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Comment by DanHulton | Hacker News Reader

I debated bringing up Kagi at the top level here, since I already commented on it in a reply, but honestly I really want them to succeed and shit like this is why.

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.

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I’ve been using Kagi for multiple months and due to advocacy I made few people pay for it too, but I’m completely disheartened by their business model.

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)

> The whole explanation of the recent “we want to stay afloat” was weird

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).

> [...] 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 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.

It's precisely the antithesis of a use case of ChatGPT/BingAI. I want sourced information, and the opportunity to read the source in its original form, make a critical judgment about it, and draw my own conclusions. Giving me the opportunity to ask a question and get an answer, when I have no way of knowing whether the answer is a hallucination is less than useless. It's a waste of time.

At least BingAI does provide its sources and ChatGPT/BingAI are made to be conversational, so you get the opportunity to ask actual questions and get an answer. As with everything on the internet take the answers with a couple of grains of salt.

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.

If you ask for the source, don't you just get the most likely source?

The other thing I'm wondering, even though this is veering quite far off the original topic, but: I don't just want all the sources that the AI used in responding to my question, I also want all the other sources that seemed relevant to my question but were for some reason not used.

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.

Not saying you're wrong, but they grandfathered me on the $10/mo plan with the new pricing changes, and that would cover your usage. I think on the new plans 30 searches a day would come out to $13/month.

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.

I've tried Kagi as primary search for a few months and used DDG as primary for a long time before that. Recently I default to using phind.com. Don't think they'll be able to stay free forever, but as it is the mix of free access to GPT-4 and the focus on being developer-friendly makes it feel much better than alternatives (perplexity.ai being the closest competitor, but not feeling quite right for me).

For developers, I should also mention Bing Chat seems to be in the lead for asking questions like, "In this <github repo link>, can you tell me what this function does <function name>?" (or insert your own question you might ask another developer about some repo). I suspect this is because Microsoft has already done the chunking/embedding/vector-storage for all of Github and Bing Chat is querying a vector database for info about the repo, whereas the other GPT-search-chat offerings aren't there yet.

Curious can you 'grep the web' with it and how do you handle shopping, image/videos/news/maps types of searches?

> What AI model are you?

> 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.

The "Expert" toggle switches it to GPT-4. You can tell by how slow it responds then (note that I've seen it switch over to turbo when you ask followup questions recently).

It's worth pointing out that the "window to a huge amount of knowledge" feature isn't really what you're paying for. The question isn't "is access to a search engine worth $10 a month to me?" (probably yes), it's "Is the delta in functionality with DDG/Google/Bing/Ask Jeeves worth $10 a month to me?" (maybe).

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.

- "(price doubling with my usage, to 20$/mo) and felt untrue (ordinary user doing 30 searches per day?)"

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 grandfathered me in, and in their announcement said that they would do that for all their early users. So, I don't quite understand what happened to the parent commenter there.

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.

It depends on your usage. With 200 searches/workday (25/hour) - Kagi set as default search engine - I got following options:

- 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've been using Brave Search as my main search engine for months, and the only issue I have with it is that it takes longer to revisit smaller sites. Depending on your queries, you may stumble upon a bunch of dead links. However, this shouldn't be a problem for most users since results for major sites are constantly updated.

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 like Brave Search as well. Goggles are super easy to create and manage. Brave's customizable Search Engines are also a helpful feature to further personalize the search experience.

+1 to Brave as an alternative. From the search results I get the impression that they are much more aggressive in weeding out SEO-optimised sites that do nothing but:

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.

I think this is why advertising will remain the default business model of the mainstream internet and search.

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.

I can't pay $20/month for EVERY site and tool.

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!

That's basically my point. HN people are wealthy and spend most of their working hours and free time on the internet. They also vehemently hate ad-supported business models.

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.

These are the early days of paid search. Kagi laucnhed less than a year ago, after 25 years of humanity being "massaged" with the idea that it is OK for your searches (arguable both the most important and most intimate thing you do online) to be paid by someone else, an unknown 3rd party, usually an advertiser.

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.

It's not paid vs free, it's $120/year versus $300/year.

There is no Kagi plan that costs >$300/year? Most is ultimate which is $255/year. (point still taken)

> 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

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.

High earning does not necessarily mean wealthy. Rich people in my eyes don't even need to work. People also often gain more money by not spending everything all nilly willy. Someone inheriting a lot of money is more likely to spend it on something superfluous than someone that meticulously grew it over their lifetime.

Saying you aren’t a trust fund baby therefore you aren’t rich is just plain silly.

Your point is totally valid, but I think the folks over at r/fatfire are probably wealthier than us peasants here.

you're talking circles in circles, in a venn-diagram sense. probably a non-trivial overlap there with HN users.

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 make 200-500 searches per 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.)

I'm also really curious how you manage having 20 searches a day :)

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.

> ordinary user doing 30 searches per day?

I suspect there's a big difference between an ordinary user and an ordinary Kagi user.

I've been using Kagi for the last year or so. I average about 20 searches per day, including on my mobile after work. Well under my 1k monthly limit.

I guess I don't search nearly as much as I thought I did. Still worth the $10/mo to me.

The best thing about Kagi I've found from trying it recently is that it's results are actually really good.

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.

I think Kagi is great, but I’m paying on the order of €10 per month and was suddenly told yesterday that I exceeded my 1k requests quota. That’s not a great way of dealing with paying customers. Google warned me multiple times before they hiked my Workspace price.

I’m _this_ close to going back to DDG with the occasional Google drilldown.

1000 searches are included in the $10 plan. Currently you are offered the option to pay for additional searches at 1.5 cents per search. Not ideal we know, but someone needs to pay for those, and the notice you received is courtesy (you can also remove it). How would you handle this differently?

At least my render of the pricing page gives that 700 searches per day are included in the $10 plan, with additional searches priced at ¢1.5. So 1000 searches would be $14.5 plus conversion fee if you don't have a dollar account.

It's 700 per month, not per day.

Ah, yes! That was a mistype from me, I meant to echo the previous comment but lower the count.

I'd like to be warned before hitting a hard limit, in whichever way. E.g. warning emails ("You've reached 80% of your quota"), or a meter on the search page.

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.

You can set your own notices in Kagi and you are never locked out of searching (as you can adjust limits yourself). We do not plan to invest more in these features as we'd like to walk towards the world where we can remove limits again.

Thanks for pointing that out, I’ll have a look.

Kagi are very open about their policy to submit feedback, bugs, and feature requests at https://kagifeedback.org/. I've not submitted anything Kagi Search, but I've submitted a few features and performance issues/bugs to their Orion feedback. I got replies from Vlad and Kagi employees within 12 hours. Feel free to suggest this as feedback I'd say...

GGP comment is from Vlad so I answered him here.

Aha, look at that.

Maybe some kind of warning when getting close to the existing tier limit?

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. ;)

As they said, give multiple notices in advance.

I’m tired of all these “do no evil” organisations, that we back but once they succeed they give us the middle finger and harm us. Is search engine that hard to self host? Assuming I don’t want to index most of the web, such as non English sites, porn, most news sites. Surely there’s an open source solution someone has written to do that I can run from home!

You can run YaCy from home https://yacy.net/

On a more general note I wonder why everybody is so convinced a paid service will cater to what they want? I can't imagine for my 10$ a month they would implement my bugfix or add that feature I'd love. I'm paying for MS Office or my car as well and boy do I have complaints about them... why would Kagi be any different? The only advantage I can think of is they would be less motivated to search alternative financing - aka advertising. But not even that is a guarantee in the long run...

It's about their business model. If their business is to profit off of satisfying customers then they are going to be motivated to satisfy customers. If their business is to profit off of selling advertisements, then they're going to profit off of selling advertisements.

Volkswagen business model is to profit off satisfying customers, yet their menu navigation is censored and they were never bothered to change it. How's that working differently for Kagi? Paying Kagi users just got hit with a new price model which judging by the reactions around here was not very welcome. Yet they all keep selling products, both Kagi and Volkswagen, against customer complaints. Can we agree that there's a lot of gray area in the "customer is king" saying?

Not every customer is going to be happy. And few, if any, companies are purely motivated by customer satisfaction. There are limits, especially legally, of what companies can do to satisfy customers.

> I can't imagine for my 10$ a month they would implement my bugfix or add that feature I'd love.

That is exactly what you can expect from Kagi. Here is user submitted feedback marked as 'Done'.

https://kagifeedback.org/?secondaryTag=done

You need to realize that you like Kagi exactly because it has NOT been "succeeded", and you start to dislike DDG because it finally picks up popularity.

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.

Not the previous poster, but I'm a paid subscriber of Kagi and was previously a heavy user of DDG.

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.

neither the previous poster, but I'm not missing what was said, but are you missing that paying a subscription for something, if it becomes popular, becomes an irresistible audience to also advertise to? Have you seen Amazon Prime video lately? it becomes more and more festooned with ads, like happened to cable TV. Pay a subscription, and watch ads, or promotions, or product placements. They're drunk on it.

Kagi doesn't have any ads, and serves an audience that is so opposed to ads that they'll pay for the privilege. Sure, in 10 or 20 years that may change, but for now I don't seem them changing that and taking away their single biggest differentiator.

If Kagi adds ads I'll leave it.

There is a level of ad I'm willing to tolerate.

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.

if Kagi becomes popular, losing the early subscribers is just a drop from their bucket

I reject the premise that OP dislikes the product because it succeeded, instead of their stated reasons.

Also, saying 'no, this is why you think what you do' is not cool.

DDG is just Bing. nobody wants evil microsoft search

>Firefox had been like that. When 70% of Firefox users are non-techies, Firefox has to start focus on the privacy niche to survive.

Non-techies don't give a damn about privacy.

This is simply not true. I say this based on direct research, with users of our no-tracking search engine.

Non-techies use Microsoft, Apple, and Google accounts.

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.

You're wrong, they do care about privacy, just at a superficial level. This means that advertising a service as "privacy-oriented" is a positive feature for the normies, but only if it's convenient.

It's kinda like the cruelty-free labels on shampoo.

Non-techies have a poor understanding of the risks, little awareness of privacy protecting alternatives, and a lack of confidence in installing and using new software. It's not that they don't care about their privacy.

Can I use Kagi without linking any real-world identifiers (including credit card details) to my search queries in any way?

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.

Their privacy policy is here: https://kagi.com/privacy

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.

Yeah I was actually hoping for an answer that doesn't require blind trust.

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.

Any promises made by a company can disappear with a change of management/ownership.

Don't rely on company promises if you can avoid it.

In that case, you really can't use any hosted search engine because they could be logging all your queries, the time you made them, and associating them with your IP and any other information they can get their hands on. Are you familiar with any search engine that is technically incapable of logging your IP???

You can use a privacy-focused VPN like Mullvad to conceal your identity from the search engine. In most markets having a credit/debit card requires personal information so there's nothing you can do if they don't provide a privacy-friendly payment alternative.

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.

If you're going to use Mullvad to conceal parts of your identity, why not use prepaid cards or a service like Privacy.com for your payment details?

For the record, I'm signed up for Kagi with a disposable email, though I didn't bother to anonymize my payment.

Why not just have a payment method that isn't linked to you?

How do you realistically do that online, short of getting into crypto ?

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.

There are pre-paid credit cards you can buy in Safeway and such for a small premium. I'm not sure how to use them for paying online though (i.e. how to provide name/address/phone that match).

Well, they could do it like Mulvad VPN and allow cash payments + whatever your account number is. (Account number isn't tied to you)

This is not unrealistic at all. For curious people, here's how the Posteo email service does it:

https://posteo.de/en/site/privacy#anonymisedpayment

Posteo relies on you trusting them to remove your identifying data after payment. There is no way to make sure they actually do

Do they support any such payment methods? Only Monero and cash come to mind.

No, just debit/credit cards, handled via Stripe IIRC.

I know HN is against Bitcoin by design (it’s destroying the planet!11), but I really miss the opportunity to pay with Lightning TBH. It’s fine for me having an account, but not using a credit card linked to my name. I found a 2022 thread where someone asked to pay with BTC or Monero, but still. No news.

Privacy.com might help

Privacy.com is US only. And of course, Privacy.com "virtual cards" are still linked to your real-world identity.

How would it get tied to you from the search engine perspective? You can fill in fake information with a Privacy card. They'd have to do some pretty intense investigation to somehow tie the card number back to you...just to sell your information. Seems unproductive.

A single leak could ruin your social relationships. Extortion bots are untiring and neverending. Just a moment ago our countries largest mental health institution had an IT-catastrophe, and thousands of influental people immediately got automatically extorted by bots.

I also use Kagi and I can confirm that it’s great. I am using Google now maybe still several times a week and most of the time the results are not even better.

I still think it’s too expensive though and I wish prices would come down.

> They are working out the kinks with the pricing scheme

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.

> They are doing something wrong behind the scenes with regards to spend or optimization...

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...

This is what has been holding me back from trying out Kagi. I will probably jump over to Kagi at some point because I've noticed the quality of DDG searches going downhill as well. However, I'm firmly in Kagi's idea of 1% of Internet users. I search for anything at the drop of a hat. I just checked my history in Firefox for duckduckgo.com for "This Month" and it came back with 704 individual searches (DDG likes to add on a =web and generate a new request so I filtered for just those). My phone is an island all on its own, and I probably have another 100-150 searches on there. March and February are right around the same numbers. For fun'sies lets just say 1000 searches per month. $10/month for the 700 searches plan + 300 * 0.015 for the overages = $14.50/month.

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.

Thanks for doing the analysis!

> 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! :)

yea, the tool tip says "200 searches is enough for 99% of Internet users", but I doubt their target demographic is the 99% that don't need more.

Just a datapoint, but I feel like I do a lot of searches… I’m always looking stuff up, and I’m also in the habit of using my search engine as a lazy form of autocomplete for urls. I apparently do about 700 searches a month according to Kagi. If I were on the basic plan, I think that would mean I’d be paying $5/mo. + $0.015/search * (700-200) searches/mo. = $12.50/mo.

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…)

Yeah, I similarly felt like I did a lot of searches every day... and if I had estimated my search usage I would have said easily thousands a month. But I'm also actually in the 600–800 range it turns out.

That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.

> 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.

Then it would be better take the professional plan including 700 searches for 10$/mo.

You are correct, Kagi current users are mostly from the remaining 1%. However that plan was made to attract the remaining 99% Internet users to Kagi (and the plan is more than sufficient for their needs).

I'm skeptical that those 99% would ever be interested in Kagi's value proposition at all. Kagi is a niche product in the contemporary context of ad funded free search engines, and it would have to survive until the other side of the adoption curve before it can reliably sell itself to the average person.

You may be right, but there was only one way for us to find out :)

Why do you think their prices are unreasonable? Just curious.

1.5 cents per search doesn't sound expensive, although if you do 100 searches per day that's $45 per month...

45 USD per month is more than what most people in advanced countries pay for their mobile phone service or broadband connection. Frankly, it's crazy to me. Anything more than 10 USD per month for better search is hard to defend. And yes, I know that Kagi is targeting a _very_ picky audience! B2C is a brutal business.

Why would you pay that? You’d subscribe to the unlimited plan for 25$/mo.

I easily do dozens of searches per day, occasionally hundreds, especially when debugging obscure issues. It shouldn't be the most expensive subscription I've got by far. Well it could be, but I better not have to go to google or something else to get answers, and it's not quite there yet.

It looks like they do some fair margin on top of the Microsoft Bing API:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...

Hopefully they can get volume discounts and reduce the prices.

Actually Bing API will be $28 per 1000 searches from May 1st [1]

Kagi will remain at ~$10 (and yes we will be replacing Bing).

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update

It is never more than $25/month (Ultimate plan with unlimited searches)

I would use them if you could pay anonymously. Using a search engine where every query is tied to my credit card is not for me.

Searches are not tied to an account, Kagi does not even log searches. [1]

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.

[1] https://kagi.com/privacy

How would Kagi enforce quotas if they can't link searches to the account paying for them?

IP address. The classic example is scholarly/academic journals. Access by subscribing university libraries and corporations is still generally dependent on IP address. It has been this way for as long as I can remember. Early 90s at least.

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.

Wouldn't they have to validate a paying customer to tie it to an IP aswell? If there is a point where a user is identifiable, it can't be rolled back with a "trust us" in my opinion if the focus is privacy.

Sometimes service providers on the internet try to accomodate "anonymous" payment via wire transfer or other non-credit card payment methods. VPNs are one example. Whether this is significantly "anonymous" is debatable. An obvious question is whether the service provider retains payment information after payment is made and if so, why. To provide service, arguably the provider only needs to know "this IP address is paid up through [date]". It does not need to know "this IP address is associated with [user]". It does not need to collect or retain any information about [user].

We just increase search counter by one.

200 searches a month and then having to pay extra per search is a hilariously bad offering.

This isn’t 2008 mobile contracts, I don’t want usage caps for basic functionality.

I recently gave Kagi a try after using DDG, and signed up for their $10/month plan. However, I found myself running out of searches within the first 20 days, which left me feeling hesitant about making any additional searches due to the extra cost. While I do want to support Kagi's success, I personally found the cost of $10-15 per month for search to be a bit steep. Perhaps I have unrealistic expectations on how cheap search should be, but for now, I'm not sure if the cost is worth it for me.

I search ~1000 queries/month, and I tried using Google, DDG, and Kagi side by side for the last six months. At this point I'm 100% on Kagi. My last holdout was work using Google, but it's just so frustrating now after using Kagi, I finally switched over.

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.

I agree. I was skeptical to use Kagi at first, but since making the jump a few months ago, I'm never looking back.

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 don't want them to fail but I have 0 support for Kagi after trying them out. Main reason is they collect PII and have no privacy friendly payment options. They should have gone the way if Mullvad with that. Another reason is requiring an account for search is begging to be tracked but even if that is not an issue, it is sooo annoying having to sign in to search and even more annoying when auto complete for a search takes me to kagi but I no longer have that account so I have to face a login page and then navigate away and redo the search.

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.

Kagi does not collect PII. You can register with a fake email if you want to. Payment information (if any) is collected by Stripe, not Kagi.

How would you keep it simple while running a paid search service with non-trivial search cost?

As someone with high privacy focus, just having a user id given by stripe, that stripe then can connect to a real person is a liability. Mullvad allows payments in crypto and their site is accessible as an onion service. I know it definitely adds overhead to do both of those things, though personally I wouldn't mind paying a lot of extra for it. I'm not sure which fraction of users are like me though, I might just be an unviable customer

Sure, but also note that it took 14 years for Mullvad to reach the point where it can support all those billing methods. Kagi launched less than a year ago with a small bootstrapped team, building a much more complex product.

Kagi can listen to its users and learn from other pro-privacy companies. Imagine if proton requires a paid account for everything for everyone.

> 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.

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).

For those interested in something self hosted and open source, try SearXNG. I've hosting an instance from my NAS for over a year, it's been excellent, and I retain full control over my search history (or lack thereof)

searxng.org

Haven't tried Kagi, but I can highly recommend you.com. It allows quite a bit of customization and has been really solid for the last year+ that I have been using it, I only ever go back to Google for thesaurus/dictionary lookup searches.

"Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs."

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.

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