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Comment by RamblingCTO | Hacker News Reader

I really like kagi but the price point is just not worth it. Hope to see some economics of scale. These folks need to stop using bing and build their own crawler.

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In my case what stops me from using Kagi is not the price, but:

* No presence in Europe. Establishing a legal entity in Europe and using an European datacenter would at least add some pressure to handle data correctly. We can never know if they fulfil their part of the deal, but at least the consequences of a publicly visible privacy fail would at least be non-zero.

* Email is required. It would be way more appealing for me if this was handled like Mullvad handles their accounts. I understand Kagi's choice is mostly because they prefer a subscription model instead of a pre-paid one. Yes, I can use a disposable email address, but I'd rather not have to rely on workarounds like that.

(EDIT: I want to emphasize that this is only what is stopping me from using Kagi based on my own preferences; they (Kagi devs) are of course free to do what they consider best for the project from their point of view. I'm just not the target audience for this paid search engine, and that's fine.)

I really like Kagi and have been a paying customer for a few months. The price is very fair. I find what I'm looking for faster than with any other search engine and I am better treated as a customer.

same here: 100% satisfied and am paying of course, online all day, and yet not overextending my search quota. very valuable in my experience that kagi exists.

It's been worth it to me. I pay for NextDNS, Youtube Premium, and Kagi and the web feels so much better. From the threads here about taking your life minutes back I've also installed SponsorBlock for Youtube. Life's too short and brainpower too valuable to waste on all the crap. That is the value proposition. How much is your time worth? How much is avoiding wasted mental energy worth?

I get your point! But I don't like the subscription hell. 10 bucks here, 10 bucks there (and Kagi is what, 30?). No thank you. I don't even pay for video streaming.

I might change my mind for 10 bucks a month with unlimited search tho.

> the price point is just not worth it

They mention on the Discord that they're getting close to returning to unlimited searches for $10 per month, so this might improve soon.

> stop using bing

Interestingly, last month Bing was removed from the documentation on search sources[1] and replaced with Mojeek, Yandex, and Marginalia. Running their own crawler at this scale is probably not reasonable.

[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

> Running their own crawler at this scale is probably not reasonable.

You can interpret your comment in two ways, so maybe I misunderstood you, but they are running their own crawler, and they’re providing API access to their own web and news indices. These are geared towards niche content, and maybe that’s what you meant: they’re probably not running their crawler at a large scale.

They would have to raise their price to build a crawler as good as what they’re currently getting.

I do hope they grow to where they can afford it at their current subscription rates.

Not sure, but won't argue that vehemently. I build my own crawler in a few days using pgvector, go-colly, and some embedding. It's a bit over-engineered because of go-python interop, but I'm happy with that. And with a subscription model like kagi you should be able to pay for the storage. I also think that a search engine doesn't need to crawl nor store the whole web. You don't need to crawl pinterest, facebook, instagram, tiktok, and known SEO farms or spam blogs.

I'm too busy to productize this just yet, but might do down the line.

A ton of businesses and events are only on facebook or only on instagram. Probably the same with tiktok. So they are essential if you want to provide a complete search engine.

Well, the business case would be a knowledge base for LLMs. I think that there's a lot of tinkering to be done to fine-tune such things anyway.

I'm not sure I understood you for reply. For example if you're looking for a specific sushi restaurant in your town, their Instagram page might be the best result.

I got you! My search engine would be for things like chatGPT in the first place. They look up knowledge.

But maybe you understood that. Anyway, your point is valid. As I said, it sure needs some fine-tuning ;)

That's a neat project, but it wouldn't satisfy a sizable percentage of searches as a Bing API replacement. It needs much more crawling, processing and a quality maintenance and improvement operation. I think you should keep going with it. Perhaps you could find a way to contribute to engines like Kagi; they already incorporate some smaller and/or weirder indexes.

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