> Can people suggest good alternatives
I've been on the Kagi beta test for a few weeks now and, for the kind of searches I mostly do, it seems to be a massive improvement on Google. Strongly recommended.
I've been on the Kagi beta test for a few weeks now and, for the kind of searches I mostly do, it seems to be a massive improvement on Google. Strongly recommended.
It may lack "instant answer" widgets or other fancy search engine features but it gets the actual "search" part of the equation so right that I find it astonishing how I ever used DDG/Google in the past.
With Kagi most of the results are what I'm looking for. If they are not, I'll still try "@google", but so far with very few queries Google's results were actually better. The biggest drawback is worse "smart cards" results, but I hope they keep those optional/unobtrusive anyway.
The strange thing is that the feeling Kagi gives me, isn't even unknown. It just feels like Google circa 2010.
Yes, I'm aware that all the same arguments apply to DuckDuckGo, and that Google & Bing already explicitly do sell this stuff, but the stronger the promises, the more I demand to see proof.
In theory, this would be visible to end-users as a halt in feature roll-outs, because the dev team has to pivot to building ad-tech.
I hope to god VCs don't get involved; if they do I'd be the first to bail. I'm hoping that the revenue model makes VC money allergic to them in general. Bootstrapping is preferred for this type of service (see also: Pinboard, sr.ht)
Write and ask them. GDPR requires that users can retrieve all stored information associated to their profile/person. Most large internet companies have this functionality.
But that's a fantasy dichotomy as long as free search engines exist, and there's plenty of them. If you could somehow change the world and wipe them all out in an instant, I guarantee that people would scramble to provide alternatives. We will never live in a world where your only option is $10/month or no search. (Free & open source search engines already exist and you could host one at home or on a cheap VPS; there are also P2P search engines)
Free search engines work 95% of the time for your employees searches
Kagi can get a result in half of the remaining 5% (this is definetly the biggest assumption and I haven't had enough experience with kagi to say if this is realistic)
Your employee does 1 search a day and 30 days in a month (so kagi gets you 0.75 more completed searches a month).
It takes an employee 15 minutes to search manually through documentation or come up with a solved algorithm from first principals when the search fails.
In that situation your employees time needs to be worth less than $53.33 dollars an hour for the $10 dollar plan not to break even.
So play with the numbers how you want to make up your own mind but it does seem reasonable to argue there's a market for it at that price. Personal use where missing a result could have no cost is ofcourse another question.
edit: 0.75 not 1.5 searches a month extra
And because the consumer surplus is literally an order of magnitude or two more than the subscription fee quoted, that is prima facie a case that a subscription search engine could have a marginal benefit of >$10 compared to the free ad-supported engine. It, or the subset of searches you opt to use it for, only needs to deliver a little more value to be worth it. Quite aside from the problem of Google Search being increasingly jammed full of ads, wasting your time, or any distortion of ranking, people just plain dislike and avoid ads (https://www.gwern.net/Ads).
Of course it will be hard to compete with ads as business model if the alternative doesn't allow for price discrimination.
At $10 a month you have to pay per search if you search over 20 times per day or something.
In the FAQ they mention potentially charging around $10/month.
Not sure if I'm being entitled or anything, but I was expecting something more like the original WhatsApp model of a few dollars a year.
Perhaps I'm under-estimating how computationally heavy search is.
I've done 20 searches this month (I haven't switched it to default) and it says I have incurred $0.25 (between $0.01 and $0.02 per search) so it would seem that it's very expensive for them to provide results at the moment. It would absolutely be unsustainable at a few dollars a year given these consumption numbers.
Lets say you search for "Photo Of A Mother" * Then you click "images" * Then you click "Sort by Recent" * Then you click "Licence -> Public" * Then you click "Size -> Large" * Then you click "Size -> Extra Large" *
Every time I have put a star in the above is a time where you would be charged a search (so the above would be charged as 6 searches). It's the same thing with switching to news, applying filters, blocking a site or boosting a site etc - I've validated this on my Kagi account by clicking actions and seeing what it does to the billing, and just by using the search engine and using the lenses feature for example you can quickly rack up loads of searches.
Now let's say you search for an error while you program, visit the first site, it's not got what you want so you click the back button and then visit the second site, that's not got the right answer so you click back and visit the third site... That's currently counted as 3 different searches rather than 1 search. If you open them in different tabs it's counted as 1 search though.
And with all this then you are suddenly over 25% through your daily allowance on the $10 plan. Even choosing to 'block' a site in the search charges you to block it. They are talking about charging $0.015 per search if you go over-quota (which is something like 20 searches on the $10 plan), but as far as I can tell if you are using it moderately heavily you will blast part the 20 searches and could end up with an eye-watering bill.
I think the team are great, and when I was on discord they were really receptive, but I ended up giving up on Kagi after trying to use it as a daily driver as I figured they wouldn't be able to find a good enough monetisation strategy for my level of usage (after hearing discussions in the pricing channel). The product is good, it's just that they can't offer it at a price I can accept (and I suspect they can't offer it at the moment at a price that the market can accept, unless they can reach a deal on API licencing or roll their own search).
It IS hard to get results as good as Google at a price where people are willing to pay for it.
IMO I think the issue with Kagi is that their current architecture has made it easier for them to get great results (as they are just taking their results from Google + Bing and adding their own special sauce) but it makes it much more difficult in the long run to be cost-competitive.
Their nearest competitor (Neeva) does offer $5 a month search, has a free tier, and rolls their own engine, so I don't really see how Kagi's current model is sustainable unfortunately (but maybe they will be tremendously successful and I will look back at this post and feel silly!).
It's because they aren't rolling their own search, they pay Google and Bing to do the search for them (via the Google and Bing Search API's which are charged), mix in a few results from their own crawler, and then reorder the results.
So they will always have a higher cost base than both Bing and Google, because they are paying for 3 different search indexes (including their own), plus Bing and Google's margins on the API, plus their own infra costs.
(Now if this is a sustainable model or not is another question...)
You could just allow a given IP address ? But that's just as trackable and has tons of downsides with using from other locations.
That's probably a worse business model, but it would be really interesting to hear what other monetization ideas Kagi considered or is considering.
Managing customer expectations on api key usage (esp. if that key is publicly visible e.g. URL parameter vs. HTTP header) is not worth it unless you have higher-priced products.
Also api keys would mean you might have to prevent re-selling, etc. Furthermore, they could still analyze api key usage to get the same historical data on you as if you logged in.
An individual account which isn't permitted to be shared is different.