Kagi is worth every penny. Been using it for 6 months as my primary search engine. I think I have used the Google !g 10 or so times in that period maybe?
I hadn't considered this aspect of Kagi yet. I'm not a subscriber at this point, but I am strongly considering it. But I use search instead of typing domain names directly to avoid the typo phishing style attacks. I wonder how much "artificial" search that would generate based on my typical usage.
Just a suggestion. Search engines do supply their results with a level of confidence, and you're not wrong to use them like that.
On Chrome I think it is optimized so it always askes Google first.
Otherwise how would Google know all the pages you visit, and especially the ones you visit most?
It's a work-around, not an actual resolution, unless you already happen to like using bookmarks.
Obviously that means I'm using split url/search fields in the address bar, or that wouldn't work as easily. I also heavily use Firefox' keyword search to avoid doing a round-trip through a search engine if I already know which site I want to search; mostly using the same prefixes that DDG uses, so I don't need to adjust too much if I find myself using a different computer.
I have actually already split my address and search fields too, for a different reason. I got aggrevated with having the local machine names on my lan perform a public search, even though my local dns is configured to use only my opnsense router, which does resolve the local names correctly. Splitting off the search box makes the local names always do only what DNS says, and so I get my 3d printer instead of search results for it's name.
For that particular problem, going to "truenas" or "unifi" etc on my lan, the bookmarks are actually more convenient in nmost cases I have to admit! Especially with half of the services needing some special port number like unifi and jellyfin etc.
So this may not be as big of an issue as you think. Should also keep in mind that higher search quality means you don't have to search as much in the first place, which leaves a larger buffer.
Alternatively you could just use "hashbangs" to search domains via google (!g), since I don't believe those cost you anything.
This is not the worst thing in the world, but it is annoying to me and not a life upgrade.
Maybe the search results are better enough to make it worth it (on top of also paying money), or maybe not. I'm still determining that, but it's question and not a slam dunk.
On the $5 tier it's 1.7 cents per search for the first 300, then 1.5 cents after that. As expected I blew past the 300 before the month was out and am currently sitting at a total of almost $9 for this month and there are still 3 more days to go, and this includes being away for labor day weekend and only using my phone (without kagi) for a couple days, and this is after populating and using a bunch of bookmarks specifically to cater to the fact that I now pay for searches. And this is only my laptop. I have not used kagi on my phone or anything else yet.
I haven't used bookmarks in 20 years and don't particularly want to. I normally don't even have the toolbar visible but now I had to un-hide it and add that clutter back to my browser.
So I'm both paying money and contorting my usage pattern.
I guess now that the first month is about done, I can say it looks like I should go up to the $10 plan, where the searches are only 1 cent, but only for the first 1000, and only if I actually use all 1000! If I pay $10 and only do 250 searches that month, then they weren't 1 cent were they?
As much as I like it, I don't know if I'm going to keep it.
I will not pay $10 or $25 just to have it sitting there available "in case", and I apparently will at least some times (who knows how often? every month? 3 out of 12?) will blow past the $5 an end up paying $10 anyway.
If I complicate my usage to cater to kagi so that my default is ddg and just invoke kagi sometimes when I feel like it would help, then I'll probably forget it exists most of the time and do about 10 per month and pay 50 cents each. Probably only one or two months of that and I'll just decide it's not worth $5 for a handful of searches and just cancel it.
The only way it will be useful for me is if it can just be the default search that I don't have to worry about.
They should just figure out whatever the fair per search price is and bill that. The stupid tiers are probably going to drive me off.
$10 unmetered must always be a fallacy anyway. Surely I can't start up "bkwsearch" and sell searches for 3 cents each, and pay you only $10 for my million$ skin.
So I say don't even pretend.
Except really there probably needs to be both options, because some people value predictability more than any specific amount. So $10 or $20 or any number that never changes is better (for them) than paying only $2 on average but unpredictable each month.
I neither want to pay $10 for $2 worth of usage, nor soak you for $30 worth of usage while only paying $10. Even more than that I don't want to have to think about it to make sure if I choose the N tier that I'm making more or less full use of the N tier.
I appreciate that you took the time to read an individual users complaint, whatever you end up doing. Thanks.
I'm now halfway through my billing period (22 aug - 21 sep) and I'm on 488 searches. Would be tight on the pro plan (1000 searches), but I'm still on the early adopter pro plan (1500 searches).
The search results are consistently better than anyone else's, including DuckDuckGo, so I am, and will remain, a happy paying customer.
I tried Kagi for about a week, and it felt more or less identical in quality to DDG, just infinitely more expensive as DDG costs nothing.
It feels a bit like how it felt discovering Google back when AltaVista was still a thing.
I had some memory of AltaVista being full of SEO (as I recall it was mostly a keyword search engine) spam.
And that was probably true, but I also came across this Quora page https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Altavista-search-engine-lose-g... and it reminded me about two other things stand out to me as true
1. AltaVista was slow and you needed to know your syntax to find things 2. AltaVista was cluttered. Google had very clean results.
I think on 1 google is still fast, but 2. not so much. Google's results are far from "clean", instead it feels like the main goal is showing you as much ads as possible and preferably getting you to accidentally click on one.
This in and the fact that Kagi results are as good or slightly better (and much more customisable) than Google is probably the main reason I'm so happy with Kagi.
After all, Kagi sources results from Google so it's no surprise the quality is similar https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
This is an interesting observation given Google's roots. Although it is a different era, where we have ad blockers now, it would be really weird and neat if Google were displaced by a new search engine that did literally the exact same thing Google did in 1998: clean, no-bullshit page that just gives you search results + page-rank.
Plus, Searx supports many more search engines, and I can customize it exactly to my liking.
I wish them well, as they clearly have good intentions and a good product, but I prefer using an equivalent OSS and self-hosted solution over a proprietary SaaS I have to create an account for, even if it's not as polished or featureful.
EDIT: Actually, I'm wrong. Kagi apparently also has their own crawlers and indexes[1]. Still, I'm not finding Searx results to be deficient, so I'm not missing out on much.
One thing that does concern me with Searx, and partially with Kagi, is that those 3rd parties could decide to block these API requests at any point, leaving Searx unusable, and Kagi's results less relevant. I'm not sure this is a sustainable way to build a search engine, but I do appreciate both Kagi's and Searx's stance on ads. Using any mainstream search engine via their own frontends is a frustrating experience at best.
[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
https://kagi.com/search?q=%s&r=fr