Almost a meme at this point:
> I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall
Kagi is, however. Well worth putting your money where your mouth is and supporting them.
> I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall
Kagi is, however. Well worth putting your money where your mouth is and supporting them.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blo...
Their founder is also on record as "down ranking misinformation", which is not a judgment call I want my search engine making. Relevance and truth are two different things.
https://mashable.com/article/duckduckgo-search-engine-russia...
The sketchy and indirect way they engage with this criticism put me off of ever trusting DDG.
Granted, this would probably be a very miniscule amount of their users.
https://www.amazon.com/Mullvad-VPN-Devices-Protect-Security/...
I’m not sure what these people are searching for but I want to pay for a search engine that doesn’t show ads and doesn’t track me. A credit card comes with the territory for mass adoption.
- Advanced search operators actually work. When you quote something it actually searches for that exact string, when you minus something it actually excludes it.
- Categorization in the search results; for instance all of the low signal listicles can be segregated into their own section.
- Image search that is not intentionally nerfed that will just give you the image directly
- The ability to up and down rank specific sites from your results (something you can't feasibly do without an account anyways); good riddance Pinterest and spammy stack* reposters
- DDG-like bang searches, with the ability to add custom sites
- The obvious one: no ads or tracking or perverse incentives
Have been using Kagi since the invite phase. The moment they opened up and switched to subscription, I immediately subscribed (you'll run out of the free quota in ~3-4h - 50 searches per month).
Paying 10$/mo for something you do hundreds of times a day, and getting consistently better results than Google, Bing or DDG, doesn't seem too much to me. I happily gave up D+ subscription to have Kagi instead. It's very rare for me to have to scroll past for the first 5 results with Kagi. With the other search engines, nowadays I can't find anything relevant in the first page.
And they have an actual Roadmap: https://kagifeedback.org/roadmap
I don't think it should be priced as high. I think they should add other services maybe w/ their own prices, like a photonmail competitor, and api's so people can build things off their tech but pay per query, etc.
I think they could at least have tiers like 100/month 1, 400 searches for $2.99, 1000 for $5.99, unlimited for 8.99. They'd reach a bigger audience, which would likely mean more dollars overall. If I were them, I'd also create a mobile app that's completely free, just to get people hooked on the results while using mobile, or maybe have some privacy-based ads in the app, though the actual search results would have none, and remove that for paid accounts.