Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

I left Kagi when they changed their pricing a few months ago, after being a paying customer since the closed beta. Switched away to Neeva, and even messaged the customer support at Neeva to ask if they were financially stable, since competitor Kagi raised prices so much (they told me yes).

Now that Neeva has collapsed, I’m back at Kagi. But I also bought the highest tier $25 plan because I want them to get my money. Even with these search increases on the lower plans, I understand now that building a privacy focused search engine is expensive. And Kagi has really hit a sweet spot of providing high quality search (often better than google)

I’ve also switched to Orion browser and might start donating for that too. It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab tree that doesn’t look like a hack, or setting a custom ‘new tab’ page).

Huge kudos to the Kagi team for building products that are not only privacy focused, but also just genuinely better products. Search and Orion are both fantastic. I really hope they can be financially sustainable.

> even messaged the customer support at Neeva to ask if they were financially stable

Offtopic, but what answer were you expecting?

"Thank you for your message. We advise you not to start using our services, we are on the brink of shutting down, just haven't announced it yet."

Fair, maybe oversimplified for the sake of the above comment.

Rather, I asked the Neeva support person if the $6 price was sustainable, and if they foresaw a need to raise prices. I mentioned that Kagi called out increased costs from Bing, and asked if Neeva was impacted as well, and whether $6 was enough to support their costs.

I was hoping to mostly just let them know that customers care about this stuff, but they responded to me by saying that they have an in-house index and Bing costs are not a problem for them, due to their private index.

So even though they likely answered my question honestly that Bing costs increasing didn’t impact them as much as it did Kagi, it seems they had much bigger cost problems instead!

Can't say for sure, but Neeva I don't think failed because they couldn't keep the business going. It was always a game of perseverance going up against Google Search that not only is free but has tremendous distribution advantages (through Android and Chrome).

DuckDuckGo is at it after all these years, building it brick by brick, if you will. Neeva's problem might have been the opportunity cost to their engineering and executive orgs in pursuing such a drawn out build. They'd rather latch onto something that could grow much faster, and frankly, Enterpise + LLMs is right in their alley. It is a nice pivot and not representative of much else (don't mean to discount that consumer products are hard, especially when the competition is BigTech themselves).

I think Neeva needed user signup growth more than it needed cash. It was reasonably well funded through VC. If it had shown adoption growth they would have received more VC money to continue even if they were losing money on each user.

Kagi appears to be more bootstrapped, so it's very, very important for them to always maintain healthy marginal profits on each user. In this case, your cash is probably very appreciated, and hopefully they're net positive overall so can afford years of potential stagnation after this boom time while still earning a decent living. That allows them to be around to get sudden influxes of new customers whenever various self-inflicted crises damage the incumbents brands. Time in market vs. timing the market.

Well put, "time in market" is a thing when going against a habit so entrenched as search is.

How is Kagi better than simply using google without an account through a VPN? Or using DDG through a VPN?

I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account. They can then associate all of your searches to that account just like google and bing do when you use them while logged in.

I searched for certain things that google didn’t show me for ten pages that Kagi did on the first. For example, a divorce filing of someone

I feel Google’s ability to track and profile you extends far beyond your IP address and/or a login

Not really. I set my VPN endpoint to Sweden, disabled adblock and Google started showing me ads in Swedish. Also back when I still used my Google acc they showed me ads for things that I've already bought. Their adtech stuff is way dumber than you think it is.

I guess they created a browser and continuously push for more sources of tracking data via web browser features/standards just for fun. Gotcha

That browser requires an account. Most people use it with a google account, because they are using gmail and other google services. So their adtech doesn't need to be that smart. Why bother trying to track a Firefox user who uses a VPN and an adblock when most of your users don't even bother to hide from you?

> That browser requires an account

Fake news. I’m done here

Slightly unrelated, but Google has become increasingly less accurate at returning pages. I am looking for a change even outside of its huge privacy violations.

This is a big part of it! Google has genuinely dropped the ball on search. Kagi tends to be better than google, or at least comparable. Not on every search, but often enough. And their ability to rank up/down/block certain websites is actually really useful!

Kagi is not showing ads.

Ads are (often) a distraction. Mostly my brain just ignores them, but occasionally they trick me to some sidetrack and I forget for a while what I was doing.

I use an adblock so I don't see any ads on google.

Kagi also sorts results by the number of ads/trackers on them (pushing them down), so higher quality content is more likely to surface on top.

Using an adblock isn’t enough as the ads are embedded into the results, and very subtlety called out. If your query even remotely resembles something related to shopping (in the eyes of Google) you will get spammed with localized ads.

Kagi has good quality search results (better than Google in many cases), works well and has no ads or promoted content. I'm personally not using it for extreme privacy / anonymity reasons, I just want a good experience using the search engine.

> How is Kagi better than simply using google without an account through a VPN? Or using DDG through a VPN?

More features (lenses, explicit personalization), more results (it’s bing + google indexes + extra), and better results (IMO).

> I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account.

Many don’t, but you lose a lot of what makes it so much better without it.

> They can then associate all of your searches to that account

Yes, but then the rationale is that they are so expensive, so they don’t need to do shady shit like that. Currently, they don’t even save your history which is planned as an optional feature for later (so you can look into your own history).

These wishful projections of benevolent intent are thoroughly unconvincing.

Do they accept mail-in payment like some vpn or email providers that are recommended on this site, and use a random string to connect that money to a payment plan? Because that would actually back up their intent with concrete action.

If not, there is no reason to trust their declarations of good deeds. And encouraging people to trust them because "they can make money by other means" is disingenous and ridiculous.

The search results are better. That's why I'm using it. The privacy part is not important to me, but having the best search results possible is important. I'm done wasting my time.

> setting a custom ‘new tab’ page

Aside, but it’s so crazy to me that both Chrome and Firefox lack this option. There are third party extensions for it, which is the official solution, but I’d rather minimize the number of third-party extensions I use.

I setup account limits to the $25 water mark with the plan to just swap to that, probably for the annual re-up option.

Then today I noticed they upped their quota. Talk about timing. Ill proabbly stick to monthly for a while. Honestly not sure what is better for them, a monthly sub or an annual (at a discounted rate). As it looks I'll probably be around 1k searches a month.

https://imgur.com/a/ZbnWUao

a 25/mon bill was kinda steep. But 10 is definately digestible for me. So I am quite happy with the swap and the quality of the searches.

> It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab bar that doesn’t look like a hack).

Huh? Firefox has had great vertical tabs, thanks to Tree Style Tabs, for decades. Orion doesn’t supper hierarchical tabs, like Firefox does.

I use Orion and Brave, both of which are experimenting with vertical tabs, but if Firefox were as fast as Brave I’d be full-time on that. The tabbed browsing experience on Firefox has always been the best, in my book.

I used Tree Style Tabs in Firefox, but it looks like it was tacked-on (because it is). Also Firefox doesn’t have a good way to hide the normal top tab bar, so you have to go into browser-chrome CSS and hide some UI elements.

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