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Comment by mind-blight | Hacker News Reader

They seem really cool. But, I was reading the FAQ, and they claim it costs about $1 to process 80 searches. That seems extremely high. I would have expected that the up-front cost of creating and storing indexes is very expensive, but the cost of user searches to be so low that they're nearly negligible. Okay, it sounds like they lose money with each new added user

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They are using google custom search and Bing search apis. They cost about ~$5 per 1000 queries - so thats 40c on the dollar already for those 80 queries. Thats just for a single "behind the scenes" query - and they sometimes perform multiple subqueries based on your "lens" configuration which inflates the cost further.

They also have their own infra and team to support.

I wouldnt call myself a search engine poweruser, but based on my usage, they are definitely losing money on those subscriptions.

I believe they are doing some search aggregation from multiple sources and from what they say they do not seem to be caching results much.

API's that charge by usage usually have terms that prevent caching API results. This also applies to Bing:

> You must use results you obtain through the Services only in Internet Search Experiences (as defined in the use and display requirements) and must not cache or copy results. (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/legal)

It's really unfortunate Microsoft doesn't provide a free API that require users to display ads, or at the very least make their ad network accessible to all.

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