DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results
github.com
github.com
It's a paid search service, and I'm honestly really happy with that distinction and what it entails. Being paid means that they can deliver on and support features that users can use to get the best results for them, without worrying how those features may affect potential advertisers and their opinions of the service.
For example, you can block a whole site from your search results - and it's an easy-to-find button directly in the search results, not hidden deep within some settings or done via a manually-installed extension. They already deprioritize a whole lot of "junk" sites -- for example I very rarely see the kinds of technical results that are just reposts of Stack Overflow but laden down with their own ads, and if I do see them I can nuke the site from orbit, never to be seen again.
They are working out the kinks with the pricing scheme currently, but I've always found the plans fair and very transparent. If you are interested in good search and potentially giving the industry a bit of a hint that search is important enough to pay for, and all this advertiser-prioritized bullshit is unacceptable, I can wholeheartedly endorse them.
I'm very much interested in a high-quality search engine, and certainly willing to pay for it, but unless the above condition is satisfied, it's a non-starter for me.
The short answer to your question is: yes, you can use it without linking any real-world identifiers to your search queries. That is explicitly stated in the linked privacy policy. With that said, I guess it's possible that they are violating their own privacy policy. That seems like a bad idea from a legal perspective, and I don't have any reason to suspect they're lying, so I'm not too worried about it.
So the correct answer seems to be "we absolutely could link your searches to your identity, but we promise that we won't; however, you cannot verify that we are keeping that promise".
Which I'm afraid is not good enough. To be clear, I'm not saying that they are lying, and indeed I have no reason to suspect they are. But I'm looking for technological privacy, not contractual privacy.
I wonder if they'd even accept crypto, but their FAQ has nothing on their accepted payment and so it seems it needs an account even to just see that.
Don't rely on company promises if you can avoid it.
Anyway, GP's question was simply:
"Can I use Kagi without linking any real-world identifiers (including credit card details) to my search queries in any way?"
And the correct answer is no.
For the record, I'm signed up for Kagi with a disposable email, though I didn't bother to anonymize my payment.
You mean being way too expensive? I appreciate them wanting to stay afloat but they need to bring the cost per search down drastically. They are doing something wrong behind the scenes with regards to spend or optimization.
1.5 cents per search doesn't sound expensive, although if you do 100 searches per day that's $45 per month...
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...
Hopefully they can get volume discounts and reduce the prices.
Kagi will remain at ~$10 (and yes we will be replacing Bing).
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update
For what search is worth to me, that seems reasonable. (Or I guess more to the point, how much I value a relationship where I’m the customer, rather than companies expressly interested in using psychological manipulation to influence my behavior…)
That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.
I agree, we will get there.
I disagree. You have to remember how disadvantaged the online ad market actually is. Many of those ad networks also are simply legitimizing fraud on the advertisers, but because the networks aren't big enough at competitors, and all existing implementations suffer the same issues you really don't get what you pay for as Uber found out years ago.
https://veracitytrustnetwork.com/blog/digital-marketing/uber...
Unlike the other comments down-thread, this number feels right. I don't like it, and my gut doesn't want to accept this. If you're not harvesting user data and/or selling ads, and the monthly subscriptions are the only source of revenue then $14.50/month sounds right.
I'm still riding this fun'sies train so lets just kick some numbers around. I suspect their FAQ might be a little out of date, but lets go with it. https://kagi.com/faq says that, "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches". 1000 searches / 80 = $12.50, so they make $2 per month from me. I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx. If it doesn't, then that $2 per month gets a bit more sad. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months states that, "Kagi search is currently serving ~2,600 paid customers." from September 1st last year. Let's say they've grown 10x since then and we're at 26,000 paying customers and they're all me. $52,000 in profit on $377,000 per month in revenue. So they're clearing $624,000 a year on this totally hypothetical scenario.
Is https://moneyconnexion.com/per-second-earnings-of-top-compan... accurate? Who knows. If it is accurate, it takes Google just shy of 15 minutes to make that same $624,000.
Mostly this is just me thinking out loud. Like I said, I'm trying to wrap my head around this pricing.
> so they make $2 per month from me
That would be roughly right.
> I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx
It does cover only the search and infrastructure cost, not salaries and other operations.
According to my calculations, Google is making $5.60 on those same 80 searches from ads (roughly 7 cents per search), so $1 cost from Kagi is a bargain! :)
Every time I'd tried DuckDuckGo over the years I found myself having to switch back to Google because I was never sure that there weren't better results going missing. Whereas Kagi often ends up with better rankings than Google—eg. Goodreads, which is great for real reviews, gets placed above all the random booksellers websites.
The whole explanation of the recent “we want to stay afloat” was weird, unexpected (price doubling with my usage, to 20$/mo) and felt untrue (ordinary user doing 30 searches per day?). I felt like it was written by Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler - made sense but also very abstract and shifting responsibility to the customer.
In the end I ran stats how many of Kagi results were on spot (i.e. weren’t repeated in other search engines). It was around half, probably ones that I “didn’t pay for”.
I was ready to move back to DDG but an acquaintance recommended Brave search to me (which has its own index). I was reluctant to use it due controversial opinions about them. Not only I found it more pleasant to use, but also the results are (in my opinion) slightly better than Kagis.
Edit: To provide additional context - I was using Kagi as daily driver, and I make 200-500 searches per day (that includes duplicate queries to other search engines)
I know it may sound like a lot (and definitely is a lot for some folks), but when I think about it as literally being the window to a huge amount of knowledge I take in, the fact that it's way less than Adobe products, and similar to things like GitHub, Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc. feels pretty reasonable.
> ANSWER
> I am an AI language model powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo. My primary purpose is to understand and generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I can perform various tasks, such as answering questions, providing explanations, and even writing code snippets.
Looks like it's not on v4 yet.
It's a pretty big problem in internet tech, actually. Ad revenue has poisoned the well, creating a situation where it's really, really hard to create a compelling product that isn't based on advertising, because you end up having to compete with "free" alternatives. Thus from a consumer's perspective the cost of the product needs to be in the added functionality over the alternatives, since they see your base functionality's perceived value as $0.
It's gotten to a point where I don't think it's fixable at a grassroots level.
Brave Search also allows you to customize your search results with "Goggles". These are plain-text files that you can host on Github or Gitlab and use to boost or remove specific sites from your search results. For example, you could create a Goggle that removes "quora.com" from your results while giving priority to StackExchange sites and Reddit. You could also create another Goggle that shows results only from a predefined set of cooking sites.
Finally, multilingual users may find it helpful to create different search shortcuts with the `country=` parameter appended to them. For instance, if you add `&country=fr` to a search URL, you'll get French results.
I suspect there's a big difference between an ordinary user and an ordinary Kagi user.
I guess I don't search nearly as much as I thought I did. Still worth the $10/mo to me.
It's like anti-marketing. Target the paying customers most likely to talk a lot about your product – power users with heavy search workloads – and do stuff that makes them unhappy. And that's you, I guess: I'm reading your comment because you're the sort of person who *would* write HN comments reviewing their new search engine. And now I'm unhappy with it too, by contagion.
(30 searches/day is for illiterate gibbons)
They also made it very clear on that early-days pricing that it was essentially arbitrary as they just had no idea of how the economics of their business would develop, and that they'd need to revisit it. So it really seems unfair to use that as an anchor.
They're also being extremely open about everything. Anyone can join their Discord, and there is a channel there about pricing that had been going for months, prior to the change, where people could contribute to discussions and meaningfully get their grievances heard if they had any.
- Stay at Professional - $10 + $49.5 query cost = $59.5 total (495% price increase)
- Use grandfathered - $10 + $37.5 query cost = $47.5 total (375% price increase)
- Use Ultimate plan - $25 + $0 query cost = $25 total (150% price increase)
With absolutely 0 guarantee ultimate plan will be ultimate. Would I pay for search engine 25$? Of course. Does Kagi delivers 25$ of search quality - no. As I mentioned I did metrics. 50% of the queries had to be moved to other search engines, so Kagi simply didn't deliver.
I didn't find that weird at all: They were overly optimistic, both on how many people they'd be able to recruit for a paid service, and on the economics of how many searches these people do.
I'd be willing to bet that those skew heavily in the direction of power users and knowledge workers using search professionally, so they probably do a lot of searches. I was really surprised when I read my own numbers. In the survey they asked me to fill out, I wrote that I'd expect I'd be doing maybe five searches a day. Turns out the number is actually in the range of 30-70 most days.
One data point that seems to support that is that Kagi previously didn't take any outside investment, with the whole thing being bankrolled by the founder who had had a prior successful exit. But at the same time when they announced the pricing, they also announced they'd be willing to take on board small investments from enthusiast users. So it's looking like they really are starting to get worried about money.
I also indicated in the survey, that, for a really good search engine, the amount of money I'd be willing to pay would be a multiple of what their actual pricing is now. A good search engine is an investment that could pay phenomenal dividends for me, allowing me to make better decisions for my business by having better information as input. It allows me to waste less time, when searching for solutions to technical problems. It allows me to connect to the right people. So, I don't want to think of search as a commodity, like electricity. I think that, as a knowledge worker, I'm really only ever as good as the search engine I'm using, and I just want to hand somebody a pile of money to make me the Ferrari of search engines so I can have a competitive advantage against all those people still riding the bus. (The bus is full of billboards and paid for by people who never want the bus to reach its destination, so they can keep the passengers' eyeballs focused on the advertising).
It sounds a bit like the use case of ChatGPT/BingAI. Depending on your specific use case it might be the wrong fit - especially if you want to look up PI - however it is excellent as a rubberduck/idea provider.
You can also directly ask for the sources btw. In the end LLMs with access to the internet can be an abstraction to search engines. If it is good can only be assessed once you actually tried as it heavily depends on your use case and your approach.
LLMs are just a tool like everything else.
I want completeness (i.e. if source material is being skipped, I want to be the one to make the decision that it can safely be skipped), and I want consistency (i.e. I want to be able to double-check that the same set of sources wouldn't also support drawing conclusions that contradict those drawn by the AI).
In other words: I'd still want to use search as a product, and I'd still want someone to solve the search problem for me, even if question answering were a solved problem.
1. Force you to signup to see the content (pinterest, I'm looking at you).
2. Copy-n-paste SO threads onto a page that is 90% ads.
I expect that ChatGPT written content for sites that are 90% ads will soon make it difficult to determine the useful sites.
HN might possibly be the wealthiest collection of people on the internet. And if we’re complaining about $10-20/month here, there’s certainly no hope for the mass market.
if you know what an SRE III is, and where those exist, chances are you're in the global 1%, and top 25% of US earners.
and yah i get not everyone on HN is STEM, and not all STEM is super-lucrative, but the parent poster is directionally correct.
I'm happy to pay the current $120 I do for Kagi, but that's my upper limit.
I do have some web tools I pay $250 a year for, and they are significantly more complicated than kagi.
With Kagi's new pricing, I will be paying >$300 a year. That is too much. They aren't THAT much better. That is literally more than my beefy dedicated gaming server in a datacenter!
Hell, I probably built my entire career off internet searches.
In theory, HN people should have the most to gain from a better search engine, and be the most likely to pay for one. Yet, to your point, the alternatives are free and good enough.
The problem is, what the mob moralistically claims they want on HN (when upvotes/downvotes are a concern), vs. what those same people actually do in the real world on an individual level, are two separate things.
The lesson is, things evolved the way they have on the internet for a reason. It's not some "evil" companies shoving these ad-supported business models down our throats. We have all voted with our eyeballs and our (lack of) dollars, and will continue to do so. We get exactly the products we deserve.
The early resistance towards a paid model is to be expected. But if we can learn from the example of YouTube Premium (25M+ subscribers for a product available for free), there are millions of people ready to pay for search today, we just haven't reached them.
No reason both can't be true. evil companies can shovel ad-supported business models down our throats while the few paid options which have emerged haven't offered users enough value to justify the fees, being forced to be logged into an account, or having to worry about how many searches you make in a day.
That's a lot compared to my modest 20 searches a day on average. So I'd guess you're an outlier, since I do sit within their "30 searches a day" claim. I use Kagi on desktop while working, and on mobile outside of work. I've never hit my 1k searches/mo limit, but was honestly worried I would (and set hard limits to not exceed my limits). I guess I don't search as much as I thought I did. I really like Kagi and think it's well worth the $10/mo.
(I'd really like to hear how you're hitting that search volume, if you're open to share? I can't imagine hitting a search engine that many times a day, so I'm quite curious.)
An leisure example - I was checking various fidget toys. My ~10 minutes "research" took 15 queries like: "spring toy", "fidget stick", "worry beads", "kendama", "baoding balls" etc. (on topic: infinity cube is quite cool)
Another one would be preparing instrument study sheet with around 20 music instrument where I searched both for images & audio (~50 searches) - e.g. "acoustic guitar sound sample" & "acoustic guitar".
Those are simple, professionally I sometimes go quite wide to find hook point and then dig from there. 20-40 queries spread across various search engines.
I am aware that I'm outlier, yet thinking about usage in this case is a mistake for me.
I still think it’s too expensive though and I wish prices would come down.
Anything in the world that's used by large amount of users are guaranteed to piss off some portion of them, because they can only focus on limited amount of features. Google had been like that. Firefox had been like that. When 70% of Firefox users are non-techies, Firefox has to start focus on the privacy niche to survive. Then the rest 30% vocal techies all start to protest and saying Mozilla has lost its direction and hope to regain market share.
When Kagi starts to gain popularity, I guarantee you they will start to polarize on their features, some of which you won't like, regardless of their business model, because the (majority) users they are catering to are also paid users, same as you. Only when they have only small amount of users could all of such be homogeneous enough so that every single feature they dish out is something you like.
The key difference that the previous poster outlined and you're missing is that with Kagi, you're the customer, while with DDG, you're the product. Kagi is thus incentivized to improve their offering to better fit your needs as a user, while DDG is incentivized to better serve their customers the advertisers.
20 seconds before a YT vid -- yeah maybe. Every 2 minutes during the vid? Not so happy.
ditto for a paid search. something on the side of the page, or something that's in the middle of results but still clearly an ad... maybe.
Non-techies don't give a damn about privacy.
Non-techies use Chrome over Firefox.
Non-techies use Windows and MacOS over Linux.
Non-techies use smartphones over phones.
Non-techies use smart TVs over TVs.
Non-techies use social media and have accounts using their real names.
I reiterate: Non-techies don't give a damn about privacy.
It's kinda like the cruelty-free labels on shampoo.
Also, saying 'no, this is why you think what you do' is not cool.
I’m _this_ close to going back to DDG with the occasional Google drilldown.
eg "You're getting close to your 1000 search limit at your current pricing (800/1000)".
I'm trying to think of better wording, but having a hard time of it. ;)
From a higher POV, I like GPT-4's smaller time windows way better (x queries within 4 hour window). I hate to be "locked out" of search for a whole week. A few hours wouldn't feel that bad.
What would be the point when your search history would just be a liability? That is the whole point of the paid search business model.
An expected retort might be "But consumer IP addresses are subject to change." True, but sometimes a "static" IP is non-negotiable. For example, in the past if one subscribed to ICANN's zone file access program, which is public information open to access by anyone, not only university libraries or corporations, a static IP address had to be provided. Of course one could use a consumer IP address because those can change infrequently, sometimes on a timescale of years. If it ever changed then one had to execute a new agreement. Perhaps the requirement for a static IP has been dropped but I honestly doubt it.
Rate-limiting/access control by IP address is common and straightforward.
However so-called "tech" companies have shown they cannot be trusted when collecting information from users. For example, Twitter and Facebook each claimed they were requesting phone numbers from users for "security" reasons but it turned out they were using them for commercial purposes.
They made the critical mistake of not keeping it simple. If they wanted profits, why make it hard for people to pay them? If they wanted market share, why not have a free tier so people can try before they buy. They're only staying afloat in tech-circle hype imo.
How would you keep it simple while running a paid search service with non-trivial search cost?
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-brave.html
If many users all send their search queries through a proxy that forwwards them to, say, Google, then one can argue these queries are "anonymised" to some extent.
This has been tried. But AFAIK, no one has ever tried to charge money for it.
In 2003, there was Scroogle which lasted for almost 10 years and was reputedly forwarding hundreds of thousands of searches per day.
Scroogle used to have its own Wikipedia page before it was deleted then merged into the "Criticisms_of_Google" Wikipedia page.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/privacy-what-should-google...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AScroogle
In 2010, there was GoogleSharing, a Firefox plugin. It did not last very long and unlike Scroogle I cannot recall any explanation was ever given why it was shut down.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/10/04/a-bett...
Criticisms of Scroogle or GoogleSharing might include having to trust the people operating the proxy servers. With respect to continuation of ad-free, no BS service and with respect to privacy.
For example, if operator gets a strongly-worded letter on law firm letterhead then will he share a user's search results. What if he receives a directive from some legal authority demanding that a user's queries be monitored and/or preserved. Will he notify the user. Will he fight such requests. How good are his lawyers. Does he even have any that are prepared to handle these matters.
The same issues apply to Kagi.
Being a paid service might actually improve these trust problems, assuming there is a contract with the user. The last time I looked for Kagi's terms, it was not reassuring. What does Kagi promise to do or refrain from doing. If Kagi agrees to zero liability for almost anything, then to me that's a red flag. Why would anyone trust him. At the very least, users should be able to sue for up to the amount of the fees they have paid if Kagi breaches the agreement.
NB. I am not for or against Kagi. I like the proxy server idea and wish there were more options to use proxies. However I do not agree that merely paying for web search solves all the problems. I wrote scripts for own use that search multiple indexes, filter out garbage and combine results into a simple, minimalist SERP with unprefixed URLs suitable for a text-only browser. For me, that addresses the paid placement ads and ranking algorithm problems. As for the privacy problems, I cannot find anything that promises Kagi will not collect data about users. The same problem of trust as in 2003 through 2012 exists today. Arguably things have gotten worse. As we've seen from so-called "tech" companies offering "pay to stop the ads" subscriptions, paying fees does not stop the data collection. It does not solve the privacy problems. Perhaps if the search engine operator was actually bound by an agreement or laws that prohibited it from collecting data or restricted its use of data. But even with that, how does one detect non-compliance.
This isn’t 2008 mobile contracts, I don’t want usage caps for basic functionality.
That is exactly what you can expect from Kagi. Here is user submitted feedback marked as 'Done'.
Yeah it's paid, but I am getting the best results and experience. Not everyone needs great search, but I do and I'm willing to pay for it.
I just recently got my brother to sign up, he's also gotten so tired of Google and DDG. Already a few days later he's really digging Kagi.
I think a lot of the pricing sticker shock is just because we've been price anchored to $0/month for the last twenty years. The $15/month for Kagi is what most people pay for a single coffee and sandwich, which saves them like ~5 minutes making by hand. Kagi probably saves me at least an hour a month, so from an ROI it's at least 12x better than a coffee and sandwich at the shop.
Kagi gives you so much power over your search experience. I don't even have to use site:Reddit.com anymore to find non-SEO-optimized content. It's like using Google in the early 2000s!
I moved to Kagi for this feature. I think that if a search engine does not offer this kind of feature, it does not have the user experience as a priority.
This was after getting tired of using "!g" in all my DDG searches because the results were so bad (and with so many "junk" sites).
What did happen is last month we temporarily updated our syntax help page because we had been getting complaints from some users that they were not working consistently and wanted to get to the bottom of it, but we never actually deactivated the features themselves.
Instead of removing that information from the help page, even temporarily, we should have said we know users are having problems and we’re working to address them. That's what the help page says now and we hope to provide an update soon.
Hopefully you can get this resolved as it's become extremely frustrating searching technical pages to weed out unrelated information.
For example, and especially since Pinterest is mentioned in your help page, I tried the following in the image search: the far side gallery -site:pinterest
It is a good example, because Pinterest in particular, with all its TLDs, seems to really excessively pollute search results. Changing it up to -site:pinterest.com does catch those, but still not all the other TLDs, so I guess it would be a case of whack-a-mole for the rest.
Sample query: “lowes pet bedding”. The quotation marks do something; they remove some results from tractor supply and home depot. However, many results don’t contain the word “lowes” or “bedding”. For example:
https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/licensing/
And, none contain the exact phrase. Google does the expected thing (return one result). Annoyingly, the last time I checked, the situation was reversed, and Google search is now useless for other reasons.
Thirty seven spam results surround the one organic google search result for the query. For the love of all that is good and proper, thirty seven?!? Who thought that was a good number?
That result page would make 90’s era pay-for-placement search engines blush!
after all, you aren't paying them
Search engine quality has declined due to ads/sponsored results and the adversarial nature of SEO driving the signal-to-noise ratio into the ground. So now people are using ChatGPT to lookup the information they'd normally use a search engine for but don't want to wade through the tens of sponsored posts to get to something useful.
The idea of LLM's taking over search is pretty gloomy to me, because it destroys the discoverability of unique information. Sites that have expert information often leads you down the rabbit hole and introduces you to new information. With LLM's you will get 'mean reverted' results and won't be introduced to that information that sparks curiosity.
On the other hand, it's pretty hard to find those nuggets with search engines these days. Years ago, you'd be able to just Google for the answer. Now you have to go to specific sites to search those knowledge bases.
I have to assume it's something along the lines of, they found that a lot of people would put things in quotes when they didn't actually want an exact match, and so changed what it did to better serve the wider audience. But there is no excuse for doing this without replacing it with some other way to specify exact match for the people who know how to RTFM.
If I try to look for IT related stuff I'm getting trapped around these obnoxious blogs and "sites" that shamelessly rip off someone else's content. Then, for a while looking for anything related to Windows was filling top most results with Microsoft forums, with threads that have all these generic "have you tried turning it off and on again" diagnostic solutions.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=%22lowes+pet+bedding%22&atb...
I notice in your HN post, you're using fancy quotation marks; I assume you're not using the same while searching DDG.
Changing the region to "USA" really confused me. Suddenly a lot of unrelated results turn up, but a lot of the results are Danish or Denmark-related. Including the Wikipedia page for Ringsted. What does that have to do with "lowes pet bedding"?
I am honestly not entirely sure what the region parameter on DDG does, but it appears not to be working for "USA".
Perhaps they're A/B testing or something?
graphics card -"nvidia"
graphics card -"radeon"
Stuck with DDG until Kagi though since Google is almost equally bad at this, equally non responsive when we report it[1] since Google has managed to fight their way from product I loved to use and company I'd love to work at down to products I actively avoid and company I went to one interview with and didn't care to follow through :-/
[1]: except the nifty trick someone mentioned about throwing you out of your current experiment and into another so it sometimes seems they have fixed it in 15 minutes)
That is the opposite of what you would expect if incentives and business models around this most basic utility were not broken.
If people can build collectively incredibly useful resources like wikipedia and openstreetmap why not an index of the web as a public good that is devoid of the race to the bottom dynamics of SEO and adtech and whatnot.
Why do we need to worry about privacy violation and/or gross commercial bias when trying to access the most important information machinery invented in recent decades, the web?
Imagine you try to find your way in an unknown city and the only maps available are the sketchy freebies handed out at hotels, choke full of commercial ads, spam and fake entries.
We have normalized too much, we are accepting as inevitability suboptimal services. This is not theoretical and without systemic implications. Knowledge worker productivity - which is a large fraction of modern economies - depends on the speed and quality of information retrieval.
At some point people must snap out of the spell and work towards a sane internet that puts the interests of billions of users first.
automated moderation or more tolerance are needed to extend the group further; one of those can be bought with money.
Decades of apathy and bad policy means that is not a trivial problem to crack, but in contrast with all prior technology revolutions, what we have is an entirely social, organizational challenge - disruptive change of behaviors can happen overnight.
We need to think boldly about these new "professions" (open source developers, online platform moderators, creative commons content generators, etc) and how they might become sustainable and purposeful options for people. The dividend we will reap collectively if we succeed is enormous.
The size of a billion scale web search index like ours, is approaching 3 orders of the magintude the size of the Wikipedia and OSM databases we need to provide Wikipedia infoboxes and Map search.
Added to which it's very far from straightforward to provide search across billions of results in around 200ms.
Kinda is like that already
But I'd think duckduckgo wouldn't really be affected by public pricing, and that they have some sort of huge discounts and contracts that would protect them against this. If they pay anything that is, since I thought ddg generated revenue from using bing. Though Ecosia seems to have the same issue so who knows.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3688574/microsoft-more...
Source on the price increases, seems like the API is now 3x to 10x more expensive (I used the MS docs directly but the article shows the previous rates too).
I don't attribute any malice to this kind of thing. I just expect that if a project or product is trying to be more easy and delightful to more users, using telemetry and the latest UX design research etc, then it's going to stop being a tool for smart technical people, even if that's how it became known in the first place. It wants to be a solution, a product, not a tool.
I've realized that I like tools, particularly those that require skill to use. The mass market just always goes the other way. You'll have to find another niche project/product. The great benefit of locally-run open-source software is that you can keep using the tool even if the project goes a different way, and open-source projects can be forked by even smaller interested groups.
but then they could disable them by default, and users can enable them in the settings ? Removing them entirely just makes the product worse.
Adding options isn't free. If you drop a feature you can delete the code and stop testing it. It you make it an option instead, you need to maintain and test two features instead of one, even though one is only used by a tiny minority of users. If you have N binary options that creates a total of 2^N different configurations. If the features are perfectly orthogonal you only need to test N+1 things, but in reality, features may interact in unexpected ways, and you may have to test a significant subset of 2^N combinations to make sure you've covered all real-world scenarios.
And you will still get confused users. “Why does Bob get different results than me? Are you profiling me?” Alice complains, forgetting that she had turned a feature on/off in the options. etc.
That doesn't mean you should never add any options: many products require a certain amount of configurability to adapt to different user needs. But there is a cost to adding features, and a product manager should carefully consider the pros and cons. If “just make it an option” is your answer to everything you will end up with an unmaintainable product that is likely to confuse the majority of users.
So a hypothetical expert.ddg.gg wouldn't be out of character for them
I am aware that there is a slight nuance here between what one may consider just theming of the frontend versus potentially changing how query syntax works, but I just wanted to point out that DDG has embraced UX-flags-via-domain-name which would be in-your-face different from some secret toggle on a settings page
The homepage of duckduckgo contains a lot of information about their products, and a whole FAQ about the search engine. Maybe if they also included a list of these operators, inexperienced people might learn about them.
People don't use these operators because they don't know about them, not because it's difficult.
How many people read these pages?
But the impact on DDG? You can see the results on their traffic here [1]. I have to use an archive link because they removed public reporting of traffic figures shortly thereafter. The graph there defaults to display traffic averaged out over 365 days, but the day figure (on the top left of the graph) is configurable, since the data is (somewhat oddly) all client-side. Change it to something like a 7 day average to actually be able to see what happened.
Basically smaller sites are serving different demographics. That's precisely how they succeed. And this is also where a lot of their word of mouth comes from, which is going to be a major factor in their growth. Take your users for granted, and you risk losing not only them - but also the growth they would have provided you with. You even risk getting the opposite - of negative word of mouth. In any case, it's a sure path to rapid decline for any smaller company.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20220511093804/https://duckduckg...
- more likely to use ad blockers.
- more likely to critically evaluate any advertising/propaganda they encounter.
- more likely to use VPNs and other technology that makes them more difficult to track.
- more likely to be "power users" of the service, thus consuming more resources than the average user.
Many more points like these apply, but the bottom line is that the ROI for such users, from the service provider's point of view, is terrible, so alienating them makes perfect business sense. And since competition has almost disappeared from the technology industry, there are no unintended consequences to be expected in most cases.
- more likely to recommend your service to friends and family when they ask their power user friend which service to use.
A move like that is shortsighted at best, not good business sense.
In my experience, non-technical people don't ask power users what to use, because they'll get answers they don't want and conflict with all the slick marketing they've been brainwashed with. So instead, they'll frequently try to coerce their technical family members into buying the mass-market stuff they like instead, particularly iPhones.
I have family that wont tolerate any changes on their smartphone, wont create or use an email account and such... they arent even very old. But it kinda reinforces your point: they dont really take power user advice either, especially if it conflicts with something they already know.
Also, I think computers used to be more enigmatic to the non techy, but now they are very accessible. People dont feel like they need help.
Exactly. They can go to the Apple store and talk to one of the "geniuses" there.
Companies are then safe to ignore you recommending against their products when the users have no other viable options. Until they do. Then they become Kodak or Blockbuster Video because someone else makes a better product than theirs and they're so unaccustomed to customers having a choice that they lose the market.
Then you have the people at the margin, who would be better off with a laser printer, but only by something like tens of dollars a year. At which point the opportunity cost of the time to evaluate whether they would actually be saving money is on par with the money they would be saving.
Whereas if there was actually more competition, someone would be selling a cheap printer that takes cheap cartridges instead of your options being a cheap printer with expensive cartridges or an expensive printer with cheap cartridges.
Unless they live in a place with the right level of humidity where once a month is exactly the right interval to print so they don't dry out. Or they print once a week, but still not enough pages to justify a more expensive printer. Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit, so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
Sometimes people aren't as dumb as you might think.
Usually, they are.
>Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Such as here. Doing this is stupid, because buying a new printer is cheaper than buying a set of cartridges for the same printer.
>Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit,
Or here, because they couldn't manage money and earned themselves a bad credit score.
>so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
If you have credit that bad, you don't need a printer at all. Plus, you can get a B&W laser for $100; less than the cost of an inkjet + a set of cartridges.
Sorry, but every way I look at it, inkjets are nothing more than a scam designed to prey on people who aren't good at long-term thinking or money management.
The last time someone asked me about search engines was probably 20 years ago.
When I was at Blekko we had a tremendously enthusiastic librarian user base who loved being able to curate the sites searched. But product was so focused on ads, nobody seriously considered a paid service. (Libraries subscribe to all kinds of services for example)
Most users however would not even provide an email address which would allow them to elide spammy sites from their searches.
It was an interesting thing to observe.
VPNs, privacy tools. You name it. These so called self-proclaimed smart people were trained like a sheeple to buy stuff.
Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index? Some shady startup's Bing wrapper that promotes a crypto scam?
There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...). Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.
Back to Google?
This is factually untrue. There's plenty of competition in social media and OSes, and Firefox still exists. For social media, there's Diaspora (yeah, I know, no one uses it), and for OSes you've got to be kidding: there's dozens of Linux distros out there or you can easily roll your own with various tools that are easily found. And despite its poor marketshare, Firefox still works quite well for me on Linux.
You have a valid complaint about search and email though, but for email it's understandable: the underlying protocol is broken beyond repair because its designers never anticipated spam so the current state is really unavoidable. Luckily, people have found alternatives to email and just don't use it much any more.
Linux accounts for somewhere between 0.5% and 3% of the desktop OS market, depending on who you ask.
Mastodon, Diaspora, Lemmy etc. are niche products used by far fewer than 1% of people.
That's not competition. That's "some geeks built some stuff and a couple of people use it occasionally". If there were just two car manufacturers, and one of them had 98% market share and the other 2%, I doubt you'd call that market "competitive". Competition doesn't simply mean "other stuff exists".
Yes, but for now, it works just fine. Much better than Chrome IMO in fact. As long as Mozilla gets enough funding to continue development, this shouldn't change.
>Linux accounts for somewhere between 0.5% and 3% of the desktop OS market, depending on who you ask.
Why does this matter? It works fine for countless people and companies. I'm using it at work right now, and have been using it exclusively at work for many years. Marketshare is meaningless with Linux anyway because almost no one pays for it, so of course it doesn't show up in marketshare surveys.
>Mastodon, Diaspora, Lemmy etc. are niche products used by far fewer than 1% of people.
But they exist and work. If people don't like Facebook et al, they're free to switch, and they have no right to complain.
>Competition doesn't simply mean "other stuff exists".
Yes, it really does. Those things are all viable alternatives. That's the definition of competition.
It has gotten worse. And mostly Cloudflare is fo blame.
Many sites are relying to Clouldflare and the human verification seems to work only in Chrome or Safari.
It breaks so many important pages and they don’t seem to care to fix it.
>Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index?
>Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.
Why so dramatic? It isn't really that big a deal if DDG starts to suck.
I use 3 or 4 different engines myself ATM just to see what's going on, DDG being one of them. To say DDG can do whatever they want is only true on the macro, in the short term. It is true me saying 'please don't' will not stop them from doing this right now, and will not affect their bottom line right now.
But this news is going to stop me recommending DDG to tech peers, and to change the default on my family's computers. That is STILL a drop in the pond, assuming I am the only one who is going to take this course of action. However, I am very confident that I will not be the only one to make such a switch.
Now regarding the idea that DDG is the only good modern search, I refer you to Searx, Librex, Kagi, and Startpage.
Now regarding your comment about "random individuals hobby search engine with a crappy index", that would be true if I wasn't satisfied with the indexes of the ones I recommend. I am satisfied with them, so that's not an issue. Unless you don't like hobby projects, in which case that's weird but you do you.
With regards to the "shady startup that wraps bing" point, Startpage is a Google wrapper but I assume the real issue is the shadiness. Which, sure, start page is not a perfect track record, but its good enough.
To close, I really don't think tech doomerism is productive. There are alternatives available. Making excuses to not try them is just lazy, not "realistic".
Related, and after reading some of the comments in this thread talking about knowledge and knowledge workers, but maybe this would be the perfect time to bring back ontologies and OWL/RDF?
For me DDG was better results, as Google has tried to read my mind and be "smart" about what i am "really" looking for instead of just giving me the results for the words I put in the box. I most often encounter this when looking for technical solutions to a technical problem. Google tends to be better for search results on non-technical items, current events, political topics etc
DDG has made their search less useful, is it less useful than google's trash when it comes to technical search results time will tell
And as a nitpicky aside, if this was done in response to Microsoft's cuts, I should really have found out about this from DDG themselves, rather than a github repo commit. Though it does change the intent quite a bit.
Why on earth would DDG have any obligation or interest in telling you about their supplier pricing? You found out something that has little to no material impact on you from a post on a nerd site.
Because I used the feature.
>You found out something that has little to no material impact on you from a post on a nerd site.
It has an impact on me, because I used the feature.
Some examples:
- Double quoted strings ignored, continuing to return results without the quoted string.
- Adding the exclusion parameter doing nothing, continuing to return results with the string.
- Various queries return non-legit sites in the majority top 10 results or more—sometimes being all results. By non-legit, meaning: these are randomized named domains that have scraped other sites' content or are doing word salad query matching. Example query from December last year: `google "oauth" "api" "thunderbird"` returned all non-legit sites.
- Using `site:` parameter to restrict a query to specific site can return fewer results for that domain (eg: two results vs dozens) than just searching for the site name and query without the `site:` parameter.
- Using `site:` parameter to limit to TLD only sometimes returns only single result or nothing despite knowing there are domains that contain the query. Eg: last year when searching `opnsense site:.se` there should have been tons of results from teklager.se but there were none (I have the screenshots), but searching `opnsense site:teklager.se` returned results.
In the most egregious cases that I've documented I submit feedback but it always seemed like a hopeless cause the worse the results became.
I once had a Ducker(? Goer?) reply to me here on HN saying that a human does in fact read the feedback, and yet this indescribably terrible change aligns with your conclusion: they read them, and then cheerfully "put them on the backlog"
My results have been looking like the code for Google Ads had some error and was stuck in a loop - resulting in page after page of advertisements :(
Example: roborock s8 disassembly (variants tried: roborock s8 teardown)
Same goes for Youtube - not a single disassembly video / teardown could be found, only reviews with cringy thumbnails..
This is after a number of years of using DDG and considering "good enough" most of the time, i seldomly had to result to !g - and like 50% of the time i had was to find other interesting content to augment what i had found so far...
Maybe it was reworded, or an attempt to reword it, because of this issue: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/issues/1...
How few people were using duckduckgo with these filters for it not to be noticed until now?
Stranger still that the author noticed the change to the docs but not that it didn't work previously
The other filters are cool.
DDG has been my default engine for years now, but by the time I am searching at this level I often have added a !g along the way and am working in Google at that point.
Frankly, these changes don’t alarm me much because I am presuming most Q&A I’m going to be doing going forward will be in chatgpt or a similar service.
In the last few weeks, I’ve taken more and more questions, sometimes spanning a wide but related context to chat gpt.
There are no keyword-stuffed greyhat websites and long serps to dig through with varying formats, styles and recency.
It is just information. And while I am keenly aware chatgpt will spit back complete BS, I have found this problem is not bigger than the problems I face for information seeking via DDG or Google.
-, +, and, intitle, inurl
dogs -crazy -cute -sounds site:youtube.com
dogs -babies -crazy -cute -sounds site:youtube.com
Then I no longer get that as the top result but the fifth result mentions babies.
Was swearing at it only a few days ago due to stupid results it was showing, while completely ignoring the "-" sign.
Search term:
solar panel array concrete flat -roof -roofs
Fucking useless. :( :( :(
Had to switch to Kagi, which at least seems to honour the negative signs.
If the only good option was paid, I would pay a lot. I think most other people would, too. But they'll keep using worse free options so long as those are passable.
Like, it'd be nice if everything were free, but sadly everything has a cost, and we can see what the cost of "free" search is and it kinda sucks.
Else, it evokes the sentiment of riskynacho on the comment, "It's almost like DuckDuckGo wants to eliminate itself from being a safe useful alternative in the search engine competition."
I'm super disappointed in DDGs changes the last few months. I wish them the best but I'm on the hunt for a new search engine.
Now I'm expecting you to potentially say "I would pay 10$, but I refuse to have to go through the trouble of changing my default search engine twice a month", which brings me an idea:
Actually Kagi should maybe offer that option: after you're done with your monthly credit, they redirect everything to the free engine of your choice. That would provide an easy way for people to support them with the amount they are willing to pay, without having to change anything in their setup.
EDIT: already suggested: https://kagifeedback.org/d/512-automatically-redirect-search...
When we made our initial plans, we believed they were both realistic and sustainable. However, the search market has experienced dramatic changes in the past six months, far more than in the previous 16 years. Additionally, we've been confronted with an economic downturn. As a small, bootstrapped business, Kagi has had to make some difficult decisions to adapt.
We were left with two options:
- Stick to the original plan, which would result in significant financial losses and potentially lead to bankruptcy within a few months.
- Adjust our strategy to ensure the survival and growth of the business.
While we are not pleased with having to alter our plans, we have done our utmost to adapt to these new circumstances. It's important to understand that there are only three ways to fund search services - through advertisers, venture capital, and in Kagi's case, users. That is the reality we must face.
We acknowledge that the rollout of these changes could have been executed more effectively. However, as a small bootstrapped team without a dedicated communications department, we have limited resources. I personally oversee crucial business decisions, manage a fully remote team, and supervise the development of complex software products such as search, browser, and AI solutions. There is only so much one person can do.
We would love to offer unlimited searches for $5, but the reality of the search market dictates otherwise. That said, we are continuously evaluating our pricing structure, and we may update it again as some costs, such as AI, have not been as high as anticipated.
We are determined to navigate these challenging times and maintain a high level of professionalism. We appreciate your understanding and support as we work towards a sustainable future for Kagi.
On the other handm, we were forced to reassess our approach due to the situation with Bing, which led us to invest further in alternative partnerships and strengthen our own infrastructure. And despite the challenges this transition presented, it ultimately instilled a renewed sense of optimism in our team.
The most difficult aspect of this process has been receiving emails from customers who felt let down by the way we managed the change. We are committed to learning from this experience and improving our communication and execution in the future.
I'm not in the space, but that seems to me like the natural way to avoid having your company brought down on a whim by Microsoft, in the long term.
I'm actually serious. At least I think I check Marginalia more often than bing or ddg or google.
Thanks for making paid search for the masses (with funtioning filters, apparently) a reality. By the testimony of many here, your results aren't bad. I'll be giving Kagi a try.
I’m one that’s ardently against subscription culture in most cases but I have to say im quite impressed.
Im currently on the $10 plan. Not sure if im gonna moved to the unlimited but im definately on pace to hit my limit this month. I never realized how much I search. I do wish the 10 dollar plan had annual options. Even without a discount.
I’ve used ddg for a long time. But even still haven’t been a huge fan of changes and I am one that’s happy to support a project in any way that I can get behind and gain something from from. Either via contribution or in a case like this cash.
I hope you all find a path to sustainability.
Does anyone actually pay that? It looks like something a real search engine would post on April 1st.
Also check: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/why-pay-for-search.html
If you save 1-2 hours per month not having to use a search engine that tries to trip you, that's a net win.
However, personally I use Google with a browser plugin that lets me hide unwanted results, and I find it works quite well.
Although I don't do much elaborate searching using operators etc.
I have not ever loaded a new page with Kagi.
I generally need fewer searches than with other search engines, between their general features, and customized ranking, they are just that much better.
That said, I’m also in the early adopter plan ($10 for 1000 searches) which is enough for me (unlike the non-early one, as I sometimes go over 700 searches).
I'm a heavy search user with Kagi on both mobile and desktop, and I've never even come close to 1000 searches/mo. YMMV.
I'm considering paying for Kagi but the price seems a bit high, especially considering that I replaced some of my searches with ChatGPT and I pay much less for using the API of OpenAI. But maybe their API price is not sustainable.
For $5 or $10 per month I'd prefer to self-host a search engine and a language model on a server I own.
The thing is that searches have a price. If Google makes it free, that's because they make money from the data they gather, right? And probably the data is worth more than people guess. Maybe Kagi would be able to be cheaper if it had more users (some kind of economy of scale), but in the meantime, that's the only alternative I see.
So I'm ready to pay for it now to help prove that it is viable to ask people to pay for their product. Because I can afford it.
Based on their existing pricing at the $10 plan, that's 700 searches plus up to 400 searches at 15c / search.
Total is ~$16 / month depending on how many searches I make. The unlimited plan is appealing, but I'm convinced paying something in the range of $16-$25 a month ($192 - $300 / year, or $163 - $255 / year with their 15% annual discount) is still a steep price.
Sure - search is valuable, and ~$160 / year could work for me, but the variable nature of the cost is off-putting. Part of the issue is the per-search unit pricing: why can't I pay up-front like in the unlimited plan for a whole year, at the benefit of a slight discount? As someone who does pay for SaaS plans and is willing, I'm not excited about surprise monthly bills as an individual user.
My advice to Kagi would be to find a way to do annual billing without resorting to such fine-grained unit pricing. Charge per every 100 searches instead of 15c/search (e.g. charge $1.25 for 100 /extra/ searches on top of whatever plan I'm on), and have a rollover period (e.g. two months) if I purchase an extra 100 searches but only use e.g. 20 of them.
This kind of billing (annual discount for all plans + broader unit pricing) would reduce the price shock and anxiety of worrying about how much a single search costs.
I think Kagi can be an interesting product, and even one I probably will pay for, but the amount of thought into their current pricing seems naive from my view...
For all of those, I would like to be able to set an upper limit. Like "cut my service for the rest of the month if it costs more than X".
But it's great that Kagi has that feature!
The idea would be that people can set a hard limit after which Kagi would redirect everything to a fallback of their choice. If my limit is set to 10$ and I reach it by the 21st of the month, then all my searches will automatically go to e.g. DuckDuckGo until the next month.
Wouldn't that make sense?
Their issue is, that they pay the same to Google and Microsoft, no matter where the user searches from :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx https://github.com/searx/searx
Have been able to use the advanced keywords and operators to filter results with Ecosia
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-ke... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-op...
Sometimes the search results can be irrelevant especially for programming queries. But in those cases I just fallback to G
And hopefully I'm totally wrong about the whole situation being related to pricing!
- Non-privacy-conscious people are just going to use Google.
- Privacy-conscious people know enough to realize that DuckDuckGo isn't really protecting your privacy, and that it's akin to using ExpressVPN or NordVPN to "hide your IP address".
Didn't they also have some kind of censorship uproar back in the day?
They recently down-ranked Russian propaganda-linked sites (like RT). I can't remember if that change has remained in place or they reversed it.
I don't think toeing the line is a viable business strategy when your competition blows your search result quality out of the water. There's no benefit in that case.
It's genuinely difficult to do both of these at the same time. You can do keyword search well, you can do natural language search well, you can't do both at the same time. What you get in a mixed paradigm is confusing and unpredictable results.
This is mostly a limitation in query understanding. The traditional boolean index is still there.
Natural language search engines typically first do a series of traditional keyword searches to identify candidate results, and then re-score them using a natural language understanding of the query.
You need to check out the guide on how to create a new Goggle.
For me, I'm less and less using a single search engine for all my needs, rather using a plethora of engines for different tasks.
I use DDG as my default engine to ensure I get privacy by default, and if the results aren't to my liking, I use a bang to re-run the search in a different engine.
I also like to set up custom search engines in my browser with shortcuts, so if I need to search a specific GitHub org or something I can quickly run a search there from my URL bar.
A lot of the comments here saying "DDG is dead, switch to xxx instead!" strike me as not particularly relevant with my usage patterns, but I'm wondering whether I'm just in a minority.
The idea of a web search engine is disappearing into the mist of time. Text search engines worked well 10 years ago, but they are now completely overwhelmed by content farms.
I mean even searching for a literal string (part number) doesn't give me results on Google/DDG anymore. I'd be happy to use yandex as my main search engine if I didn't have to (re)solve a captcha every couple of searches.
Are there other search engines that still allow us to run powerful search queries?
If you're only allowed positive searches, the best way to get your product found is to maximize the number of positive search terms associated with your product. With negative search terms, every additional term you add is a potential exclusion criteria as well.
Unfortunately, people just don't use the negative search terms enough, so it is up to the search engines themselves to detect metadata bloat, and that ends up being a cat-and-mouse game.
I was a heavy user of Google way back when, then moved to DDG for many, many years. Settling on Neeva.
However, I will check out Kagi now, maybe I will move again.
[1] https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-help-pages/pull/152
Sure, they have a ways to go (for example, i think they should provide confidence level for their answers based on how many docs/pages they ran into during training that support a particular answer; show references when asked etc) but the search engine as an interface is obsolete at this point.
They could default to the simple one and achieve their goal.
E.g., search query: t-shirts -site:amazon.com
I expanded on it more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683834
I keep seeing Kagi being pushed and it seems suspicious as Kagi is a subscription based search engine that limits your searches to their paid tiers.
Kagi shillposting with their bot accounts?
Before I was an avid user of google but seeing the results getting worse and worse made me look for different solutions. For now i'm interested in supporting a search engine that can keep itself above water through my wallet.
That said, I stopped using it after they increased prices. I'll reconsider it when they figure out how to decrease them and add privacy-friendly payment methods.
I think Kagi is good, but not $25/mo good. People with SV salaries will disagree, though.