10 ms·

Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search

202 points by simonebrunozzi 3y ago

fredski42 3y ago
So you pay Kagi money to de-enshittify Google as Kagi is a meta searcher. That model can only work temporarily. If the userbase becomes uncomfortably big, Google and the likes will simply cut them off. Kagi must know this. So my take is they use your money to build their own indexers to at some point not need the likes of Google. And do this without using VC money as a safeguard against future enshittification. This is why the price is what it is. I wouldn’t be surprised that when they are done and decoupled from Google Apple will buy them and make it part of their services offerings.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I don’t understand what you mean. Kagi is its own search engine. It isn’t a “meta searcher.” It also searches other engines but has it own index. If Google cuts it off, it uses its own and the others.
iansinnott 3y ago
> I've basically stopped using Google search altogether. This. As a portion of the global market I suspect Kagi's userbase is tiny, but the fact that it has become an actual viable alternative makes me hopeful for a resurgence in paid B2C services.
just_testing 3y ago
I live in Brazil. The individual plan is arguably expensive around the global south. But the family plan amounts to 3USD/person/month! I joined a bunch of friends and paid upfront for the yearly plan. I even moved my 70-year-old mom to Kagi search so she wouldn't fall prey to clickbaits and scams. The extra peace of mind definitely paid off. I am going to move more people to Kagi in the coming months. The only "feature request" I have is that it should be easier to switch to Kagi. The quotation marks because I know it's not up to them, but to the FCC lawsuit. Also, if anyone from Kagi is reading, thanks so much for the great service you provide.
8bitsrule 3y ago
Glad to see Corey mention the Steward/Khan interview. Not only did she speak Peoplese, she pretty much sketched out (in the limited time she got) the main forces at work in the past 30 years of monopolization. Now, hoping to see FTC find their big stick. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM
thinkingemote 3y ago
Search is less about answers and more about finding the right questions to ask. I think some are able to better guess what the user wants because the users dont know how to ask questions.
- graynk 3y ago
  This is simply false. There are millions of pages that may contain your search query, no matter how you word it. And a lot of them are SEO spam. Results ranking and giving the user the ability to filter further down is very important and can’t be done with „just“ the write question
drcongo 3y ago
> In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google. This does a massive disservice to Kagi and contradicts the previous sentence which explains that Kagi is using multiple indexes.
miki123211 3y ago
> It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. > they [...] figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product I think Doctorov is getting this entirely backwards; Google would love to provide good search results, but there's just one Google, and there's millions of people out there trying to make SEO spam. Most bloggers are just writing whatever posts they feel like writing, while content farms explicitly optimize for articles that rank highly in search. The outcome is inevitable. To be clear, I think Google could (and probably has historically) spend more on improving search, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided that this isn't profitable for them, but I don't think there's anybody at Google who explicitly wants search to be bad. Kagi isn't good just because it is good, it is good because it's small enough that nobody really optimizes for ranking high on Kagi.
- silveraxe93 3y ago
  > Kagi isn't good just because it is good, it is good because it's small enough that nobody really optimizes for ranking high on Kagi. While I think that's like 50% of the story, it's not the only factor. For me what's amazing is being able to up/downrank results. By shifting responsibility down into users to curate their own algorithm Kagi is more robust to bad actors generating SEO spam.
- rnd0 3y ago
  > Google would love to provide good search results, but there's just one Google, and there's millions of people out there trying to make SEO spam. Most bloggers are just writing whatever posts they feel like writing, while content farms explicitly optimize for articles that rank highly in search. The outcome is inevitable. I think it has less to do with that, and more to do with the fact that their primary business is advertising. That is and will always be their first priority.
deleted 3y ago
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not_a_real_56 3y ago
Just wanted to chime in, I have been using Kagi for a long time now and it's been the best change of life. If I am on another computer and I accidently google something, I cannot even believe the amount of sponsored links and shit at the top. I will be a happy Kagi user for a long time! (assuming they don't change it to much!)
mogdance 3y ago
[flagged]
lygten 3y ago
Try this guy. Its not Kagi, but the search results are pretty good. Host it yourself on Docker. https://felladrin-minisearch.hf.space/
deleted 3y ago
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smcleod 3y ago
"I tried it. It was magic. No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again. ...(contd)"
curmudgeon22 3y ago
Interesting tidbit: > In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google. >The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:
ctrw 3y ago
I've tried kagi and really wanted to like it. But it returns the same results google does. I even asked people on here to give me the queries that kagi is best at. Even then google still returned the same results. Like the OP said, Google's shittiness is a choice and one they can turn off whenever too many people look like they are about to leave.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  For me the query "!guix nginx" returns the following sites: - https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Web-Services.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Web-Services.html - https://packages.guix.gnu.org/packages/nginx/ https://packages.guix.gnu.org/packages/nginx/ - https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Certificate-Services.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Certificate-Service... - https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Setting-up-NGINX-with-Lua.html https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Setting-up-NGINX-... And some results from the GNU Guix mailing list. !guix searches with a custom lens[0] that I added for Guix specific documentation and resources like the mailing list archives, and the IRC log archives. I can combine this bang with the quick summary feature (accessed either by adding !q to the search as well, writing a query that ends in a ?, or pressing the q button after loading the results), which is essentially the same as the info boxes that Google will add sometimes, except it only shows up on Kagi if you specifically request for it. I have also mapped versioned documentation for some things to the latest documentation using url redirects[1]. I have also manually hidden or raised lots of sites that I don't care about or care a lot about. This manual curation makes it so your search results get better over time, without having something like Google try to deeply understand who you are and what you want to try to figure out what search results are best for you. Kagi specific features have been very integrated into my workflow personally. I definitely find the subscription worth it. [0] https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8 https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8 [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
- mordae 3y ago
  Yeah. It's the same results. Sans 90% of the spam. And it gets better as you blacklist the frequent offenders yourself.
MyFirstSass 3y ago
Think i'll finally give Kagi a try - also thinking about moving to Fastmail or similar. The results are so ridiculous now i've actively begun hating them, that coupled with a short stint using Google Ads a few years ago and i'm convinced Google is a very, very shady company that i can't wait to ditch fully. Docs wise i've begun to look up on GPT-4 a lot though instead of stack, official sites etc. so i'm already using search less in general.
- graynk 3y ago
  Been using Fastmail for several years now, and Kagi for several months. Can heartily recommend both
- dhc02 3y ago
  I switched to fastmail from gmail a few months ago and I'm incredibly happy with it. I even got to keep my *@mydomain wildcard addresses, and the fastmail calendar implementation is not half bad.
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    Quick question: Were you using Google apps for your domain (or whatever it’s called now)? And if, were you able to maintain access to your Google docs and other Google-based services (play, etc)?
    - dhc02 3y ago
      I was not. I switched from an @gmail.com address. However, I think the real answer to your question is that your email address is your ID for Google services, whether its MX records point to Google or not.
- omoikane 3y ago
  I was on Fastmail until Opera bought them. Looks like they have since bought back their company, but there wasn't a compelling reason for me to go back.
jhbadger 3y ago
I get paying for a search engine rather than having it be ad-supported. And I get that running all those servers costs a fair chunk of change. But the cost just seems insane -- $10/month? That's on par with a streaming service that needs millions of dollars to make content. I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or providing that much value.
- yzydserd 3y ago
  > the cost just seems insane My kagi subscription is literally the best value subscription or recurring-charge item I have in any part of my life, online or offline.
- karma_pharmer 3y ago
  [dead]
- truculent 3y ago
  Google makes about 200bn per year in advertising revenue (see quarterly figures here: https://searchengineland.com/google-ad-revenue-q4-2023-437041 https://searchengineland.com/google-ad-revenue-q4-2023-43704...). The world’s population is about 7.8bn, with about 60% of people being online (https://ourworldindata.org/internet https://ourworldindata.org/internet). If we assume that about 90% of people use Google, that’s about 4.2bn people using Google search. 200/4.2 = 48 USD per year per person. So, 120 USD per year is more than the implicit cost of using Google, but it’s in the ballpark. I think the 48 figure would increase if you adjusted for people primarily accessing the internet through facebook, whatsapp, or youtube, which I would guess is quite common.
  - PaulRobinson 3y ago
    Kagi claims that Google themselves peg it at 300 USD per user per year.
    - truculent 3y ago
      That includes other sources of revenue, I believe; although I could be wrong. Do you have a source?
bananapub 3y ago
to add another anecdote: I've been using it for a year and it is really good. less garbage in the results of the sort of searches I make, no ads, no tracking, no logging, a nice UI to affect my own personal search results in ways I prefer (banning sites I consider crap from results, up and downranking others based on my opinion). most importantly, it's just a simple, clear business transaction: I give them money, they provide a search engine in return. no trying to make me click on ads, no trying to encourage me to use it or let it track me to make money some other way, no worries about how they manage to provide a service to me, no worries about what future management might do with the huge morass of personal data they have acquired. every now and then I can't find what I'm looking for and try Google, and the vast majority of the time Google can't find it either. it's pretty sad that a tiny new upstart can actually replace the once formidable Google Search for me, but c'est la vie.
api 3y ago
Kagi works for you. Google works for advertisers.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I wish we could go back to the good Google with ads in the sidebar. It paid to keep the lights on and felt like a fair trade for a free service.
xnx 3y ago
> All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again. No examples? > When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave, Is this allowed by Google's terms?
- EMIRELADERO 3y ago
  > Is this allowed by Google's terms? Why does it have to be?
  - xnx 3y ago
    It seems impolite to scrape Google's results and charge for it.
    - SkepticMystic 3y ago
      Assuming they use some form of this Google API[^1], they're surely paying for the results. What bothers me is that, by paying for Kagi then, part of that monthly fee is going straight back to Google, right? [^1]: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
      - xnx 3y ago
        > Custom Search JSON API provides 100 search queries per day for free. If you need more, you may sign up for billing in the API Console. Additional requests cost $5 per 1000 queries, up to 10k queries per day. It seems like that API has a limit of 10k queries per day, so I don't know if it would be feasible for Kagi to use and I thought most Google APIs were prohibited for use in a competing product.
        SkepticMystic 3y ago
        Sure, that specific endpoint doesn't meet their criteria. But point being, they're getting results from Google, and almost certainly pay for them using my monthly fee
infomiho 3y ago
Every time I write a search query like "best tool for X" or "alternative to X", I use Kagi instead of Google. Because Google results for those kind of queries tend to be SEO optimized articles where the first recommended thing is the advert. Or even worse, I get some sort of spam/scam sites that get paid to shill stuff. I think got conditioned with bad Google results to not do it for those kind of queries. For all other searches, Google seems good enough.
- eps 3y ago
  Just add "site:reddit.com" to the query. Without it, Google results are nothing but junk and spam.
  - terribleperson 3y ago
    On Kagi, you can just use the 'forums' lens, which will include Reddit but also results from other forums you might not have known existed. It's my favorite lens.
gmuslera 3y ago
Depending on what your main competitor gives you is a bad pattern. If it gets adopted enough, or somewhat Google see it as a threat, conditions will change, maybe for everyone. Think in what Reddit did when seemed that ChatGPT was trained on Reddit content, they put a price to such 3rd party requests, ended a market of good frontend alternatives for it, some tools and bots stopped working, etc. Google could do something similar, or poison/watermark the results sent to them or even put Gemini to be creative enough with the way it send back results to make very hard to parse to send an unified answer. It is what is available now, and it may work, but it may stop doing so because things happening outside their control.
ladzoppelin 3y ago
I also am getting value from Kagi and think their AI/Summarize is really good. The search lenses are also very cool, actually its like Google was before they silently deprecated all useful operators. Honestly I hope they make it as it really is a better way to do the web. edit: So I pay 20 bucks a month and get the "early adopter" package which is all the AI stuff in beta and its amazing. I think it completely makes Kagi much more desirable. Its a lot of money but I don't use any streaming services anymore and honestly just learn stuff and mess with LLM's to kill time when before I was watching something. I guess its not for everyone but I am surprised its not an instant buy for [more people in the industry.
jjmarr 3y ago
The way I see it, Kagi can save me half an hour of searching in a month. Given that it's $10/month for unlimited, I need to make $20/h to break even. If I make more than that, the value proposition becomes better and better. Anything that will allow me to do more work I will buy, because the more efficient I am, the faster I can make money.
dkobia 3y ago
I’ve been paying for Kagi for a little while now. The biggest thing for me is knowing each search is independent of the next like a good unit test. It does not feed, as a signal into some algorithm. Any time the thought of canceling Kagi comes to mind, I think about the confidence of searching for really sensitive information, eg medical. I can’t do that on Google confidently.
jacekm 3y ago
I typically use a mix of Google and DuckDuckGo and this combination serves me well. I block all ads with uBlock Origin. I tried Kagi and I like it but not enough to justify the price to myself. If they ever introduce a plan where they charge per query I may start using it more often. Also, I don't like the idea of every query being tied to my credit card details (Kagi claims to be privacy friendly but many companies do, very few really are, it's better not to trust such claims)
- loughnane 3y ago
  > Also, I don't like the idea of every query being tied to my credit card details This is a non-starter for me.
- Havoc 3y ago
  > Also, I don't like the idea of every query being tied to my credit card details Pretty sure that is trivially possibly in the tracking supported side of them web - likely far more so for bad actors
0xcde4c3db 3y ago
At some level, I really want to like Kagi. It represents how things should work. Value for value. I don't have any particular opinion about the pricing. I don't have "fuck you money", but I don't feel like it would appreciably hurt me if I put off cancelling the subscription for a year or two. The problem I have with Kagi (within the status quo) is that it attracts high-value users, and it exists in a system that refuses to settle for anything less than milking those users for every penny. It's not that I think the idea is bad or the founder is dishonest, it's that Kagi is ultimately asking me to believe that it can construct a vessel that won't spring a leak under the pressure of GOOG/MSFT/AMZN/META when they turn their collective eyes toward acquiring Kagi's user base. And I'm not ready to believe that. As C.A.R. Hoare so aptly put it, "There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars.".
- onionisafruit 3y ago
  They aren’t asking you to believe they are going to make it long term. They are asking you to believe that this month they can give you more than $10 of value in exchange for their $10 subscription.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Kagi is ultimately asking me to believe that it can construct a vessel that won't spring a leak under the pressure of GOOG/MSFT/AMZN/META You won't give Kagi money because of a hypothetical that becomes more likely when folks don't give it money.
cameldrv 3y ago
People have honestly forgotten that our economic system simply fails to deliver progress without competition. The system is based on transmuting the desire for money into better and better products, but in the absence of choice, this can’t happen, and so the products stay the same or get worse.
mhb 3y ago
There's a plan for $54/yr for 3600 searches.
mediumsmart 3y ago
I have paid dearly for all those people that actually use Google. The 25 for Kagi and 5 for Orion RC I give happily. Good search engine.

So you pay Kagi money to de-enshittify Google as Kagi is a meta searcher. That model can only work temporarily. If the userbase becomes uncomfortably big, Google and the likes will simply cut them off. Kagi must know this. So my take is they use your money to build their own indexers to at some point not need the likes of Google. And do this without using VC money as a safeguard against future enshittification. This is why the price is what it is. I wouldn’t be surprised that when they are done and decoupled from Google Apple will buy them and make it part of their services offerings.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
I don’t understand what you mean. Kagi is its own search engine. It isn’t a “meta searcher.” It also searches other engines but has it own index. If Google cuts it off, it uses its own and the others.

iansinnott 3y ago

> I've basically stopped using Google search altogether. This. As a portion of the global market I suspect Kagi's userbase is tiny, but the fact that it has become an actual viable alternative makes me hopeful for a resurgence in paid B2C services.

just_testing 3y ago

I live in Brazil. The individual plan is arguably expensive around the global south. But the family plan amounts to 3USD/person/month! I joined a bunch of friends and paid upfront for the yearly plan. I even moved my 70-year-old mom to Kagi search so she wouldn't fall prey to clickbaits and scams. The extra peace of mind definitely paid off. I am going to move more people to Kagi in the coming months. The only "feature request" I have is that it should be easier to switch to Kagi. The quotation marks because I know it's not up to them, but to the FCC lawsuit. Also, if anyone from Kagi is reading, thanks so much for the great service you provide.

8bitsrule 3y ago

Glad to see Corey mention the Steward/Khan interview. Not only did she speak Peoplese, she pretty much sketched out (in the limited time she got) the main forces at work in the past 30 years of monopolization. Now, hoping to see FTC find their big stick. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

thinkingemote 3y ago

Search is less about answers and more about finding the right questions to ask. I think some are able to better guess what the user wants because the users dont know how to ask questions.

graynk 3y ago
This is simply false. There are millions of pages that may contain your search query, no matter how you word it. And a lot of them are SEO spam. Results ranking and giving the user the ability to filter further down is very important and can’t be done with „just“ the write question

drcongo 3y ago

> In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google. This does a massive disservice to Kagi and contradicts the previous sentence which explains that Kagi is using multiple indexes.

miki123211 3y ago

> It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. > they [...] figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product I think Doctorov is getting this entirely backwards; Google would love to provide good search results, but there's just one Google, and there's millions of people out there trying to make SEO spam. Most bloggers are just writing whatever posts they feel like writing, while content farms explicitly optimize for articles that rank highly in search. The outcome is inevitable. To be clear, I think Google could (and probably has historically) spend more on improving search, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided that this isn't profitable for them, but I don't think there's anybody at Google who explicitly wants search to be bad. Kagi isn't good just because it is good, it is good because it's small enough that nobody really optimizes for ranking high on Kagi.

silveraxe93 3y ago
> Kagi isn't good just because it is good, it is good because it's small enough that nobody really optimizes for ranking high on Kagi. While I think that's like 50% of the story, it's not the only factor. For me what's amazing is being able to up/downrank results. By shifting responsibility down into users to curate their own algorithm Kagi is more robust to bad actors generating SEO spam.
rnd0 3y ago
> Google would love to provide good search results, but there's just one Google, and there's millions of people out there trying to make SEO spam. Most bloggers are just writing whatever posts they feel like writing, while content farms explicitly optimize for articles that rank highly in search. The outcome is inevitable. I think it has less to do with that, and more to do with the fact that their primary business is advertising. That is and will always be their first priority.

deleted 3y ago

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not_a_real_56 3y ago

Just wanted to chime in, I have been using Kagi for a long time now and it's been the best change of life. If I am on another computer and I accidently google something, I cannot even believe the amount of sponsored links and shit at the top. I will be a happy Kagi user for a long time! (assuming they don't change it to much!)

mogdance 3y ago

[flagged]

lygten 3y ago

Try this guy. Its not Kagi, but the search results are pretty good. Host it yourself on Docker. https://felladrin-minisearch.hf.space/

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

smcleod 3y ago

"I tried it. It was magic. No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again. ...(contd)"

curmudgeon22 3y ago

Interesting tidbit: > In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google. >The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:

ctrw 3y ago

I've tried kagi and really wanted to like it. But it returns the same results google does. I even asked people on here to give me the queries that kagi is best at. Even then google still returned the same results. Like the OP said, Google's shittiness is a choice and one they can turn off whenever too many people look like they are about to leave.

Zambyte 3y ago
For me the query "!guix nginx" returns the following sites: - https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Web-Services.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Web-Services.html - https://packages.guix.gnu.org/packages/nginx/ https://packages.guix.gnu.org/packages/nginx/ - https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Certificate-Services.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Certificate-Service... - https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Setting-up-NGINX-with-Lua.html https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Setting-up-NGINX-... And some results from the GNU Guix mailing list. !guix searches with a custom lens[0] that I added for Guix specific documentation and resources like the mailing list archives, and the IRC log archives. I can combine this bang with the quick summary feature (accessed either by adding !q to the search as well, writing a query that ends in a ?, or pressing the q button after loading the results), which is essentially the same as the info boxes that Google will add sometimes, except it only shows up on Kagi if you specifically request for it. I have also mapped versioned documentation for some things to the latest documentation using url redirects[1]. I have also manually hidden or raised lots of sites that I don't care about or care a lot about. This manual curation makes it so your search results get better over time, without having something like Google try to deeply understand who you are and what you want to try to figure out what search results are best for you. Kagi specific features have been very integrated into my workflow personally. I definitely find the subscription worth it. [0] https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8 https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8 [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
mordae 3y ago
Yeah. It's the same results. Sans 90% of the spam. And it gets better as you blacklist the frequent offenders yourself.

MyFirstSass 3y ago

Think i'll finally give Kagi a try - also thinking about moving to Fastmail or similar. The results are so ridiculous now i've actively begun hating them, that coupled with a short stint using Google Ads a few years ago and i'm convinced Google is a very, very shady company that i can't wait to ditch fully. Docs wise i've begun to look up on GPT-4 a lot though instead of stack, official sites etc. so i'm already using search less in general.

graynk 3y ago
Been using Fastmail for several years now, and Kagi for several months. Can heartily recommend both
dhc02 3y ago
I switched to fastmail from gmail a few months ago and I'm incredibly happy with it. I even got to keep my *@mydomain wildcard addresses, and the fastmail calendar implementation is not half bad.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  Quick question: Were you using Google apps for your domain (or whatever it’s called now)? And if, were you able to maintain access to your Google docs and other Google-based services (play, etc)?
  - dhc02 3y ago
    I was not. I switched from an @gmail.com address. However, I think the real answer to your question is that your email address is your ID for Google services, whether its MX records point to Google or not.
omoikane 3y ago
I was on Fastmail until Opera bought them. Looks like they have since bought back their company, but there wasn't a compelling reason for me to go back.

jhbadger 3y ago

I get paying for a search engine rather than having it be ad-supported. And I get that running all those servers costs a fair chunk of change. But the cost just seems insane -- $10/month? That's on par with a streaming service that needs millions of dollars to make content. I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or providing that much value.

yzydserd 3y ago
> the cost just seems insane My kagi subscription is literally the best value subscription or recurring-charge item I have in any part of my life, online or offline.
karma_pharmer 3y ago
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truculent 3y ago
Google makes about 200bn per year in advertising revenue (see quarterly figures here: https://searchengineland.com/google-ad-revenue-q4-2023-437041 https://searchengineland.com/google-ad-revenue-q4-2023-43704...). The world’s population is about 7.8bn, with about 60% of people being online (https://ourworldindata.org/internet https://ourworldindata.org/internet). If we assume that about 90% of people use Google, that’s about 4.2bn people using Google search. 200/4.2 = 48 USD per year per person. So, 120 USD per year is more than the implicit cost of using Google, but it’s in the ballpark. I think the 48 figure would increase if you adjusted for people primarily accessing the internet through facebook, whatsapp, or youtube, which I would guess is quite common.
- PaulRobinson 3y ago
  Kagi claims that Google themselves peg it at 300 USD per user per year.
  - truculent 3y ago
    That includes other sources of revenue, I believe; although I could be wrong. Do you have a source?

bananapub 3y ago

to add another anecdote: I've been using it for a year and it is really good. less garbage in the results of the sort of searches I make, no ads, no tracking, no logging, a nice UI to affect my own personal search results in ways I prefer (banning sites I consider crap from results, up and downranking others based on my opinion). most importantly, it's just a simple, clear business transaction: I give them money, they provide a search engine in return. no trying to make me click on ads, no trying to encourage me to use it or let it track me to make money some other way, no worries about how they manage to provide a service to me, no worries about what future management might do with the huge morass of personal data they have acquired. every now and then I can't find what I'm looking for and try Google, and the vast majority of the time Google can't find it either. it's pretty sad that a tiny new upstart can actually replace the once formidable Google Search for me, but c'est la vie.

api 3y ago

Kagi works for you. Google works for advertisers.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

I wish we could go back to the good Google with ads in the sidebar. It paid to keep the lights on and felt like a fair trade for a free service.

xnx 3y ago

> All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again. No examples? > When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave, Is this allowed by Google's terms?

EMIRELADERO 3y ago
> Is this allowed by Google's terms? Why does it have to be?
- xnx 3y ago
  It seems impolite to scrape Google's results and charge for it.
  - SkepticMystic 3y ago
    Assuming they use some form of this Google API[^1], they're surely paying for the results. What bothers me is that, by paying for Kagi then, part of that monthly fee is going straight back to Google, right? [^1]: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
    - xnx 3y ago
      > Custom Search JSON API provides 100 search queries per day for free. If you need more, you may sign up for billing in the API Console. Additional requests cost $5 per 1000 queries, up to 10k queries per day. It seems like that API has a limit of 10k queries per day, so I don't know if it would be feasible for Kagi to use and I thought most Google APIs were prohibited for use in a competing product.
      - SkepticMystic 3y ago
        Sure, that specific endpoint doesn't meet their criteria. But point being, they're getting results from Google, and almost certainly pay for them using my monthly fee

infomiho 3y ago

Every time I write a search query like "best tool for X" or "alternative to X", I use Kagi instead of Google. Because Google results for those kind of queries tend to be SEO optimized articles where the first recommended thing is the advert. Or even worse, I get some sort of spam/scam sites that get paid to shill stuff. I think got conditioned with bad Google results to not do it for those kind of queries. For all other searches, Google seems good enough.

eps 3y ago
Just add "site:reddit.com" to the query. Without it, Google results are nothing but junk and spam.
- terribleperson 3y ago
  On Kagi, you can just use the 'forums' lens, which will include Reddit but also results from other forums you might not have known existed. It's my favorite lens.

gmuslera 3y ago

Depending on what your main competitor gives you is a bad pattern. If it gets adopted enough, or somewhat Google see it as a threat, conditions will change, maybe for everyone. Think in what Reddit did when seemed that ChatGPT was trained on Reddit content, they put a price to such 3rd party requests, ended a market of good frontend alternatives for it, some tools and bots stopped working, etc. Google could do something similar, or poison/watermark the results sent to them or even put Gemini to be creative enough with the way it send back results to make very hard to parse to send an unified answer. It is what is available now, and it may work, but it may stop doing so because things happening outside their control.

ladzoppelin 3y ago

I also am getting value from Kagi and think their AI/Summarize is really good. The search lenses are also very cool, actually its like Google was before they silently deprecated all useful operators. Honestly I hope they make it as it really is a better way to do the web. edit: So I pay 20 bucks a month and get the "early adopter" package which is all the AI stuff in beta and its amazing. I think it completely makes Kagi much more desirable. Its a lot of money but I don't use any streaming services anymore and honestly just learn stuff and mess with LLM's to kill time when before I was watching something. I guess its not for everyone but I am surprised its not an instant buy for [more people in the industry.

jjmarr 3y ago

The way I see it, Kagi can save me half an hour of searching in a month. Given that it's $10/month for unlimited, I need to make $20/h to break even. If I make more than that, the value proposition becomes better and better. Anything that will allow me to do more work I will buy, because the more efficient I am, the faster I can make money.

dkobia 3y ago

I’ve been paying for Kagi for a little while now. The biggest thing for me is knowing each search is independent of the next like a good unit test. It does not feed, as a signal into some algorithm. Any time the thought of canceling Kagi comes to mind, I think about the confidence of searching for really sensitive information, eg medical. I can’t do that on Google confidently.

jacekm 3y ago

I typically use a mix of Google and DuckDuckGo and this combination serves me well. I block all ads with uBlock Origin. I tried Kagi and I like it but not enough to justify the price to myself. If they ever introduce a plan where they charge per query I may start using it more often. Also, I don't like the idea of every query being tied to my credit card details (Kagi claims to be privacy friendly but many companies do, very few really are, it's better not to trust such claims)

loughnane 3y ago
> Also, I don't like the idea of every query being tied to my credit card details This is a non-starter for me.
Havoc 3y ago
> Also, I don't like the idea of every query being tied to my credit card details Pretty sure that is trivially possibly in the tracking supported side of them web - likely far more so for bad actors

0xcde4c3db 3y ago

At some level, I really want to like Kagi. It represents how things should work. Value for value. I don't have any particular opinion about the pricing. I don't have "fuck you money", but I don't feel like it would appreciably hurt me if I put off cancelling the subscription for a year or two. The problem I have with Kagi (within the status quo) is that it attracts high-value users, and it exists in a system that refuses to settle for anything less than milking those users for every penny. It's not that I think the idea is bad or the founder is dishonest, it's that Kagi is ultimately asking me to believe that it can construct a vessel that won't spring a leak under the pressure of GOOG/MSFT/AMZN/META when they turn their collective eyes toward acquiring Kagi's user base. And I'm not ready to believe that. As C.A.R. Hoare so aptly put it, "There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars.".

onionisafruit 3y ago
They aren’t asking you to believe they are going to make it long term. They are asking you to believe that this month they can give you more than $10 of value in exchange for their $10 subscription.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Kagi is ultimately asking me to believe that it can construct a vessel that won't spring a leak under the pressure of GOOG/MSFT/AMZN/META You won't give Kagi money because of a hypothetical that becomes more likely when folks don't give it money.

cameldrv 3y ago

People have honestly forgotten that our economic system simply fails to deliver progress without competition. The system is based on transmuting the desire for money into better and better products, but in the absence of choice, this can’t happen, and so the products stay the same or get worse.

mhb 3y ago

There's a plan for $54/yr for 3600 searches.

mediumsmart 3y ago

I have paid dearly for all those people that actually use Google. The 25 for Kagi and 5 for Orion RC I give happily. Good search engine.