Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
blog.kagi.com
blog.kagi.com
Internet is I guess, next after a working computer with a working dev environment, the thing that makes most difference for many of us developers.
For me it has value in two different ways:
1. time saved by arriving at the correct answer quicker and not waste a lot of time trying to refine my search to the point where even Google cannot misunderstand it. If your relationship with Google is better, more power to you.
2. I am a happier man as a result of not having to fight my search engines day in and day out.
I also notice that unlike a number of others who like me feel they use search a lot, I don't get close to the quotas.
I guess one thing I might do differently (based on years of frustration with Google and DDG) is I take something like a depth-first approach based on my first search:
- Using Tree Style Tabs I open every result on the first page that looks relevant in a new tree (ctrl-click to open in new tab, nesting is automatic)
- I then look at each of them, ctrl-clicking every link that looks relevant, recursively
This works for me and I have been doing it for years. One nice side effect is it gives me a permanent somewhat organized tree of most of the most relevant docs. In some cases I even select such trees and (with the help of another extension) export them as nested links in markdown in rhe hope that I can use as a more permant table of contents for the topic.
I also think it's one of the big selling points of GPT-like search engines. It's not that they necessarily arrive at the answer quicker, they're just so much less annoying to use than Google, not only because you don't have to wrestle with an ambiguous syntax, but you also don't need to wade through bait-and-switch spam results, dismiss newsletter requests, get roped around by filler text, etc. The typewritered text is also a brilliant move to circumvent the sort of skimming-like reading pattern most of us have developed due to exposure to the spammier side of the web.
All that content was created with existing SEO rules in mind. As soon as GPT-likes have established behaviour, we'll get new kind of content that specifically targets them. But at least we can enjoy better results in the meantime.
In general, a big part of why Google is struggling so much with search engine spam is that they are such a dominant force in directing web traffic that they're effectively re-shaping the web around them to optimize for their algorithm. If you had any sort of diversity in search, this would be much less of a problem because the economic incentives would be much smaller.
I don't think it can be taken for granted that any search ecosystem would struggle in the same way Google has been struggling. I think their SEO-problems is a direct consequence of their monopoly on search and a lack of real competition.
In the past few days it’s helped me with a bunch of k8s stuff (“explain this coredns log message”, “give me the kubectl command to show all events sorted by most recent first”, etc…)
Lately I have started using https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt as well, which seems to be more up to date and less censored.
The only time I find myself re-doing a search in Google is when I want to look something up in Google Maps, but everything else, Kagi is on par with Google or better. I really like that Kagi lets me filter out blogspam results and sites that are just remixing content from StackOverflow.
I've never seen Kagi miss something blatantly obvious like that, so I echo sibling's suggestion to reach out to Kagi to investigate what's going wrong in your account.
Do you mind sharing more information about this on kagifeedback.org so that we can have a look?
Now it's just the price holding me back. I just refuse buy metered services. I've had unlimited bandwidth for years despite my usage consistently falling below the cheaper top limited usage download tier. I just don't want to think about usage — it's an unwanted distraction when something is critical to my workflow.
However, $25/mo is just too much for this service. I can see why they need to charge that at the moment due to economies of scale (or lack there-of). However, even $10/mo would be pushing it for this service.
$25/mo is a long way off the mark. Can buy a VPN, support an open source ad blocker, and have money spare to pay for a couple of streaming subscriptions each month.
Happy to keep paying for this.
It's also a buzzword with no commonly-accepted definition. (If something is commonly accepted, it's that the term escapes common definition.)
This motivates a race-to-the-bottom mixed with a sort of Gresham's law. The worst actors go the furthest. And then they drive the good actors away from the term. "AI-powered X" is quickly approaching red flag territory for me, though I doubt that will be the case for the general population for some time.
This is a breath of fresh air. Ever since CNN Underscored started being a thing, I've grown to dislike more and more the swamp of affiliate link promoting content.
Some concent creaters on YouTube for example (like randomfrankp), are able pull it off, but deeply affects the credibility of most content.
Better off using a VPN and duck or Brave imho.
In any case these improvements do look very good. Public record search is cool. Lenses improvements look interesting as that seems the be the most unique feature.
If that's the case, nowhere on the regular Internet is safe.
Snowden revealed that NSA has infiltrated all the major industry players (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.), also ISPs. But the only way NSA can know what your plaintext HTTPS URL is either by having access to your PC, or having access to Kagi's servers. Or as I said, that they've cracked encryption schemes everyone assumes to be safe.
Or if they have access to, or can subpoena, a MitMaaS for HTTPS. Like Cloudflare.
Couldn't you also just open an incognito window?
I'm just explaining the reason why some does it and saying it doesn't help against intermediaries who can eavesdrop.
Im fact I think I was tempted to write my exact thoughts about it yesterday but dropped it.
The reason some privacy oriented sites hide it is because of local snooping on your end point, i.e. if someone has access to your device when you are not there and can look through your logs and by extension search logs.
This is such an 'of course, why wasn't this done before' move!
Larding up a site with lots of ads and trackers is a blatant signal that it is low quality content attempting to game the search engine site.
It is surprising/not-surprising that Google didn't prioritize this downranking method years ago, as it would have massively improved the usefulness their results; but then it would also reduce the number of pages subsequently displayed using Google's placement engine...
Seems like low hanging fruit for Microsoft to undermine Google, downranking sites with heavy Google ad placements (since MS doesn't have a similarly large ad network that I know of)... and it'd be legit improvement of their results!
But look at the company using bearblog.dev, that's awesome. bearblog.dev remains one of my favorite services I've found through HackerNews.
On to neeva.
Seconded. I gave it a few months, but it just wouldn't improve by itself. To be fair: With a detailed bug report (via Discord, making it excruciatingly hard to find duplicates/follow up), the problem would often be fixed in the next release.
But it wasn't 1 or 2, it was more like 20 easily spotted issues. Come on, I can't do all of your testing.
I think I've never said it this clearly because I don't want to offend (I still very much like the browser's concept), but it was just too painful for regular use for me.
This about a year ago. Your comment seems to indicate that it hasn't changed.
But we are getting there. More than 1,500 issues have been addressed.
And Orion is the fastest browser on Mac and completely zero telemetry at that. Give us a bit more time..
Early adopters tend to be more vocal. If your product becomes successful, you will have to satisfy less vocal, regular users.
a) do not want to jeopardize zero telemetry nature of the browser
b) we hear a lot from users who miss "just one thing" for Orion to be perfect
c) no amount of telemetry would tell us why someone does not like the browser
I've rage quite Orion a couple times. But I keep going back. Some of the features are great. I use multiple browsers anyway so I'm ok with using Orion for the bulk of my browsing, then using other browsers each for certain sites or for certain uses. I'd love to work for them but I don't see a viable business model.
My SO uses multiple browsers as well although I can't make head nor tail what their "strategy" is for choosing. I doubt that having to switch up browsers is acceptable for the public at large.
I imagine there's a /reason/ you were using kagi, and that reason is probably privacy related? Why then would you use neeva as an alternative? Started by ad execs. There is zero chance neeva has your privacy in mind, no matter what they say about it. They are focused on pushing consumer products. This requires user profiles.
Are we talking about Orion? It is one of my absolute favorites!
> On to neeva.
Not available where I lived last I checked, which also means I now don't like them.
Please someone who knows neeva let me know if they are good enough to forget that they disrespected me last time ;-)
However, I think it should be easier to filter down searches to only show these results as Kagis advanced search operators mostly work reliably (and if they don't you can file a bug).
I have Apple Music because it comes with my family plan, and I have YouTube Music because it comes with YouTube Premium. If I had to pay just for a music service — like Spotify — they wouldn’t get my money. Even if it’s the better music streaming option in my car. But my car also plays Apple Music.
The dark pattens and ubiquity of some of these verticals means not having to care too much and still getting most of what I want. I don’t really want to care about search the way some people care about vinyl.
And I have my personal version of vinyl, I listen a lot to soma.fm and Radio Paradise. It's very interesting to me personally how few other services like those really exist out in the world. There are things like DI.FM and Mixcloud, but I don't know anything else like Radio Paradise (music channels, forums, etc). I've scoured all the channels and platforms expose on TuneIn and the like, and there aren't quite as many variants as I would personally expect. So the niche music world isn't even as numerou$ as you'd want a long tail to be.
I was a subscriber and I absolutely hate the feeling of "spending" searches every time I search
- How is your search in languages other than English and local to countries other than the US and Europe? In particular, I am interested in Russian and Turkish. I remember that previously (a year or two ago) it was not very good. Also, does your GPT based search work for other languages?
- How is phind.com related to kagi? I remember that at some point, I was searching for something on phind and got an error saying that Kagi is out of capacity or something like that.
- What underlying search providers do you currently use?
I wonder what happened to Google?
My theory is maybe their own systems have become too complex for them to understand and tune now. But they’ve invested so heavily into “AI” they don’t known where else to go in order to fix it ?
I’ve here seen or experienced a search product quite like Google used to be. It truly felt like magic in it’s day.
I have a feeling many things in the digital space are similar to this and will go the same way, code is a pretty good example. Longer term, I wonder what the generation of massive amounts of code will do to the training data.
Wonder how they determine if a review is unbiased or not. Any attempt at automating this process means someone else will figure a way to game the system over time.
If the price model (IMHO correctly) is connected to the actual costs of the search, why not make a "searches account"?
You pay 5$ per month as a "baseline" and each first of the month 200 searches are credited on your account.
Then, if you use less than 200 searches, at the end of the month you have a credit that goes over to next month.
If your credit goes to 0 within a month, you can buy "packets" of searches, 5$ for 200, 10$ for 500, or something like that, and recharge your account.
Overall, while I'm still not sure whether Kagi is worth the money I'm paying, I keep doing it so that they can release improvements like this one. Their quick development speed is great to see.
I always found Google's to be pretty bad, I like to use Yandex for reverse image search since theirs is crazy good.
> whether Kagi is worth the money I'm paying
Honestly, searches being limited just kills it for me, I don't feel like paying per search nor $25/mo, I do close to 200-250 searches per day, sometimes >500
I'm downloading and rendering the web page on my browser anyway, so it seems like a giant waste not to index it while the page is open.
I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or four times per day". They know very well that someone for pays for Kagi (or even knows about Kagi) doesn't perform three or four searches a day.
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I have been asking GPT-* a lot of what I would have previously searched for. And there's still a lot of searching `+reddit.com` because they can't seem to solve search.
I pay $10/mo and am grandfathered in as an "early adopter" with 1K searches. I would be willing to pay more because I've been so happy with it. It's simple stuff -- it respects and obeys my double quotes and boolean operators. If my query returns no results, I get no results. No advertisements, period. The ability to pin, raise, lower, or eliminate the rank of domains in your results.
It's just nice to feel a modicum of respect as someone who's been using computers since shortly after they could read.
At this point, the free options are so bad I'm considering writing my own. It won't do 50% of what the big ones do but it will do it well.
The days of believing free is viable for any online service should be long gone. Hell it's difficult to even determine if paying for a service actually protects you from being the product - because often that isn't the case. However free should be a no-brainer these days. There is no free.
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You are correct in saying that almost all current Kagi users are in the other 1% category (tech savvy professionals who search a lot).
But this plan is not meant for then. This plan is literally made for the 99% of all users who search the web 2-3 times a day, as the statistics show. We would like Kagi to have much broader adoption outside the HN crowd, and a low price plan is essential.
How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?
I don't necessarily agree it's dishonest, but I think it's a bit weird to have a pricing tier than effectively doesn't work for anyone who would pay for the service.
As you said, almost all Kagi users are not in this 99% of users. Having a plan that caters to these users probably doesn't benefit many people in that group because they won't pay for search, but for users who would pay for search they might see that tier and feel that the quotas are stingy and they're being forced up the pricing tiers for behaviour that to them feels normal.
I don't know what your subscriber base looks like, but as an armchair spectator... I'd probably drop the $5/m tier and then emphasise that the "Professional" tier comes with "10x the number of searches that an average internet user makes", or whatever the multiplier actually is.
Also it would probably go some way towards assuaging fears of running out of searches if unused searches rolled over month to month. This tends to feel fairer in general.
When we had only the $10 plan, we were getting messages from users that that plan is too pricey for them when they don't search as much.
Hence the $5 month and now about 5% of our users are on this plan. (and Kagi still has zero marketing spend). You have to start somewhere. This gives us an opportunity to onboard almost everyone to Kagi.
> if unused searches rolled over month to month. This tends to feel fairer in general.
Yes, except something still has to pay for all the free trial searches and our salaries. Selling product at cost or below is something VC funded startups can do, which we are not.
Sidenote, i'd really enjoy the rollover. At least to some degree. Not infinitely of course, but being able to mitigate the cost of some overages would be really nice.
Aside from that i'm a new customer (1st month), having gone through the trial and now on the $5/m plan. I'm quite happy. I expect i'll upgrade to the $10/m, but i hope i don't have to upgrade to the $20/m because i'll be debating if it's worth it. Regardless, a bit of a rollover price would help a ton with any cost aversion. Even if only up to 1 extra month, or w/e, of rollover. Anything would help.
Thanks for Kagi tho, i'm very happy so far! I also really love the continued work and improvements. It feels like i'm not just paying for the current product, but buying into a larger future product. Which also goes to mitigate cost aversion.
Let's say a search costs 1c, the free plan therefore costs $1. With a 5% 30d conversion rate that's a $20 CAC. On $10/m for 700 searches, that's just under 7 months to pay back which is quite long, but drops to just over 3 months if users average ~400 searches, so I can see why you don't want to roll over.
That said, if you believe you have a big LTV/long retention, retained users past their payback period should be more than enough to pay salaries/R&D/etc, so maybe there is more flexibility.
> Selling product at cost or below is something VC funded startups can do, which we are not.
I know it often feels like this, but I think the answer is more complicated. It's often hard to know what cost actually is – when you're hiring, growing, and selling a service running on tech that is hard to price.
I'm interested in how you know your cost per search at such a level of precision. It suggests to me that either you've done _way more_ work measuring it and optimising your infrastructure than I expect for a company of Kagi's age, or that it's a fairly naive number (understandably so!) based on dividing infra cost by number of searches. If it's the latter, are there economies of scale that significantly change the number if you have, say, 10x or 100x the user base?
Most searches I do are simple, any search engine will do. So I don't use Kagi for those. When it's not trivial, I just start my search with "k " to use Kagi. I easily stay below the 200 searches limit then.
For sure it would be more convenient to have unlimited searches, but I'm not willing to pay for a higher plan.
Personally, I think Kagi needs to reconsider their pricing plans and either lower the monthly price or significantly raise the limit for included searches. Otherwise I don't know if I can judge $10 per month for a premium search engine whose service will not even last me for a whole month.
Don't get me wrong. I love the product and would be happy to pay for it, but your current pricing plans are just not very convincing to me and do not fit most peoples needs. Nowadays, a search engine is something you use on a daily basis. And you don't want to care about it.
> But the included searches of 200 in the standard plan is extremely low. Even a normal user will hit this limit quickly
They will not, a 'normal' user searches only 100 times a month.
> (if not, they are not your target group - or why should they consider paying for a search engine anyway
Because they want higher quality search experience, have their privacy respected and/or do not like the entire order of things on the web where they are constantly being the product.
> I think Kagi needs to reconsider their pricing plans and either lower the monthly price or significantly raise the limit for included searches
We will. Pricing is not a matter of our mood though, but of economics, and once you remove advertisers from the equation the true cost of search surfaces. We were able to bring it down to just 1.5 cents per search.
> Nowadays, a search engine is something you use on a daily basis. And you don't want to care about it.
Isn't something you use every day, tens if not hundreds times a day, and helps you accomplish important stuff, in a more productive way worth the $25/mo then?
I really wish it would be that way. But from my personal experience non-tech affine people don’t care about privacy or ads that much (as long as it’s free). Just take my wife and father-in-law as an example: They have Google as their startpage in the browser. And instead of directly typing the URL into the browser bar, they will always do a search for it. I told them so many times, but they literally don’t care. And they are not completely wrong since it works for them. 99% of the time Google will return what they are looking for within the first result. No chance I can convince them to suddenly pay $5-10 for the same thing.
"Includes enough searches for X% of current Kagi users"
I'm very curious how you measure the "average" user's usage. It seems hard for me to believe that even an "average" user (which I grant I am not) who has switched their browsers' default search engine to Kagi on their (one) computer and (one) phone -- assuming an average user has a computer and a smartphone -- uses less than 200 queries per month.
We've all been trained for years now (by Google) to type searches (not urls) into our browser's address bar. For so many people, the first action they take to "access the web" is to type something that is not a URL in their browser's address bar. I suspect this behavior is even _more common_ among "average" users ("power" users seem more likely to actually type "mail.google.com" instead of "gmail", for example).
This way one search is maybe $0,05 or whatever, but at least one can use KAGI without signing up for an account.
Several paywall solutions exist for this, like:
- http://paywall.lightningj.org/ - https://medium.com/@infolightningj/lightningj-paywall-bringi...
There's something perverse with the incentives here: they make more money if you have to perform more searches.
It doesn't quite sit right in the same way github actions charges per minute: The slower their runners are, the more money they make.
And both of these scenarios there is no user agency to assist with that past a certain point.
I believe the reason for the pricing is Kagi's cost structure. Accessing for example Google index is not free. Since they don't show ads or monetize the user in other ways, they need to pass the costs to customers.
Pay-for-what-you-use models are not common for consumer services, but I think it is a healthy pricing model. Better than fixed price packages, where you assume 80% of low volume users will cover the costs for the 20% heavy users
When you assemble tools for cognitive work, it’s important that they have low overhead. Thinking about the financial cost of using a tool is a small context switch that slows you down. Thus a bundle of prepaid stuff increases the utility of the service beyond what you’d get with pure pay per use, even though the latter is more economically efficient.
Their model pushes people who make a large # of searches towards the unlimited plan, where incentives are always aligned. I personally find that fair because I expect to get at least as much value from my search engine as I do from my IDE. $20/month seems reasonable.
Their model also allows them to have lower expenses against the lower tier plans if users of those plans make fewer searches than their quota. That's the incentive you're looking for. As long as users are not reaching their quotas, or are on unlimited plans, the user incentive is aligned with the business' incentives. And shortly after exceeding their quotas, users will probably upgrade their plan.
The perverse incentive only exists within a few "holes" between the plans, and serves to encourage the user to upgrade. I believe that by limiting the window of the perverse incentive, it should discourage goal-seeking to fit customers within that window. The more optimal outcome month-to-month should likely be to improve customer experience and get more signups, rather than juicing the current customers for limited additional gains inside those constrained windows.
I just gave it a quick try there. While some of the features seem promising, the website ranking for example, what they consider a search doesn't feel great from a user perspective. Each step below resulted in part of my quota being used up:
1. Making the initial search.
2. Switching to image results.
3. Waiting a few minutes before switching back to the web results.
4. Viewing page 2 of the web results.
5. Ordering results by time.
6. Changing the sort order to descending. The previous step executed another search without allowing me to modify this.
7. Limiting the search to results from the past 24 hours. This returns a totally different set of results from when we merely sorted by most recent.
8. (Sometimes) Clearing the filters.
9. Opening the Lens > Edit menu, which has a big cross at the top right making it look like an overlay. Instead, it actually sends a GET request for the search again, using up your quota if you've exceeded whatever the grace period is.
This, along with nearly tripling the price for existing subscribers that want the same functionality does not inspire confidence or goodwill. The change might've been more palatable if they'd kept a single subscription and put a monthly price cap on additional search fees to match the $25 unlimited tier.
Maybe I'm not the target user but the 100 lifetime trial searches just means I probably won't return once I've ran out. 25/100 are already gone to evaluating what they charge for and I don't think I'll get a good idea of whether they're actually providing value over existing providers with the remaining 75. The amount charged isn't low enough that it's not a decision.
The main justification for all this seems to be that adding AI to the search experience is expensive. The obvious rebuttal is that if AI is such a big value-add why don't they just charge for that service in a higher tier or as an add-on.
Kagi is built for people who want a search engine built for them. There is no way around it but to pay for search like you would pay for donuts you eat in a coffee shop.
AI is no justification, search is just expensive. Google is making about 4 cents worth for every user search. We are selling search at 1.5 cents while building a completely user-centric product. If you know of other ways to do this, we are all ears.
Unfortunately, you do give up consistency and whatever filtering/ranking/customisation Kagi offer.
> (9 is probably a bug)
To clarify 9, the request is sent when clicking the cross on the Lens > Edit page rather on than visiting it. This also occurs when returning from maps. In both cases a new search is only billed when the cache has expired. Interestingly, from a totally naive user's perspective, maps don't appear to use up a search.
> If you know of other ways to do this, we are all ears.
I don't have an issue with charging for individual searches. On the whole I think it's a reasonable idea. I do think that some aspects of the UX encourage billing superfluous searches and that, on a purely financial level, Kagi is dis-incentivised from improving this.
Taking steps 5 and 6 as an example: there's no reason for these to be separate billable events. When viewing search results the user interface simply doesn't allow the user to select the sort order in the same operation they select the field. I sincerely doubt that this is intentional but it's easy to see the cynical take.
I think there's also a decent case for longer caching of results, giving users the option to refresh results if it's important they aren't stale. This avoids the current situation where a user might spend some time visiting the firsts webpage in the result set, return wishing to continue perusing subsequent results but end up triggering a billable event. The same applies should someone want to swap between web and images.
A quirk I noticed when trying to trigger shopping results was that searching for "best hair dryer" will display the shopping widget whereas searching "best hairdryer" does not, despite "showing results for best hair dryer" appearing as part of the search.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the feature but searching for variations on "cordless drill", "best cordless drill", "best cordless combi drill", "best cordless percussion drill" never returned any shopping results, should I have expected it to?
To expand on my prior point as to why moving to a total number of trial searches might be harmful to conversions. In evaluating the billing rules and shopping results, I'm now on search 46/100. I haven't yet got into a flow with the product. That might change over the next 50 searches but I still haven't explored: redirects, lenses, personalised results, fine tuning search settings, or just the broader search quality.
Kagi is selling searches at cost, and we make money on subscriptions. Making a suboptimal UX id definitely not what we are doing, as people pay us for UX to be optimal.
You point out some valid use-cases there and the reason we haven't addressed them so far is probably because they are rare and users didn't care enough to post and upvote them on kagifeedback.org for it to make a difference.
The one you noted has been suggested actually https://kagifeedback.org/d/844-dont-use-extra-searches-for-c...
and is planned on our roadmap, just not prioritized (just one upvote) and we had bigger fish to fry.
Hanlon's razor in general applies well when thinking about Kagi, expect it is not (always) stupidity but lack of resources.
Please don't feel that I was making any hard judgements about Kagi or yourself based on the points I mentioned. My only intention has been to learn a bit more about the product and provide some insight into what someone evaluating the product for the first time might feel. I appreciate that the points may come across as hostile/challenging but I'd be happiest if they were rebutted easily.
Your present response does raise some concerns however.
> Kagi is selling searches at cost
This is a different claim from your blog post on 08/03/23 where the cost of each search was 1.25 cents. If this isn't the case, you're losing money on any annual unlimited subscribers that make more than 1,416 searches each month.
> and we make money on subscriptions
If this is the case, why not differentiate the subscriptions based on their value-add features and operate an upper bound of $25/mo on the amount charged for searches for all tiers?
If you're making money off of the subscription, why don't the search quotas roll over?
Together, these three points give the impression that the aim is for subscription search quotas to be under-utilised rather than to provide the searches at cost.
> You point out some valid use-cases there and the reason we haven't addressed them so far is probably because they are rare and users didn't care enough to post and upvote them on kagifeedback.org for it to make a difference.
That's a fair point regarding general feedback. I can't speak as your average user but as someone that wasn't already invested in the product they were areas that introduced friction in the decision of whether I'd like to pay for the product or not. A user evaluating the product is unlikely to post why they haven't converted to kagifeedback.org, even if they're aware of the site. It's worth bearing in mind that issues for potential users may not be a problem for existing users, apportioning time to the desires of both groups is a difficult balance.
> and is planned on our roadmap, just not prioritized (just one upvote) and we had bigger fish to fry.
My personal perspective is that it's absolutely unacceptable for a company to double-charge due to their own UI decisions. Spurious billing in general is something I would expect to be treated as top priority on an ongoing basis. Treating it's occurrence as a feature request raises serious concerns, especially regarding how similar/more impactful situations might be handled.
I'm disappointed, there's a lot to like about the product itself.
> This is a different claim from your blog post on 08/03/23 where the cost of each search was 1.25 cents.
Yes, cost of search has significantly increased since. Microsoft raised prices 6x and it is 2.5 cents to do a search with the Bing API alone. We are trying to absorb much of that through creative ways so that users do not see it.
> If this is the case, why not differentiate the subscriptions based on their value-add features and operate an upper bound of $25/mo on the amount charged for searches for all tiers?
Because the cost of all other features pales in comparison to the cost of search. In general if a feature does not costs us anything we do not charge the user for it (example: bangs are free).
> If you're making money off of the subscription, why don't the search quotas roll over?
Two main reasons:
- It means more billing systems to build and we are eager to work on search features like this update
- Something still has to pay for all our additional costs like free trial account searches and salaries
> It's worth bearing in mind that issues for potential users may not be a problem for existing users, apportioning time to the desires of both groups is a difficult balance.
Agreed and it is a matter of product roadmap prioritization. While the issue was previously raised, it had only one upvote. Now that we got more alarming feedback it was prioritized internally and 5 and 9 from your list should be addressed asap (others do not really apply as we do run a full search for those).
> My personal perspective is that it's absolutely unacceptable for a company to double-charge due to their own UI decisions.
I agree with this perspective and as I hopefully explained that was not the intent, but a bug.
My "excuse" for some of these things not being fixed is that they have low perceived impact in practice and/or lack of resources to address all issues at once (hence roadmap).
Fwiw, i pay for Kagi and i am totally inline with their estimates. Maybe a pinch more, 7 instead of 4 atm. But at $5/m i can't complain, and so far (it's new to me) i've found myself not falling back to Google.
I was on DDG for ~2 years and i constantly opened up Startpage (aka Google) and sometimes even Google. I've been very happy with Kagi, so far.
Not sure i'd pay $20/m, but $5/m is a very nice value to me. I hope things work well for them.
edit: Sidenote, but the first thing i noticed is just how damn fast Kagi is. Not really a selling point to me, but wow.
It's also extremely easy to check what your usage is for the current month and get a monthly overview. If you happen to use more than the 200 searches for the standard plan, they charge 1.5 cents per search. If you blow past it and end up using another 500 searches, which matches the $10 plan, you're still only paying $12.5.
They also provide soft and hard limits to how many searches you can use to avoid unexpected charges.
Like, I honestly don't know what else you expect them to do.
edit: Also, for reference, as a heavy user who basically lives in their search engine, my total searches for previous months are: 786, 782, 610, 519, 717.
Almost all of current Kagi users are in the other 1% category, but that doesn’t change the fact that vast majority of internet users search 2-3 times a day and that Kagi would like to attract them with this plan.
The copy clears says internet users and provides concrete sources for the claim. How would you word it differently?
I have no idea if that's true or not, but if it isn't, then there isn't really a way to "word it differently" - including the information at all is misleading.
Are you saying that the average Kagi user, who is an internet power user doing far more than 4 searches a day, is going to be misled into believing they are an average internet user and that they really only do 4 searches a day?
it was my first time using google search in a few months since i started kagi, but.... have google's results become better?
maybe voting with our wallets worked, and google is rolling back some of their less popular recent ranking changes