What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?
What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?
Wow. I don’t mind paying for stuff if it’s good. But seriously $5/month seems pretty expensive, and you only get 300 searches. $25 for unlimited searches, which seems like an insane amount of money.
The problem here is so many people are used to tech running at a loss on the books and/subsiding operating costs by selling customer data and analytics.
The reality is running tech companies is hard and expensive. The money here goes straight back into development. It’s just out of beta since march, and they have increased their quotas since I have been a customer.
But people are spoiled by free where you aren’t a customer. You are the product. If you are cool with that it’s fine. This isn’t the product for you.
For me, I like the idea and the searches are better than DDG/bing and startpage/google. So it’s worth the cost personally. I would rather pay that than say…Amazon prime where I’m both the customer and the product.
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-orion-public-beta
I mean yes I agree with all your points. But I stand by the assertion that it’s too expensive. I could handle $5/month, perhaps, but 300 searches is waaaay too few. That’s 10 per day. I did 10 searches this morning before I got out of bed.
For unlimited searches it’s twice the cost of a streaming service. Yet it has negligible bandwidth costs, and significantly less storage cost, probably less development cost. Sure a small user base too, but at that price they’re really going to struggle to grow it!
It’s really just too expensive.
At $10 it’s 1000 unique searches. I search a ton and have it on my phone etc. haven’t exceeded the limit. I am at 600 searches right now, with a renewal due on the 24th.
They are writing a search engine from scratch. They don’t just randomize bing or google searches. So I think you may be underestimating the operating and especially development costs, probably hosting costs too.
But to each his own. Also those streaming services you mention. They don’t really turn a profit, and definitely don’t on subscriptions.
1000 is more reasonable but it’s still only 33 per day. I’ve done 52 searches today. $10 is still way too much.
How much better would a search engine have to be to make it worth the cost of a streaming service? For me, quite a lot…
But yeah I don’t mean to say your choice to pay for it isn’t valid. As you say, to each their own.
Understandable.
I think my point is for me and in my specific use case, I actually search less.
For example if I am debugging a process or working through some setup, I will often have to iterate through a series of searches with tweaks in DDg and sometimes even google. Using tweaks like site:some site.com, quoted portions of queries to reduce useless returns etc.
Kagi, again for me, had helped reduce that. I can’t often find a very quality source in the first query or two.
So the limit wasnt hugely a problem. I was actually VERY concerned like you because above 10 dollars is pretty steep. I initially signed up at 10, set limits not to exceed 15 and figured I would cancel and either submit a request at work for an annual or just ditch it.
Luckily two things happened that retained me. The first I already mentioned. The second was they bumped the quota to 1000.
Again I may still jsut see if I can get work to pay it out. But at 10 bucks it’s digestible, for me, for the value add. I also do no filtering. Just search whatever random shit I think of n the shitter in addition to curated work searches.
I’m not trying to sway you. Idgaf if you use it or not. Just trying to help provide useful information because for me, it was more “ehhh let’s see how it works out”
Finally, I have reached out to Vlad about suggestions and even corrections on things, both in the product and ancillaries (like their documentation). He’s responded each time and even corrected some of the issues. Which is really nice.
I could actually see myself paying for the $25/mo option and leveraging that into a “free” alt-google that slurps up all your data for me to monitize however I can. Be sure to keep an eye out for it! :D
They are using Google and a few other engines, but unlike Searx, they are using the official API instead of scraping, which is a big part of costs
But the problem is that this is what it costs for a search that doesn’t sell your data or advertise to you. Search is expensive.
Fortunately you do get into the habit of just searching sites directly, like wikipedia, MDN, archwiki, etc., rather than using up your general purpose searches.
It’s this, or sell your data to Google for free searches.
And maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s just not sustainable for searched to be paid, but Kagi is really transparent about their pricing. It’s just expensive unless it’s subsidized by ads or data collection.
I will personally always be against any paywalls on information but to each their own I guess.
The free trial with a 100 searches makes it pretty easy to figure out how much you actually search online and if you’re not a power user, that 300 searches plan is pretty OK. If you work in tech, that 10$ plan is definitely enough - in searching pretty much constantly and never got above the 800 searches the 10$ plan used to offer (now that plan has 1000 searches in it).
Not sure where you are, but there’s practically no place in the US you get a lunch for that. In flat terms it’s quite cheep. It’s only expensive relative to free.
And when you think about it, your search service really is your internet. It shapes your whole internet experience. If that’s not worth $5/month to make sure it’s good and not polluted with ads, I don’t know what to tell you.
Problem is, 300 searches is 10 per day. I’ve done 52 today. To cover that I’d be paying $25 per month.
I you could have Spotify and Netflix for that.
If I’d paid their $5 rate and done 52 searches every day they’d have billed me $63 in overage charges.
Their pricing model seems insane to me.
((52x30)-1000)0.015 is $8.40 over the $10 plan. You wouldn’t need the $25 plan yet.
And 52 is a huge number. I’d bet you could cut that in half easily.
$5 is fine. 300 seems low. I wonder how many searches I actually do in a month.
I wasn’t sure ethor. My first month (last month), I used just over 180. This month might break 200, I have 5 days left. So I’m good.
300 searches per day??
No. Per month.
Those prices don’t seem super horrible, but I don’t see any reason to trust that this company isn’t mining and selling my data in addition to collecting my money.