13 ms·

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.

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
  To be fair I’m in tech and I’m always baffled at people throwing £10 a month at subscriptions for things like productivity tools that seem to offer little real benefit.
wkat4242 2y ago
I won't pay for search either. I just filter the ads out like I do with every website. I also have SearXNG in between. I'm kinda hoping it'll get domain ranking like Kagi though. That would make it perfect (as well as integrating with my home AI which already works to some extent) I don't really care about the sustainability of business models. And really, Google is not about search. It's an advertising company.
XajniN 2y ago
I subscribe to Kagi as well, and I find it much better than Bing and Google I used before, but I don’t know anyone else IRL who would even consider paying for a search engine. And, since I started using Perplexity, I barely use even Kagi. Since the responses are based on search results, they are mostly void of hallucinations, and they save me time from reading unnecessary fluff on the web.

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
To be fair I’m in tech and I’m always baffled at people throwing £10 a month at subscriptions for things like productivity tools that seem to offer little real benefit.

wkat4242 2y ago

I won't pay for search either. I just filter the ads out like I do with every website. I also have SearXNG in between. I'm kinda hoping it'll get domain ranking like Kagi though. That would make it perfect (as well as integrating with my home AI which already works to some extent) I don't really care about the sustainability of business models. And really, Google is not about search. It's an advertising company.

XajniN 2y ago

I subscribe to Kagi as well, and I find it much better than Bing and Google I used before, but I don’t know anyone else IRL who would even consider paying for a search engine. And, since I started using Perplexity, I barely use even Kagi. Since the responses are based on search results, they are mostly void of hallucinations, and they save me time from reading unnecessary fluff on the web.