Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.
Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:
- Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
- “Lenses”, which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
- All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type “!yt” in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
- Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more
This blog post goes into full details about Kagi’s capabilities.
They probably have a lot of potential infrastructure savings. $1/80 searches is an absolutely astronomical cost.
I’m imagining there are quite a few gains they can get by way of optimization, different technologies, and optimizing hot paths to bring that number down.
It really depends how they built this thing. For instance, if they built this on the AWS ecosystem, using more than straight compute/K8, their costs are going to be an actual order of magnitude higher than if they didn’t.