results.
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  > No. I am not paying and I am not seeing ads either, ad blockers existed long ago. Forget the ads! Pay them because they are objectively better. To me Kagi is a 2008 google with 2023 tech stack. An actual exhaustive crawler, with actual relevant results that neither goog or ddg serve to me. It is still not there for product discovery and regional results. But if I am searching a technical topic, or prior art in a particular domain then it is just unmatched.
porridgeraisin 3y ago
Looking at the top domains, clearly this hasn't broken out of the programmer niche. Hope it eats some of Google's share there as well.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  To be fair programmers are probably by far the most heavy users of search engines, and the cohort with the most need for niche search features. I'd expect to see a disproportionate representation in the usage statistics.
  - porridgeraisin 3y ago
    Yeah true. Would be nice if kagi could release stats that tell us the distribution of subjects.
gnrlst 3y ago
Just FYI: if you’re a fan of uBlock Origin and can’t stand mobile ads, I highly recommend Kagi’s Orion browser. It’s great on iOS and overall better than safari + it has chrome and Firefox extension support.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  I'm damn impressed that they seem to be the first to implement Chrome and Firefox plugins for WebKit.
  - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
    its a damn shame that a third party implemented firefox extensions for webkit while firefox on android still doesn't support the same extensions on the same codebase, not to talk about missing all extensions on IOS which this browser does. that's why, being a hardened firefox user, i see them doing directionless work just to kill time, sipping on google's ad revenue. case in point. employees are paid by the work they put out and management is paid by "industry standards". that means, management has incentive to keep not doing groundbreaking work because that would jeopardize their paycheck from google.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      Yeah, the whole "We need Google" schtick is not aging well. I wish they would partner with, I dunno, like Brave or even start their own search engine and follow a similar model, they're already partnered with Mullvad for the VPN so their getting the idea somewhat.
- kilmanio 3y ago
  The moment it's available on linux/android, I will
- tiltowait 3y ago
  I haven't liked it much on iOS, but the Mac version is my daily driver for tree view tabs. So hard to go back to anything else on my work machine.
goplayoutside 3y ago
I was excited to start using the 'pinned' and 'raised' domains feature, only to find that it breaks the way that I use the "I'm feeling lucky" bang (a single ! at the beginning or end of a query). A separate "I'm feeling lucky" bang that directs to what would be the top ranked result, ignoring user-specific adjustments, would be a great feature.
- tiltowait 3y ago
  You could post this to https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/. They seem to take a lot of feedback.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
Top 10 most-blocked domains: 1. pinterest.com 2. pinterest.co.uk 3. pinterest.ca 4. pinterest.de 5. pinterest.fr 6. pinterest.com.au 7. facebook.com 8. pinterest.es 9. foxnews.com 10. w3schools.com
- tchbnl 3y ago
  One of the best features of Kagi. Getting rid of all the Pinterest spam instantly made searches so much better.
- akudha 3y ago
  I am glad that I am not the only one who hates Pinterest, lol
  - unsupp0rted 3y ago
    I'm not aware of anybody who doesn't hate Pinterest. Surely those people must exist out there, but I can't imagine a person who wants Pinterest search results.
    - Tostino 3y ago
      My wife somehow knows how to navigate that site and can extract knowledge from it that I would only dream was available. I'm much closer to your side of the aisle. Burn it with fire.
      - unsupp0rted 3y ago
        What’s an example of this forbidden Pinterest knowledge?
        Tostino 3y ago
        Actually being able to get to the recipe for one. Just generally being competent at navigating the site is the main thing, she uses it to find ideas for crafting often.
nabogh 3y ago
Does Kagi really only have 8000 members? I'm a paying customer so I figured there'd be many others paying already.
- npub1zenn0 3y ago
  Considering search engines are on the way out, it's hardly surprising.
RamblingCTO 3y ago
I really like kagi but the price point is just not worth it. Hope to see some economics of scale. These folks need to stop using bing and build their own crawler.
- 1123581321 3y ago
  They would have to raise their price to build a crawler as good as what they’re currently getting. I do hope they grow to where they can afford it at their current subscription rates.
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    Not sure, but won't argue that vehemently. I build my own crawler in a few days using pgvector, go-colly, and some embedding. It's a bit over-engineered because of go-python interop, but I'm happy with that. And with a subscription model like kagi you should be able to pay for the storage. I also think that a search engine doesn't need to crawl nor store the whole web. You don't need to crawl pinterest, facebook, instagram, tiktok, and known SEO farms or spam blogs. I'm too busy to productize this just yet, but might do down the line.
    - 1123581321 3y ago
      That's a neat project, but it wouldn't satisfy a sizable percentage of searches as a Bing API replacement. It needs much more crawling, processing and a quality maintenance and improvement operation. I think you should keep going with it. Perhaps you could find a way to contribute to engines like Kagi; they already incorporate some smaller and/or weirder indexes.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      A ton of businesses and events are only on facebook or only on instagram. Probably the same with tiktok. So they are essential if you want to provide a complete search engine.
      - 3y ago
joshstrange 3y ago
> 7,942 Huh, I would never have guessed their subscriber count was so low and good on them for being open about that, I'm one of them. I've been happy with Kagi overall and once I got over the hump of "I need to ration my searches" it got a lot better. The 1000 searches a month seems to be enough for me, I'm still in my first month but it looks like I'm averaging about 30 searches a day (desktop and mobile) and I've only rarely re-tried a search on google (I use their bang feature so I can just add a "g" to the start of my query to send it to google). On mobile especially the lack of "search as you type" and relying on google under the hood then redirecting to Kagi is a little weird and sometimes, again on mobile, the top UI will load and then you will up to 10 seconds (!!!!) for the results to pop in. I'll put up with that for a little while more but it's frustrating for sure. The domain ranking stuff is super cool though.
- esafak 3y ago
  I definitely do need to ration my searches.
- tiltowait 3y ago
  I'm a happily paying customer, and I'm a little ... pleasantly surprised? ... that their numbers are about 1/10 what I expected. I can't really explain it. I want them to succeed and wish them great success, but something about them being small feels oddly good. I haven't experienced a 10s pop-in on mobile (iOS Safari with the extension installed). What OS/browser? You could probably file a bug report on their feedback site.
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    iOS Safari with extension as well. It's often instant, sometimes a few seconds, rarely up to 10 seconds.
robga 3y ago
I am not a fan of the text for the $5 plan, 300 searches per month, saying “Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users” when the average user who signs up for their service seems to be using 600 searches per month.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Yes, but it can be worth paying $5 dollars a month to get the highest quality results when you do need them.
helaoban 3y ago
The blocking of Pinterest domains makes obvious sense (the bane of image search), but the blocking of news domains (foxnews, dailymail, nytimes) less so. Are news outlets regular polluting search results for people for run-of-the-mill queries?
- psd1 3y ago
  Fox and the daily heil are not news organisations
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  People who are of bipartisan ideology hate the other side enough that they ban their news outlets from their search results. I think people do search for a lot of news topics, and then get furious when a link to their enemies appear in the results.

62 points by dfee 3y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082 (986 points | 25 days ago | 485 comments)

dfee 3y ago
Yeah, except it’s not. That’s why I appended the empty query string to the url. This was apparently a re-used URL, announced today: https://kagifeedback.org/d/1899-aug-29th-2023/1 https://kagifeedback.org/d/1899-aug-29th-2023/1 * also, am one of the family subs; come join us :)

nexus7556 3y ago

I’d be interested in the subscriber breakdown between the Standard Plan and Professional Plan. I’m in my first month on the standard plan, 20 days in, and I’m at 287 searches. I will have to start paying for additional searches later this week. The 300 limit feels just a little bit low for me.

n_ary 3y ago
> I’m in my first month on the standard plan, 20 days in, and I’m at 287 searches. The 300 searches/month is typical for the general populace, who mostly stay in mobile mode(fb/tiktok/youtube/tumblr etc.) and occasionally open a browser to typein a website in search engine to visit it. Sadly, from my best guess, these users will never pay for a search engine and they are not tech savvy enough to even find kagi. The professional one is targetted at tech savvy people who frequently uses searches on daily basis to find things. The basic $5/month one is sort of trial equivalent. P.S. anyone claiming to be never crossing the 300/month quota is probably not searching enough not only on Kagi but in all other ones(excluding Google, where you need to seatch thrice to find anything these days). Entirely my opinion and I am sure, I am very wrong.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  There are a lot of professions were google or Kagi isn't really that helpful for knowledge extraction so yes you are techy biased and totally wrong.
  - emanuele232 3y ago
    uhm cite a couple, maybe? off the bat i can't point at a profession that does not benefit of the internet knowledge
Hamcha 3y ago
Same, I don't buy their metrics because sure, the average person might search 3/4 times per day, but the average person isn't gonna pay for Kagi. A quick glance at the most popular search queries[1] shows a very likely scenario where people type what website they want to go to and then just stay there. I'm a heavy Google user, to the point that I can't switch to DuckDuckGo because the quality just isn't there, and by exporting and analyzing a month worth of web history I counted 4507 searches (not counting going after the first page, which Kagi counts as a separate search). I don't really see who the standard plan is aimed at. Sadly the ultimate plan is way too expensive for me, 25$/mo is what an internet plan costs here! 1. Using Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US) gives me: "google" "youtube" "weather" "facebook" "translate" "whatsapp" "amazon" "instagram" ...
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  You are not banned from searching after exceeding the quota, this is a common misunderstanding. Instead, each search after the quota is billed at 1.5c I'm also a very heavy searcher, and at most I've been at 1200 searches in a month. Do you let the browser auto-fill URLs you frequently visit, or do you use the search engine for that?

tamimio 3y ago

[flagged]

dfee 3y ago
I'm sure that's fine. That's where I was. Except the quality of results I was getting was quite poor. And, that was my reason for giving Kagi "a go". I think your point about total privacy is legitimate, though.
scrps 3y ago
I am just using free tier right now but I think the privacy bit is a sweetener, the value with kagi so far for me is you can scope searches really well, add preferred sources, filtering. It's a bit like if you slapped a nice interface over all the google hacks that used to be possible. Lack of SEO junk is another sweetener. Yeah, a lot of this is technically possible without kagi but if kagi doesn't suck I'll pay to not have to deal with the extra cognative load of wrangling google or ddg into spitting out sensible results.
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
> No. I am not paying and I am not seeing ads either, ad blockers existed long ago. Forget the ads! Pay them because they are objectively better. To me Kagi is a 2008 google with 2023 tech stack. An actual exhaustive crawler, with actual relevant results that neither goog or ddg serve to me. It is still not there for product discovery and regional results. But if I am searching a technical topic, or prior art in a particular domain then it is just unmatched.

porridgeraisin 3y ago

Looking at the top domains, clearly this hasn't broken out of the programmer niche. Hope it eats some of Google's share there as well.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
To be fair programmers are probably by far the most heavy users of search engines, and the cohort with the most need for niche search features. I'd expect to see a disproportionate representation in the usage statistics.
- porridgeraisin 3y ago
  Yeah true. Would be nice if kagi could release stats that tell us the distribution of subjects.

gnrlst 3y ago

Just FYI: if you’re a fan of uBlock Origin and can’t stand mobile ads, I highly recommend Kagi’s Orion browser. It’s great on iOS and overall better than safari + it has chrome and Firefox extension support.

Obscurity4340 3y ago
I'm damn impressed that they seem to be the first to implement Chrome and Firefox plugins for WebKit.
- 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
  its a damn shame that a third party implemented firefox extensions for webkit while firefox on android still doesn't support the same extensions on the same codebase, not to talk about missing all extensions on IOS which this browser does. that's why, being a hardened firefox user, i see them doing directionless work just to kill time, sipping on google's ad revenue. case in point. employees are paid by the work they put out and management is paid by "industry standards". that means, management has incentive to keep not doing groundbreaking work because that would jeopardize their paycheck from google.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Yeah, the whole "We need Google" schtick is not aging well. I wish they would partner with, I dunno, like Brave or even start their own search engine and follow a similar model, they're already partnered with Mullvad for the VPN so their getting the idea somewhat.
kilmanio 3y ago
The moment it's available on linux/android, I will
tiltowait 3y ago
I haven't liked it much on iOS, but the Mac version is my daily driver for tree view tabs. So hard to go back to anything else on my work machine.

goplayoutside 3y ago

I was excited to start using the 'pinned' and 'raised' domains feature, only to find that it breaks the way that I use the "I'm feeling lucky" bang (a single ! at the beginning or end of a query). A separate "I'm feeling lucky" bang that directs to what would be the top ranked result, ignoring user-specific adjustments, would be a great feature.

tiltowait 3y ago
You could post this to https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/. They seem to take a lot of feedback.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

Top 10 most-blocked domains: 1. pinterest.com 2. pinterest.co.uk 3. pinterest.ca 4. pinterest.de 5. pinterest.fr 6. pinterest.com.au 7. facebook.com 8. pinterest.es 9. foxnews.com 10. w3schools.com

tchbnl 3y ago
One of the best features of Kagi. Getting rid of all the Pinterest spam instantly made searches so much better.
akudha 3y ago
I am glad that I am not the only one who hates Pinterest, lol
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  I'm not aware of anybody who doesn't hate Pinterest. Surely those people must exist out there, but I can't imagine a person who wants Pinterest search results.
  - Tostino 3y ago
    My wife somehow knows how to navigate that site and can extract knowledge from it that I would only dream was available. I'm much closer to your side of the aisle. Burn it with fire.
    - unsupp0rted 3y ago
      What’s an example of this forbidden Pinterest knowledge?
      - Tostino 3y ago
        Actually being able to get to the recipe for one. Just generally being competent at navigating the site is the main thing, she uses it to find ideas for crafting often.

nabogh 3y ago

Does Kagi really only have 8000 members? I'm a paying customer so I figured there'd be many others paying already.

npub1zenn0 3y ago
Considering search engines are on the way out, it's hardly surprising.

RamblingCTO 3y ago

I really like kagi but the price point is just not worth it. Hope to see some economics of scale. These folks need to stop using bing and build their own crawler.

1123581321 3y ago
They would have to raise their price to build a crawler as good as what they’re currently getting. I do hope they grow to where they can afford it at their current subscription rates.
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  Not sure, but won't argue that vehemently. I build my own crawler in a few days using pgvector, go-colly, and some embedding. It's a bit over-engineered because of go-python interop, but I'm happy with that. And with a subscription model like kagi you should be able to pay for the storage. I also think that a search engine doesn't need to crawl nor store the whole web. You don't need to crawl pinterest, facebook, instagram, tiktok, and known SEO farms or spam blogs. I'm too busy to productize this just yet, but might do down the line.
  - 1123581321 3y ago
    That's a neat project, but it wouldn't satisfy a sizable percentage of searches as a Bing API replacement. It needs much more crawling, processing and a quality maintenance and improvement operation. I think you should keep going with it. Perhaps you could find a way to contribute to engines like Kagi; they already incorporate some smaller and/or weirder indexes.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    A ton of businesses and events are only on facebook or only on instagram. Probably the same with tiktok. So they are essential if you want to provide a complete search engine.
    - 3y ago

joshstrange 3y ago

> 7,942 Huh, I would never have guessed their subscriber count was so low and good on them for being open about that, I'm one of them. I've been happy with Kagi overall and once I got over the hump of "I need to ration my searches" it got a lot better. The 1000 searches a month seems to be enough for me, I'm still in my first month but it looks like I'm averaging about 30 searches a day (desktop and mobile) and I've only rarely re-tried a search on google (I use their bang feature so I can just add a "g" to the start of my query to send it to google). On mobile especially the lack of "search as you type" and relying on google under the hood then redirecting to Kagi is a little weird and sometimes, again on mobile, the top UI will load and then you will up to 10 seconds (!!!!) for the results to pop in. I'll put up with that for a little while more but it's frustrating for sure. The domain ranking stuff is super cool though.

esafak 3y ago
I definitely do need to ration my searches.
tiltowait 3y ago
I'm a happily paying customer, and I'm a little ... pleasantly surprised? ... that their numbers are about 1/10 what I expected. I can't really explain it. I want them to succeed and wish them great success, but something about them being small feels oddly good. I haven't experienced a 10s pop-in on mobile (iOS Safari with the extension installed). What OS/browser? You could probably file a bug report on their feedback site.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  iOS Safari with extension as well. It's often instant, sometimes a few seconds, rarely up to 10 seconds.

robga 3y ago

I am not a fan of the text for the $5 plan, 300 searches per month, saying “Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users” when the average user who signs up for their service seems to be using 600 searches per month.

carlosjobim 3y ago
Yes, but it can be worth paying $5 dollars a month to get the highest quality results when you do need them.

helaoban 3y ago

The blocking of Pinterest domains makes obvious sense (the bane of image search), but the blocking of news domains (foxnews, dailymail, nytimes) less so. Are news outlets regular polluting search results for people for run-of-the-mill queries?

psd1 3y ago
Fox and the daily heil are not news organisations
carlosjobim 3y ago
People who are of bipartisan ideology hate the other side enough that they ban their news outlets from their search results. I think people do search for a lot of news topics, and then get furious when a link to their enemies appear in the results.