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Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers s

Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet. I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over and over again.

paulryanrogers 2y ago
Alternatives would be nice, and I'd agree the future doesn't have to be entirely one solution or entirely without certain others. Many states have laws limiting billboards or posters to avoid obscuring nature and stop them from littering their communities. My hope is we can reign in the fraud and rampant escalation of ads, even if it means paying a bit more monetarily or trading a bit more privacy. So long as there is transparency and safety.
chrisweekly 2y ago
Yet Kagi is doing well, and I'm very happy to pay a few bucks a month to be their customer instead of their product.
- Spivak 2y ago
  You won't ever get big with this scheme but you can be sustainable.
  - Tostino 2y ago
    There should be more people striving for sustainable businesses IMO.
    - edanm 2y ago
      This is a very common sentiment on HN, but... why? I don't get it. It's not like there aren't people focused on sustainable businesses. 90% of businesses are probably SMBs - just not in tech. For most people in the world, the word entrepreneur means "someone who's opening a McDonalds across the street" or "someone opening a pizza shop". Even in tech, there are plenty of not-hypergrowth companies around (I run a small dev shop, for example). The reason we here are exposed more to VC-style startups is because a) they make more news, for obvious reasons, but also b) there are structural reasons in tech that favor that style of company, most importantly because software itself is scalable in a way that most things aren't.
      - Tostino 2y ago
        I'm not against using tech's natural advantages with scale - that's one of the beauties of software. My concern is with the disproportionate resources being poured into hyper-growth ventures, where the vast majority fail after burning through enormous amounts of capital. If even a fraction of that talent and investment was redirected toward building sustainable businesses that create real value, rather than just competing for finite resources like user attention or market domination, I believe the tech industry, the tech workers, and society would benefit more in the long run.
        edanm 2y ago
        First, I think VC makes up a tiny percentage of invested capital, so I'm not sure the intuition of "so much money is thrown at it" is right. There's far, far more capital and talent in e.g. traditional non-software businesses, finance, government, etc. Just look at places like Google, which has 180k employees. Not all are tech/innovation talent, necessarily, but that's probably more than most new startups combined. In any case, I'm not sure I trust you, me or anyone to be smarter about how to get innovation than our current relatively-free-market capitalistic system, where there's actually pretty good incentives to pursue innovation. Look at how many things today that absolutely improve our world have been created through this messy process. It's apparently monetarily worth it to have 95 failed startups in order to get 5 ones that change the world, and that's probably a good thing for society, because the world is better than it war 20 years ago in terms of technology/innovation. (The world is worse in other ways, and a different criticism of tech is that some of it can also be negative for society, but that's a separate concern than it being wasteful, which I just don't agree with.)
        Retric 2y ago
        VC funded companies are into the trillions of total investment (100+B / year adds up). That’s a small but meaningful fraction of global wealth for such a tiny slice of companies. It’s not that these are necessarily bad investments, but growth at any cost tends to suck up a lot more talent than the business actually justifies. Of course the industry is mostly dumb investments. Looking back Google+ was part of a wave of social websites that didn’t really go anywhere. Facebook was founded in 04, Twitter in 06, but in 2011 suddenly everyone wants in on the action… The wave of crypto was similarly almost pure waste but most VC firms aren’t really about wise investment. It’s about charging high fees for funds under managed, they succeed when someone invests not when companies become profitable.
    - dmje 2y ago
      As founder of a 15 year micro consultancy I'm nodding along. We've chosen quite deliberately not to grow. I don't want staff or huge wads of cash, I don't want to be rich; I want a gentle, family focused, sustainable, comfortable life. Why grow and face all the stress of growing when I'm perfectly happy with things as they are? Kagi: I use and pay for it and I love it. I'm very hopeful that they have made something excellent - each time I dip into Google with a !g (and it's becoming more and more rare!) I'm horrified by the clusterfuck it's now become. The clean, simple, accurate results of Kagi are fresh air and well worth paying for. I've seen the founder say on many occasions that they're not aiming to be "a Google killer" and I'm glad. With scale comes inevitable enshittification. I just hope their business model is enough to support a thriving - but small - business.
    - DannyBee 2y ago
      SMBs have roughly the same characteristics even when they do that. That is, the vast majority still fail, most do not make enough profit to come close to sustainability, and the 80-90% of revenue is earned by the top 10% of SMBs Even if you go through the data and try to restrict it to some definition of "not going to be an obvious failure" it's not pretty. It is a fascinating read though. So while I agree with your sentiment it does not seem to help much in practice.
  - fweimer 2y ago
    For Kagi, there is a big question mark around the availability of the third-party search API endpoints they rely on. If search evolves further and further away from textual matching, that will impact them as well. (For search providers, it could be commercially reasonable to replace more or less traditional document indexing with a way to synthesize responses—at a very high level similar to what some analytical tools for time series do.) I hope that by then, they have deployed their own crawlers and indices, so that there's still an alternative, rather than merely adopting the latest industry trends.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Kagi has around 200K subscribers. I wouldn’t call that “doing well”. Edit: that should be 29K subscribers
  - Spivak 2y ago
    Do you mean 20k? I doubt they 10x'd growth since January. For a bootstrapped business whose end-goal is sustainability that's doing great. When you don't have shareholders breathing down your neck for exponential returns the calculus changes.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Yep typo - 20K - fixing. I always thought Kagi was still the old Mac focused company that enabled independent software makers to collect payments from customers. I didn’t realize that the old company had been out of business for years until I heard the founder interview on the Talk Show podcast https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416 https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416
      - gcanyon 2y ago
        I knew Key back in the day, and I feel a twinge for him every time kagi comes up on HN.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        The full story of what happened to the original kagi https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling-prey-to-fraud https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling... And relevant to this submission. I couldn’t find any information on Google, I used the paid version of ChatGPT that has had web search for almost two years
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hosteur 2y ago
- wrasee 2y ago
  Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing. But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter. I can't help feel that when the competition is free - and on precisely the recognition that people don't pay for search - that a more aggressive $2 tier for personal customers could get a much wider penumbra of folk such as myself over the line, rather than be yet another $5 service that when applied consistently actually start to add up.
  - masa331 2y ago
    I also pay for Kagi and i'v never been happier with my searches. It's so nice not to have to slog through Google bullshit results. Kagi results are great and you can tweak the behaviour deeply to your liking. I'm also proud to support an alternative from a smaller company with same beliefs instead of Google who does a lot of damage to the medium i love be it ads or Chrome. So the few bucks are a no brainer. It's the same as paying for any other monthly subscription
  - xigoi 2y ago
    According to Kagi, they can’t make the price much lower and still be profitable.
    - wrasee 2y ago
      If they get 100x the customers on a $2 tier than a $5 tier then yes, they can be profitable. The question is, could they get 100x? Or even 10x? I don’t know, and I assume they’ve done their homework and believe that they can’t. I just wonder, what if they’re wrong?
      - TylerE 2y ago
        It if supporting each customer costs them, say, $2.50
      - 2y ago
- pembrook 2y ago
  By doing well, you mean they’ve reached a user base that is 0.00001% the size of Google (feel free to “actually…” me with the correct number of zeroes). If we want the productivity unlock of search (and AI) to be accessible to the entire world and not just to niche internet nerds who live and work online all day, we probably are going to get ads again. I’m sorry that this is true and has always been true. OpenAI is just a few years from admitting this themselves. Even if they reach 100 million paid users at $20/m, it’s not enough to stay competitive given competition will offer a free product that shows ads to monetize the other 5 billion AI users on earth in addition to a pro subscription tier and will always have the superior model. Not all humans are the same as you and care about the same stuff enough to pay for it, I know, it’s upsetting. But this is reality. And its better for the world. It helps the most people in a sustainable way.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    I don’t think ads fundamentally help people.
    - pembrook 2y ago
      Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however. Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        I agree except when it is overwhelming. ads are so prevalent these days that many brains (mine included) look at every ad as a scam
        adaptbrian 2y ago
        It just depends where you consume media. I've never felt so unreachable (via ads) online in 25 years of using the internet for play and work.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Kagi has a very tiny user base and is barely growing. But they're paying their own bills, at least.
  - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    …unlike many "growing" "successful" "businesses".
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      Can't argue that the people don't stay very busy, even if the company is just leaking investor money.
- anothername12 2y ago
  I would like to use Kagi if it had some kind of anonymous searching
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
devsda 2y ago
> for all the complaining about ads, There are couple of main complaints about ads: 1. Too many of them plastered all over in least expected places. 2. All that is done to privacy in the name of accurate profiling and targeting. 3. Malicious and misleading ads. Should we accept that ad based industry can't survive without resorting to any of the above ?
- bostik 2y ago
  You're asking the wrong question. Maybe we should be asking whether the ad industry deserves to survive if they have to (or choose to) resort to stalking and surveillance that would have made Stasi jealous. It may not be possible to do anything about ads being misleading - marketing is just another word for lying and deception, after all.[ß] For everything else you listed, I put together a tolerable set of behaviours a ~decade ago: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html ; and if that makes online advertising a lot more expensive, well... have you considered that maybe the obnoxious, intrusive, scummy and/or malicious ads are everywhere because advertising is too cheap? ß: fine, maybe some miniscule fraction (< 0.01%) are factual. I consider numbers of that magnitude rounding errors.
  - zx8080 2y ago
    > have you considered that maybe the obnoxious, intrusive, scummy and/or malicious ads are everywhere because advertising is too cheap? On contrary, probably the ads became so expensive that only scam can afford it.
    - bostik 2y ago
      So as a third-order effect, advertising industry would immolate themselves into extinction when having ads out would immediately telegraph to everyone "I am not to be trusted, stay away"? I think I could live with that.
rhubarbtree 2y ago
ChatGPT has ten million paying users.
- chgs 2y ago
  And at some point someone will say “we can increase revenue 10% by putting ads in” and the goose will survive because most people dont care I cancelled prime and stopped sending amazon about £600 a year when they added adverts. They don’t care because 100 other people didn’t and they got an extra £10 a year from pushing them adverts. Companies can’t resist the double dip, and the majority don’t care.
  - rhubarbtree 2y ago
    I hate the double dip. Apple seem to have resisted it, to be fair.
    - knowriju 2y ago
      Did they ? AppleTV has, but the AppStore sure hasn't.
      - rhubarbtree 2y ago
        The App Store has adverts?
pdntspa 2y ago
Because ads suck and they need to die
tomjen3 2y ago
That would be fine, and it's a good observation, but checking out the Perplexity website, I don't see an exception for the pro version, which means right now I'm paying $20/month to get what is now unreliable search with ads...
omnicognate 2y ago
I don't get your point. I pay for services wherever I can, including search and AI, and see few adverts online despite not using a blocker. The main source of ads I see is in news articles when following links from places like HN, which is because the news industry hasn't developed the microtransactions mechanism it would need to allow readers to pay while retaining the experience of being able to follow links freely to many sources without having to maintain subscriptions to huge numbers of paywalled sites they only occasionally read. I live in hope that they will eventually do so, though. The only flogging I've seen has been of Google for daring to offer a way of paying to use Youtube without ads, but clearly the whining on social media hasn't prevented it being economically viable as they're still offering it ten years later.
- franga2000 2y ago
  I haven't heard many bad things about Youtube Premium on its own, besides all the jokes people were making back when it was called Youtube Red (hahah redtube...). The way they seemingly randomly have a family plan in some countries but not in other is very annoying and the bundling of Youtube Music is problematic from a fair competition standpoint, but that's about it. It's not that expensive for what you get, it removes ads which are the worst thing about Youtube and it ends us giving more money to the creators you watch compared to if you just watched the ads. What's not to like?
  - omnicognate 2y ago
    > I haven't heard many bad things about Youtube Premium on its own Just now on r/popular: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1htc0ec/ill_die_a_slow_death_before_i_ever_get_youtube/ https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1htc0ec/ill_die_a_slo... Posts like this come up regularly. The responses seem to have shifted over the last couple of years, with most now pointing out how dumb complaining about ads while refusing to pay is, but there are still plenty of people agreeing, and a strangely angry "how dare you not provide this service free!" vibe to them.
- wintermutestwin 2y ago
  I’d pay for youtube in a heartbeat IF they weren’t double dipping and stealing my data (which is now much more valuable to them because they can associate my data with PII).
elorant 2y ago
You're oversimplifying the narrative. It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. Make ads contextual like they used to be and there's no problem at all, actually they might turn to be interesting. Keep tracking me all over the web and you grow the desire in me to block the living shit out of everything.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. I couldn't care less about tracking. No, the reason I block malvertisements is because they are malicious. Malvertisements are viruses and you cannot convince me otherwise, I cannot find any difference. Blocking malvertisements are a matter of fucking safety. What? We're talking about advertisements? No, all advertisements are malvertisements.
- jasode 2y ago
  >It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. No, people are irritated by just the existence of ads -- with-or-without the tracking. E.g. the "native" advertising of sponsors embedded in Youtube videos or podcasts have no technical way to track the audience and yet people are still annoyed such that they use Sponsorblock to get rid of it. https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock Lots of ads-without-tracking still anger people. The commercials interrupting the tv and radio broadcasts, the ugly billboards around the city, etc. What gp is saying is that most of them would still listen to the radio "for free with the ads" rather pay extra for ad-free Sirius XM music or ad-free Spotify subscription. That majority preference is why ad-funded businesses dominate the paid-membership business models.
  - onemoresoop 2y ago
    If only ads were expensive to display there’s be a lot less and probably people would be okay with them. The sheer amount make them unbearable to many. Remember magazines people were paying for had ads and people didn’t hate them?
  - lolinder 2y ago
nottorp 2y ago
> consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. Let's try again. Very few services that ask for "the price of a Starbucks coffee" subscription are actually worth that much to consumers. Search or not search. As long as the service providers don't understand that, they'll be limited in audience to high income techies and won't be able to grow any further.
- LunaSea 2y ago
  Subscription prices are also determined by overal company costs. And until users understand that, they will continue being tracked and shown advertisement.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > are also determined by overal company costs In the average tech case (maybe not Kagi but definitely a lot of others) by managers fighting for dominance by increasing their departments head count. And generally speaking, aren't you supposed to charge what the market will bear? What has that to do with costs?
    - LunaSea 2y ago
      > In the average tech case (maybe not Kagi but definitely a lot of others) by managers fighting for dominance by increasing their departments head count Sure, that can happen. > And generally speaking, aren't you supposed to charge what the market will bear? What has that to do with costs? Because if you can't recoup your costs you're in the red and will have to close down soon?
ryukoposting 2y ago
Do consumers refuse to pay for search, or has nobody asked them if they'd want to? Kagi is well-known on HN, but I guarantee my parents have never heard of it. I told my wife about it the other day, and she had never heard of it either. She thought it was a cool idea. $10/month is just too much. Sure, YellowPages had lots of ads. Hell, PCMag was ~35% ads. The difference was that their ads were clearly labeled and physically distinct from the actual content. They didn't camoflauge the ads to make them blend into the rest of the page layout. Advertisers occasionally tried, sure, but the layout would still be visibly different. Ads on the web are more insidious, and more intrusive.
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  No hate to Kagi, but my non-techie friends would laugh at my face if I suggested them to pay for a search engine. Us, people in engineering and web tech operate in a fairly different mindset. Ads piss us off more than the average people, who have accepted it throughout the years.
  - freediver 2y ago
    Send them this https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html many people have started thinking differently after reading it. Trend wise I think it is like organic food - 30 years ago, many of us laughed at paying extra for it ("what's wrong with regular food?") But over time we started caring what we feed our bodies. The same shift is happening with information. It will not happen over night but we're starting to care more about the quality (and incentives) of what we feed our minds.
    - tokioyoyo 2y ago
      None of the things in the list is a dealbreaker for an average consumer. By the way, I used to pay for Kagi as well, so I get it from my perspective. For other people? Not so much.
  - physicsguy 2y ago
borg16 2y ago
i think it comes down to: 1. the majority user base does not care and/or is not willing to pay for the ads 2. these platforms/products do not want to cater to the minority that cares about their privacy and not being exposed to any advertising
wkat4242 2y ago
The phone book in my country didn't have ads (well, except for descriptions of the phone company's services). It was just paid by the subscriptions. There was only one state owned phone company.
- eesmith 2y ago
  Here's an example of a US phone book from the 1980s, https://archive.org/details/1981-12-mc-lean-county-phone-book/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1981-12-mc-lean-county-phone-boo... . It has two sections, typically called 'white pages' and 'yellow pages' because the paper for the latter was tinted yellow. The white pages had subscriber phone numbers, listed alphabetically, with no advertising except that one could pay extra to have the entry in bold, to grab attention. The yellow pages were for business numbers, arranged by topic. A business could buy ad space to put on the same page as the topic. In the linked-to example, the white and yellow pages were in the same book. In a more populated area, the two would be separate books, and in larger cities even two books for the white pages and one for the yellow.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Ah yeah for us they were always different, and by different publishers too. The funny thing was that the yellow pages used to be printed on yellow paper but they switched to white with a lot of yellow printing ink because some advertisers wanted to use white in their ads :) The yellow pages used to be called "the golden guide" here.

paulryanrogers 2y ago

Alternatives would be nice, and I'd agree the future doesn't have to be entirely one solution or entirely without certain others. Many states have laws limiting billboards or posters to avoid obscuring nature and stop them from littering their communities. My hope is we can reign in the fraud and rampant escalation of ads, even if it means paying a bit more monetarily or trading a bit more privacy. So long as there is transparency and safety.

chrisweekly 2y ago

Yet Kagi is doing well, and I'm very happy to pay a few bucks a month to be their customer instead of their product.

Spivak 2y ago
You won't ever get big with this scheme but you can be sustainable.
- Tostino 2y ago
  There should be more people striving for sustainable businesses IMO.
  - edanm 2y ago
    This is a very common sentiment on HN, but... why? I don't get it. It's not like there aren't people focused on sustainable businesses. 90% of businesses are probably SMBs - just not in tech. For most people in the world, the word entrepreneur means "someone who's opening a McDonalds across the street" or "someone opening a pizza shop". Even in tech, there are plenty of not-hypergrowth companies around (I run a small dev shop, for example). The reason we here are exposed more to VC-style startups is because a) they make more news, for obvious reasons, but also b) there are structural reasons in tech that favor that style of company, most importantly because software itself is scalable in a way that most things aren't.
    - Tostino 2y ago
      I'm not against using tech's natural advantages with scale - that's one of the beauties of software. My concern is with the disproportionate resources being poured into hyper-growth ventures, where the vast majority fail after burning through enormous amounts of capital. If even a fraction of that talent and investment was redirected toward building sustainable businesses that create real value, rather than just competing for finite resources like user attention or market domination, I believe the tech industry, the tech workers, and society would benefit more in the long run.
      - edanm 2y ago
        First, I think VC makes up a tiny percentage of invested capital, so I'm not sure the intuition of "so much money is thrown at it" is right. There's far, far more capital and talent in e.g. traditional non-software businesses, finance, government, etc. Just look at places like Google, which has 180k employees. Not all are tech/innovation talent, necessarily, but that's probably more than most new startups combined. In any case, I'm not sure I trust you, me or anyone to be smarter about how to get innovation than our current relatively-free-market capitalistic system, where there's actually pretty good incentives to pursue innovation. Look at how many things today that absolutely improve our world have been created through this messy process. It's apparently monetarily worth it to have 95 failed startups in order to get 5 ones that change the world, and that's probably a good thing for society, because the world is better than it war 20 years ago in terms of technology/innovation. (The world is worse in other ways, and a different criticism of tech is that some of it can also be negative for society, but that's a separate concern than it being wasteful, which I just don't agree with.)
        Retric 2y ago
        VC funded companies are into the trillions of total investment (100+B / year adds up). That’s a small but meaningful fraction of global wealth for such a tiny slice of companies. It’s not that these are necessarily bad investments, but growth at any cost tends to suck up a lot more talent than the business actually justifies. Of course the industry is mostly dumb investments. Looking back Google+ was part of a wave of social websites that didn’t really go anywhere. Facebook was founded in 04, Twitter in 06, but in 2011 suddenly everyone wants in on the action… The wave of crypto was similarly almost pure waste but most VC firms aren’t really about wise investment. It’s about charging high fees for funds under managed, they succeed when someone invests not when companies become profitable.
  - dmje 2y ago
    As founder of a 15 year micro consultancy I'm nodding along. We've chosen quite deliberately not to grow. I don't want staff or huge wads of cash, I don't want to be rich; I want a gentle, family focused, sustainable, comfortable life. Why grow and face all the stress of growing when I'm perfectly happy with things as they are? Kagi: I use and pay for it and I love it. I'm very hopeful that they have made something excellent - each time I dip into Google with a !g (and it's becoming more and more rare!) I'm horrified by the clusterfuck it's now become. The clean, simple, accurate results of Kagi are fresh air and well worth paying for. I've seen the founder say on many occasions that they're not aiming to be "a Google killer" and I'm glad. With scale comes inevitable enshittification. I just hope their business model is enough to support a thriving - but small - business.
  - DannyBee 2y ago
    SMBs have roughly the same characteristics even when they do that. That is, the vast majority still fail, most do not make enough profit to come close to sustainability, and the 80-90% of revenue is earned by the top 10% of SMBs Even if you go through the data and try to restrict it to some definition of "not going to be an obvious failure" it's not pretty. It is a fascinating read though. So while I agree with your sentiment it does not seem to help much in practice.
- fweimer 2y ago
  For Kagi, there is a big question mark around the availability of the third-party search API endpoints they rely on. If search evolves further and further away from textual matching, that will impact them as well. (For search providers, it could be commercially reasonable to replace more or less traditional document indexing with a way to synthesize responses—at a very high level similar to what some analytical tools for time series do.) I hope that by then, they have deployed their own crawlers and indices, so that there's still an alternative, rather than merely adopting the latest industry trends.
scarface_74 2y ago
Kagi has around 200K subscribers. I wouldn’t call that “doing well”. Edit: that should be 29K subscribers
- Spivak 2y ago
  Do you mean 20k? I doubt they 10x'd growth since January. For a bootstrapped business whose end-goal is sustainability that's doing great. When you don't have shareholders breathing down your neck for exponential returns the calculus changes.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Yep typo - 20K - fixing. I always thought Kagi was still the old Mac focused company that enabled independent software makers to collect payments from customers. I didn’t realize that the old company had been out of business for years until I heard the founder interview on the Talk Show podcast https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416 https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416
    - gcanyon 2y ago
      I knew Key back in the day, and I feel a twinge for him every time kagi comes up on HN.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        The full story of what happened to the original kagi https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling-prey-to-fraud https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling... And relevant to this submission. I couldn’t find any information on Google, I used the paid version of ChatGPT that has had web search for almost two years
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hosteur 2y ago
wrasee 2y ago
Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing. But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter. I can't help feel that when the competition is free - and on precisely the recognition that people don't pay for search - that a more aggressive $2 tier for personal customers could get a much wider penumbra of folk such as myself over the line, rather than be yet another $5 service that when applied consistently actually start to add up.
- masa331 2y ago
  I also pay for Kagi and i'v never been happier with my searches. It's so nice not to have to slog through Google bullshit results. Kagi results are great and you can tweak the behaviour deeply to your liking. I'm also proud to support an alternative from a smaller company with same beliefs instead of Google who does a lot of damage to the medium i love be it ads or Chrome. So the few bucks are a no brainer. It's the same as paying for any other monthly subscription
- xigoi 2y ago
  According to Kagi, they can’t make the price much lower and still be profitable.
  - wrasee 2y ago
    If they get 100x the customers on a $2 tier than a $5 tier then yes, they can be profitable. The question is, could they get 100x? Or even 10x? I don’t know, and I assume they’ve done their homework and believe that they can’t. I just wonder, what if they’re wrong?
    - TylerE 2y ago
      It if supporting each customer costs them, say, $2.50
    - 2y ago
pembrook 2y ago
By doing well, you mean they’ve reached a user base that is 0.00001% the size of Google (feel free to “actually…” me with the correct number of zeroes). If we want the productivity unlock of search (and AI) to be accessible to the entire world and not just to niche internet nerds who live and work online all day, we probably are going to get ads again. I’m sorry that this is true and has always been true. OpenAI is just a few years from admitting this themselves. Even if they reach 100 million paid users at $20/m, it’s not enough to stay competitive given competition will offer a free product that shows ads to monetize the other 5 billion AI users on earth in addition to a pro subscription tier and will always have the superior model. Not all humans are the same as you and care about the same stuff enough to pay for it, I know, it’s upsetting. But this is reality. And its better for the world. It helps the most people in a sustainable way.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I don’t think ads fundamentally help people.
  - pembrook 2y ago
    Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however. Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      I agree except when it is overwhelming. ads are so prevalent these days that many brains (mine included) look at every ad as a scam
      - adaptbrian 2y ago
        It just depends where you consume media. I've never felt so unreachable (via ads) online in 25 years of using the internet for play and work.
carlosjobim 2y ago
Kagi has a very tiny user base and is barely growing. But they're paying their own bills, at least.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  …unlike many "growing" "successful" "businesses".
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Can't argue that the people don't stay very busy, even if the company is just leaking investor money.
anothername12 2y ago
I would like to use Kagi if it had some kind of anonymous searching

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

devsda 2y ago

> for all the complaining about ads, There are couple of main complaints about ads: 1. Too many of them plastered all over in least expected places. 2. All that is done to privacy in the name of accurate profiling and targeting. 3. Malicious and misleading ads. Should we accept that ad based industry can't survive without resorting to any of the above ?

bostik 2y ago
You're asking the wrong question. Maybe we should be asking whether the ad industry deserves to survive if they have to (or choose to) resort to stalking and surveillance that would have made Stasi jealous. It may not be possible to do anything about ads being misleading - marketing is just another word for lying and deception, after all.[ß] For everything else you listed, I put together a tolerable set of behaviours a ~decade ago: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html ; and if that makes online advertising a lot more expensive, well... have you considered that maybe the obnoxious, intrusive, scummy and/or malicious ads are everywhere because advertising is too cheap? ß: fine, maybe some miniscule fraction (< 0.01%) are factual. I consider numbers of that magnitude rounding errors.
- zx8080 2y ago
  > have you considered that maybe the obnoxious, intrusive, scummy and/or malicious ads are everywhere because advertising is too cheap? On contrary, probably the ads became so expensive that only scam can afford it.
  - bostik 2y ago
    So as a third-order effect, advertising industry would immolate themselves into extinction when having ads out would immediately telegraph to everyone "I am not to be trusted, stay away"? I think I could live with that.

rhubarbtree 2y ago

ChatGPT has ten million paying users.

chgs 2y ago
And at some point someone will say “we can increase revenue 10% by putting ads in” and the goose will survive because most people dont care I cancelled prime and stopped sending amazon about £600 a year when they added adverts. They don’t care because 100 other people didn’t and they got an extra £10 a year from pushing them adverts. Companies can’t resist the double dip, and the majority don’t care.
- rhubarbtree 2y ago
  I hate the double dip. Apple seem to have resisted it, to be fair.
  - knowriju 2y ago
    Did they ? AppleTV has, but the AppStore sure hasn't.
    - rhubarbtree 2y ago
      The App Store has adverts?

pdntspa 2y ago

Because ads suck and they need to die

tomjen3 2y ago

That would be fine, and it's a good observation, but checking out the Perplexity website, I don't see an exception for the pro version, which means right now I'm paying $20/month to get what is now unreliable search with ads...

omnicognate 2y ago

I don't get your point. I pay for services wherever I can, including search and AI, and see few adverts online despite not using a blocker. The main source of ads I see is in news articles when following links from places like HN, which is because the news industry hasn't developed the microtransactions mechanism it would need to allow readers to pay while retaining the experience of being able to follow links freely to many sources without having to maintain subscriptions to huge numbers of paywalled sites they only occasionally read. I live in hope that they will eventually do so, though. The only flogging I've seen has been of Google for daring to offer a way of paying to use Youtube without ads, but clearly the whining on social media hasn't prevented it being economically viable as they're still offering it ten years later.

franga2000 2y ago
I haven't heard many bad things about Youtube Premium on its own, besides all the jokes people were making back when it was called Youtube Red (hahah redtube...). The way they seemingly randomly have a family plan in some countries but not in other is very annoying and the bundling of Youtube Music is problematic from a fair competition standpoint, but that's about it. It's not that expensive for what you get, it removes ads which are the worst thing about Youtube and it ends us giving more money to the creators you watch compared to if you just watched the ads. What's not to like?
- omnicognate 2y ago
  > I haven't heard many bad things about Youtube Premium on its own Just now on r/popular: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1htc0ec/ill_die_a_slow_death_before_i_ever_get_youtube/ https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1htc0ec/ill_die_a_slo... Posts like this come up regularly. The responses seem to have shifted over the last couple of years, with most now pointing out how dumb complaining about ads while refusing to pay is, but there are still plenty of people agreeing, and a strangely angry "how dare you not provide this service free!" vibe to them.
wintermutestwin 2y ago
I’d pay for youtube in a heartbeat IF they weren’t double dipping and stealing my data (which is now much more valuable to them because they can associate my data with PII).

elorant 2y ago

You're oversimplifying the narrative. It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. Make ads contextual like they used to be and there's no problem at all, actually they might turn to be interesting. Keep tracking me all over the web and you grow the desire in me to block the living shit out of everything.

Dalewyn 2y ago
>It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. I couldn't care less about tracking. No, the reason I block malvertisements is because they are malicious. Malvertisements are viruses and you cannot convince me otherwise, I cannot find any difference. Blocking malvertisements are a matter of fucking safety. What? We're talking about advertisements? No, all advertisements are malvertisements.
jasode 2y ago
>It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. No, people are irritated by just the existence of ads -- with-or-without the tracking. E.g. the "native" advertising of sponsors embedded in Youtube videos or podcasts have no technical way to track the audience and yet people are still annoyed such that they use Sponsorblock to get rid of it. https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock Lots of ads-without-tracking still anger people. The commercials interrupting the tv and radio broadcasts, the ugly billboards around the city, etc. What gp is saying is that most of them would still listen to the radio "for free with the ads" rather pay extra for ad-free Sirius XM music or ad-free Spotify subscription. That majority preference is why ad-funded businesses dominate the paid-membership business models.
- onemoresoop 2y ago
  If only ads were expensive to display there’s be a lot less and probably people would be okay with them. The sheer amount make them unbearable to many. Remember magazines people were paying for had ads and people didn’t hate them?
- lolinder 2y ago

nottorp 2y ago

> consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. Let's try again. Very few services that ask for "the price of a Starbucks coffee" subscription are actually worth that much to consumers. Search or not search. As long as the service providers don't understand that, they'll be limited in audience to high income techies and won't be able to grow any further.

LunaSea 2y ago
Subscription prices are also determined by overal company costs. And until users understand that, they will continue being tracked and shown advertisement.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > are also determined by overal company costs In the average tech case (maybe not Kagi but definitely a lot of others) by managers fighting for dominance by increasing their departments head count. And generally speaking, aren't you supposed to charge what the market will bear? What has that to do with costs?
  - LunaSea 2y ago
    > In the average tech case (maybe not Kagi but definitely a lot of others) by managers fighting for dominance by increasing their departments head count Sure, that can happen. > And generally speaking, aren't you supposed to charge what the market will bear? What has that to do with costs? Because if you can't recoup your costs you're in the red and will have to close down soon?

ryukoposting 2y ago

Do consumers refuse to pay for search, or has nobody asked them if they'd want to? Kagi is well-known on HN, but I guarantee my parents have never heard of it. I told my wife about it the other day, and she had never heard of it either. She thought it was a cool idea. $10/month is just too much. Sure, YellowPages had lots of ads. Hell, PCMag was ~35% ads. The difference was that their ads were clearly labeled and physically distinct from the actual content. They didn't camoflauge the ads to make them blend into the rest of the page layout. Advertisers occasionally tried, sure, but the layout would still be visibly different. Ads on the web are more insidious, and more intrusive.

tokioyoyo 2y ago
No hate to Kagi, but my non-techie friends would laugh at my face if I suggested them to pay for a search engine. Us, people in engineering and web tech operate in a fairly different mindset. Ads piss us off more than the average people, who have accepted it throughout the years.
- freediver 2y ago
  Send them this https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html many people have started thinking differently after reading it. Trend wise I think it is like organic food - 30 years ago, many of us laughed at paying extra for it ("what's wrong with regular food?") But over time we started caring what we feed our bodies. The same shift is happening with information. It will not happen over night but we're starting to care more about the quality (and incentives) of what we feed our minds.
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    None of the things in the list is a dealbreaker for an average consumer. By the way, I used to pay for Kagi as well, so I get it from my perspective. For other people? Not so much.
- physicsguy 2y ago

borg16 2y ago

i think it comes down to: 1. the majority user base does not care and/or is not willing to pay for the ads 2. these platforms/products do not want to cater to the minority that cares about their privacy and not being exposed to any advertising

wkat4242 2y ago

The phone book in my country didn't have ads (well, except for descriptions of the phone company's services). It was just paid by the subscriptions. There was only one state owned phone company.

eesmith 2y ago
Here's an example of a US phone book from the 1980s, https://archive.org/details/1981-12-mc-lean-county-phone-book/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1981-12-mc-lean-county-phone-boo... . It has two sections, typically called 'white pages' and 'yellow pages' because the paper for the latter was tinted yellow. The white pages had subscriber phone numbers, listed alphabetically, with no advertising except that one could pay extra to have the entry in bold, to grab attention. The yellow pages were for business numbers, arranged by topic. A business could buy ad space to put on the same page as the topic. In the linked-to example, the white and yellow pages were in the same book. In a more populated area, the two would be separate books, and in larger cities even two books for the white pages and one for the yellow.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Ah yeah for us they were always different, and by different publishers too. The funny thing was that the yellow pages used to be printed on yellow paper but they switched to white with a lot of yellow printing ink because some advertisers wanted to use white in their ads :) The yellow pages used to be called "the golden guide" here.