Ok wow, seeing these lists might have just made a customer out of me. I’ve been vaguely aware of Kagi and know the general premise but this made it real.
I assume it's a bit chicken and egg - marginal costs of new customers/extra searches is relatively low, it's the crawling & development/SRE that's expensive - so should (or at least could) come down as more people adopt it, driving further adoption from relative cheapskates like me?
It seems great, but I use DDG 'bangs' (which are also a Kagi feature) loads of times a day, rather than going directly to websites - especially !w & !wikt, !arch & !aur & !archpackages only slightly less - I'd blow through the monthly limit in no time on that alone. (Which also seems a bit unfair, they're just redirects, not using index, there's an argument they shouldn't be included? I suppose if you're so motivated you can work around by using Firefox's feature for it instead of search engine anyway.)
Edit: oh wait, I just found in the FAQ that 'bangs' actually aren't counted as searches. I may have to trial it, see how many searches I actually use how quickly. (And how reasonable the 1.5ç overage seems in my usage.)
more info: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#how-are...
Redirecting a bang costs us basically nothing, so it does not count as a search.
Also reloading the same search within a short time (~2 minutes, for example coming back in browser after clicking through a search result) does not count as an additional search as we served cached results.
Another tip: We have decent documentation (that is also open source and editable) and you can access it quickly from Kagi with the !help bang, for example
!help how are searches counted
will land you on
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...
This is great to hear but it doesn’t really address the point you’re replying to:
> Wish that was more clear
As someone who is just seriously noticing Kagi because of this HN post, I have no brand impression that tells me you’re trying to pass on the savings (most companies don’t) and the marketing material even makes me think you’re targeting a premium price point with healthy margins.
I would suggest (and caveat: I’m not a marketer, just someone who has seen a lot of brands come and go) either of these directions:
1. Be clear about the cost savings when talking about the specific features. Example: Add a new heading to kagi/features/bangs.html that says “Bangs are Free” and talks about how bangs do not count towards your searches
2. Remove it from being part of your public values altogether. Lean in to the value prop of having a cost and let users self-discover what’s free. If it’s the right choice, highlight it privately: make it a line item on the monthly invoice with something that describes why they are free or put it in onboarding material.
I think this is because over a very short period of usage, I applied block/lower/raise/pin to various domains, and now my search results are almost always perfect.
That said, I understand the value of going directly to a site. On that front, Kagi makes it trivial to define new bangs.
Lately I’ve moved to doing this at the browser level instead of via a search engine. It’s not a huge speed difference, but in principle it seems wrong to have an extra round-trip out to a search engine to redirect me to another site, when I can set up the keywords locally and go directly. Firefox makes it easy to do: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
I use bangs all the time and wouldn’t even use Kagi without them. It’s so convenient when I know I want results from a specific page.
I've also defined some custom bangs to search private Jira and Confluence instances with some default filters applied, because the default search on those instances was driving me insane. It took me a long time to convince myself to pay $10 a month for a search engine, but I've never looked back.
I'm currently experimenting with hostname rewrite rules.
I have a theory that I would actually need to do twice as many searches with Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever, since the SEO spam would force me to do more term refinement. With far less of that (and a tiny tiny bit of settings tuning) I get better results much quicker. I’d test it but I have a job to do and can’t swallow the idea of going back to how bad the other viable options really are.
FWIW, I counted searches I made with DDG (by parsing my FF history export) before joining the beta, and it was slightly over 1k, with Kagi my searches are in the 700-800 range.
This is a great point that should really be highlighted more in their marketing. It was obvious once I read it and shows two obvious benefits: 1. There is probably zero issue with fitting in to the 1000 searches per month. 2. It saves time for many of the searches we’re already doing.
You are never limited to 1000 monthly searches, this is a great misunderstanding about Kagi. After passing your threshold, you are charged 1.5c per query.
I can't remember what for but I'm pretty sure I've used it and gotten a pretty fast approval.
I don't think coffee's a great analogy - it has far more utility for me, I don't buy it as a service, and it costs me roughly £24 (what, $30ish) a month in beans.
I'm not seriously suggesting it because I think comparing prices of different things to determine value very quickly gets silly, but a closer comparison might be Netflix: Kagi would cost me about as much per month for search as Netflix. Silly, as I said, but if I tried really strictly to pay for things according to relative value or utility to me, there's no way that would make sense.
Part of the problem is asking me to switch from free I suppose - if DDG suddenly started charging me $5 I'd be more likely to pay Kagi $10 than I am today if that makes sense.
Laundry detergent and breakfast cereal both come in a box in the supermarket, but it doesn't make the products comparable. A house and a car both have a door and you usually sit inside, but it doesn't make the products comparable.
Netflix is a great bargain (for those who enjoy their offerings), and I think people are shooting themselves in the foot by dismissing other great services because they've somehow tricked themselves to thinking they should be compared to Netflix only because they're offered through a digital screen.
Though I'd stand by Netflix as a better comparison to Kagi than coffee (as in the comment I was replying to) to anyone who insists on doing it.
Otoh (for contrast) I run adblock and sponsorblock on youtube, and if they start blocking traffic from people like me I'm going to cut back my YT viewership significantly (and maybe try harder to look for stuff on nebula instead, which I never browse). While I do get some educational value from YT, it's limited, and I guess I just fundamentally object to the ad-first business model.
I set it up with DDG/Google as default, and for Kagi I start with “k “.
The cost of search has made me think about what terms I use now and what I search for. Google made me lazy, I now use my phones world clock app rather that searching for "current time X", and word my searches more thoughtfully.