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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search page I'm not gonna use it.

Assuming that people don't clear their cookies is wrong nowadays. Even when your website is a little snowflake, the rest of the web isn't.

I honestly would recommend a Web Extension that adds your search as a search provider, or something like an Open Search Description.

Also: the landing page of GitHub annoys the shit out of me. Every damn time. I don't wanna register with three clicks if I already have an account.

Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups...otherwise those regular users won't be happy. Any company should focus on keeping the regular users happy (UX wise) and not focus on one time trial registrations that will be a burden on infrastructure.

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I get the impression that startups get something like a 10x multiplier in kudos, stock options, chances for a next round, (pick your reward) etc for signing up a new user than for a repeat visitor logging in. The former means growth; the latter doesn't. Hence it's always easier to find the signup button than the login button.

Fucked up incentive structures like this are why we cannot have nice things.

Having users that want to return is objectively good. We've just taken this to the wrong conclusions.

I strongly suspect that this has to do with attribution and shallow "data driven" choices - there is a heavy bias towards things that are easier to measure. Especially in startups with limited resources.

Measuring retained users regardless of anonymous/known state is very hard and lossy. So the nearest easy to measure analog that is often picked is logged-in users and we start the fucked up cycle you mention.

Similar things happen around all metrics that have to do with retention. We know that a better experience through higher performance and better UX is likely to create happier users that return... but we cannot prove it (easily) so we focus on optimizing other things.

The minute something becomes a KPI it is no longer a useful KPI.

I've been in more product meetings that have uttered a phrase like "we will work out what to do with all these users later" than I care to count. It really is a startup goal to sign-up as many users as possible. In most cases it is literally a metric for the next funding round ("Last quarter we had 100k signups!" Is a very attractive soundbite at the round table)

That's how extreme shortsightedness looks like.

The number of users you lose by doing that is smaller than the number you gain as long as you don't have enough users (and spends enough on publicity). This is also the one thing that limits the number of users a company will ever have on most cases.

I don't even mind logging in, but it does seem weird to force it before letting potential customers interact with the product. Why not just prompt for registration when personalization features are used?

What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher")

That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage.

In my opinion, the price for this kind of product should be more in the realm of $50/year. I'm thinking a price closer to what password managers charge.

This price also will need to be adjusted for global customers if that is the eventual intention. Spotify in India costs less than $1.50 a month.

The goal of Kagi is not to be a mass market product, but a premium search engine, offering best in class search product experience with top privacy guarantee (as the business model does not require fiddling with your data in bad ways). Search is arguably one of the most important activities we do every day both in personal and work setting. Unique Kagi features should be well worth the cost.

It is also an independent company, bootstrapped by the founder, without a ton of VC money to subsidize the cost. And at $10/mo per user it would be barely breaking even, if at all. So there are a lot of factors of play, and I completely understand why $10/mo may sound excessive given all the free alternatives out there. It is just one of the many uphill battles we are fighting ;)

I definitely understand where you're coming from. One can make the argument that a search engine is used with an incredible amount of frequency for most people – dozens of times per day. It should be worth a lot.

One thing that's great about search engines in terms of entrepreneurship fundamentals is that is is such a massive market. You only need a fraction of a percent to be a viable business, I'm sure.

I can also understand how underpricing a product can be a big mistake. Somebody who wants this kind of product has already made the conscious decision to pay. Pricing a product too low can be a signal that it's not a good product.

Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. People are mostly not willing to pay for it, even businesses don't want to anymore. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SaaS products with very low levels of complexity pulling in a lot more than $0.

If it's truly barely breaking even at $10/month, that fascinates me. It must mean that search engines have to do a lot of computing.

In any event, I wish you the best, because the features do look cool. I like the idea of being able to set site preferences (e.g., when I search for a movie I might like to see Wikipedia over IMDB).

> Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free.

Spot on. Not that long ago we used to pay for OS, even beta versions of OS. Nowadays, most complex software products imaginable, like OS, browser, search engine, social networking... - are all free, and over the years we as a society have been slowly drawn into an expectation of these to be free. Of course someone or something is paying for it, as all these also "magically" generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And when someone shows up with an idea to actually sell such product and tries to create a business where user is also the customer, and incentives between the user and the business are aligned, they are usually looked at with a raised eyebrow.

I am personally of the opinion that you always get what you pay for and that one should not shy away from paying and supporting products they love. I hope we are building one such product, that some people (and admittedly you need to be a little different to use and pay for Kagi) will fall in love with.

The more expensive it is the better it will have to be relative to free alternatives though.

Is it that you're doing a large amount of compute per search which yields better results but higher cost per search?

If it really starts to take off I think you should consider lowering the price. Initially I understand a higher price is required to be able to cover expenses. A price that is low enough to not matter would lure more customers into the fold (if the products deliver on its promise).

tbh what your saying doesn't make sense to me vis. breaking even, unless there is some signifcant manual element to your search indexing. If this isn't the case, the revenue received from new customers should far outpace the marginal cost of supporting new customers unless you have signifcant fixed costs for some reason. I am interested in your product and will sign up for the beta and if it is quality would even be willing to pay the price if it was flawless quality, but i'd suggest doing some analysis vis. how many users you would need to reduce the price closer to somehting like $5 a month, which is far more palatable to me.

Right now you're charging nearly as much as something like Netflix, so your product has to be nearly a Netflix' worth's more value than DuckDuckGo (rather than Google as it's closer to your value proposition) for me to rationally justify the price.

Have you considered adding business or enterprise subscriptions[0]? B2B users are a lot less price sensitive[1] than consumers especially when you're competing against a free product.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781133

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13843743

Not really in a serious way, partly because I do not have an idea where would I start. Any ideas?

> Not really in a serious way, partly because I do not have an idea where would I start. Any ideas?

On premise search. Businesses have lots of resources on their internal websites, but no easy way to search them in one place. Addition of role based search, when I'm logged and search only shows me resources I have access to.

It’s unfair to compare pricing between two totally different products, especially when one of them is owned by one of the biggest companies in the world with millions of paying customers and a vast suite of products.

> What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher")

$10 a month is less than one lost hour of work.

I hope they price it around there somewhere so that many will use it but even at $20 it is a no-brainer for me.

The results are in another league compared to what I get elsewhere and by now it also feels like an insult every time I realize Google has altered my query: do you guys really think I don't know what I am doing?

Google probably works better for illiterate people these days, but in the process they have alienated me. I have lost too many hours searching for things I knew used to be there only to be ignored and corrected by their AI. It is rather patronizing at this point.

For people who cannot afford the $10, I can unironically suggest bing. It actually responds to long queries much better than google.

You should still use the website's search function first. Github issues/SO search often turns up results that google will ignore.

> $10 a month is less than one lost hour of work.

This is a pretty feeble argument for something, especially for a product where the user perception is that it should be free, and there exist multiple free options already.

While "one hour of work" might not seem a lot, a different way of looking at that is that for most people there are 160 hours of work in a month, and so this thing needs to be worth 1/160th of their life.

It's not so hard to make that choice for a couple of things that are of obvious value, but when they start adding up in your life for basic things, people will question the value of it to them, and I'd argue for most people, search just isn't worth that much to them when there are so many good free options.

>That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage.

Offtopic: That must be one of the best deals on online storage Excluding Google's enterprise unlimited storage option which always felt like they could pull the rug under you any day.

Whitelist github.com from Auto cookie clearing. Takes less time than a rant on SO. I had a guy at work ask me to store the entire state of an internal web site in the URL. He went so far to go and get his change request approved by management, resources and time allocated. When it was passed to me to implement and I dug into why he wanted this, turned out he was auto clearing his cookies. I told him to whitelist our internal website from his cookie clearing Paranoia and stop wasting my time and company money.

Wow, this guy must have some pull in the company for this to happen

> Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups...otherwise those regular users won't be happy.

This is one of the first "asshole design" moves that I recognize, that unfortunately most sites use. If the "Sign up" button (which will be used once by each user) is highlighted more than the "Sign in" button (which will be used hundreds of times), I know that your company doesn't really care about its users.

I'm surprised how common it is.

> the landing page of GitHub annoys the shit out of me. Every damn time. I don't wanna register with three clicks if I already have an account.

If you're not signed in, `Sign in` is available on literally every page in the upper right and one click takes you to the sign in box. If one click is too many just bookmark github.com/login.

If you don't want to sign in the search box is also in the upper right on every page to take you wherever you want to go.

It is expected that if you are logged in you stay logged in. Only a minority of users clear all their cookies at the end of every session. Sorry but that is true. Thus the landing page is optimised for the most common visitor, that is the one with no account yet, not the loudest complainer on a tech geek forum.

> just bookmark github.com/login

This will make me be detected as a bot and I see captchas everywhere afterwards. I was using that for a while.

A better alternative would be content identity through URLs.

If your marketing page is at github.com/index.html, then make something like github.com/dashboard.html for logged in users, and redirect them to /login.html when they are required to be logged in.

This way users can easily bookmark the page that they actually want to see.

Github already has my public ssh key so I can push/pull/clone without typing a password. Why the heck don't they support ssl client authentication so the same thing works when I use a browser? SSL client certs are an actual thing yet no web site I have ever seen uses them. Why?

Using google search without being logged in and clearing cookies regularly will constantly harass you with a very intrusive "cookie banner". Quotes because it's much more than that.

The sole purpose of these is to get you to globally log into google and stay logged in.

So I don't think it really makes much of a difference.

The sole result for me has been a pretty insistent reminder that I should not be using this service.

Agree. The routine of opting out of that every day is very important. It is a constant reminder that I absolutely need to further reduce the use of google services.

That's true in Europe but not in the US, I believe. It is indeed one of the more obnoxious cookie consent banners I've seen.

It‘s annoying as fuck but tbh I got used to it, it‘s second nature to me now.

"I don't care about cookies" + "Cookie Autodelete" add-ons solve that problem easily for me.

> Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search page I'm not gonna use it.

Curious how would you handle authenticating for a paid product on the web today?

Not the person being asked, but unless it’s for work I just don’t use it. There’s more content online than I can ever consume and if it’s a tool I need for a side project I might as well build it myself since I work on side projects solely to keep my tech skills up

Edit: I do authenticate on several paid products, but I was always introduced to them in some hassle free manner, and only got to the point of paying and dealing with adding another app to deal with maintaining after I’ve grown to like the service

You’re authenticated here? What’s the difference?

Did it after years of lurking and finally feeling like it’s worth it. This was in response to the application in question requiring authentication from the get go.

Ultimately it’s laziness, but dealing with authentication is annoying and I can’t be assed to do it for something I’m not already valuing

Not just laziness but increased attack surface for compromised credentials. Just like physical things weigh us down (spring clean or donating old stuff is liberating) so too is having another login somewhere. I wish I knew all the sites I have logins too but I dont and its frustrating, risky and worrying.

That and data being sold, haveibeenpwned gives me a larger list as the years go on from all the “secure” services who werent.

I feel bad for people making new services now who have to deal with this, but the internet isn’t new and they have to overcome our experience with all the bad behavior of shysters who operated like these apps and ended up lying about the service

I have two periods in my life. Before password manager and after password manager.

After I made the password manager a part of my routine that I trust absolutely that I never skip, all of that anxiety went away. I still have logins from the before times that I wish I could round up, but for the last ten or so years I can guarantee I know every site that I’ve signed up for.

If I had to be logged in to view HN the very first time I arrived here, I wouldn’t have bothered.

(I'm not the person being asked.)

As of now, I log in only when needed, and usually to a single account at a time, at most two.

I am willing to try new models for web search if the provider does not log any information. I'll prefer it to be stateless (other than account settings and payments).

> Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups...

This. I suppose it's become so prevalent due to A/B tests finding it more efficient to optimize for new users, but at some point in a company's growth it would make sense to put the focus on user retention. Then again, it wouldn't be that hard to make both signing up and logging in easy and attractive.

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