How does search quality really change my life?
Entrenched behavior is tough to overcome especially ostensibly free products.
A lot. I make dozens and dozens of searches on an average day.
I'm also somewhat cheap when it comes to subscriptions.
Throwing $10/mo. for something I can get "for free" is not a light choice. But...
1) I don't like Google's philosophy, I don't like being the product, I like being a customer
2) Google Search results have gradually gotten worse, mostly because of SEO spam
3) I don't really trust DuckDuckGo or Startpage, their model is essentially also advertising
I prefer to not go to the mall for recreation or work either.
There are lucrative bundling opportunities.
I am waiting fora corporate product; it's notable that Google Workspace still subjects you to ads in search. That's not only a data leak. It's also a constant attention tax on your knowledge workers.
You might want the blog to prominently link back to https://kagi.com. "Home" took me to https://blog.kagi.com, I tried clicking on the pricing table image, etc. but nothing got me to the actual product.
I had to manually enter https://kagi.com to see the product behind the blog.
HOME -- links to your homepage
BLOG -- links to your blog
So, even on your blog sub-domain/folder (blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog), have both the links (HOME | BLOG) that links to the right URL.
Oh, do you mean if you do a Google Search even though your company pays for Workspace?
There are tons of information workers who are dependent on search in their work – or if they're not, could work much better with good quality search.
The examples are really too many to list, but it really depends on the person. When it comes to not spending a dollar, people will create the most incredible and reality-defying reasons. So I'd expect 99% of Google users to keep using Google, or maybe even stop using web search when Google becomes completely unusable. Then they'll say "I have no need to search for things anyway".
If a better search engine makes employees more productive, the target customer is the business, not the employee.
With chairs it's also less of a benefit in regards to productivity but health and comfort. I'm also still rocking a 150€ chair from IKEA, totally viable and comfortable, but I do see the benefit in a chair that has a lot of configuration options because I am slightly too large for mine. Still means one needs to know how to configure it properly (which is 90% of the health change)
Hard to quantify comfortability since it really indirectly affects mentality.
Then again, I'm not really using search a lot when working so Kagi is obviously also nothing for me
Would you pay $10/mo to fix that problem?
For me, the answer has been yes. I don't think that is true of everyone (but maybe some people can live in the free plan limits!)
I started with the free plan, made it my default search engine and then tried to measure how often I felt like I had "lost something" once my free tier was up. And yeah, having to go back to Google or DuckDuckGo felt like I lost a really good tool and was using a mediocre replacement.
When the free plan was 50 searches, that lasted me less than a day.
Now that the free plan is 300 searches, it'd last me a few days.
It was enough for me to get hooked.
I switched away from Gmail years ago; the risk of getting locked out of my digital identity with no recourse is worth more than $5/mo. Not having my electronics receipts, plane tickets and newsletters datamined for an improved ad experience is just a perk.
Ask this to someone who remembers when Google first appeared.
I am not a Kagi user, but am seriously considering it after a number of months having to dig through at least 8 results of paywalled or possibly AI-generated pages for almost every Google query; seriously, I just did a search for 'python concatenate list' on google and it was worse than I expected - the official docs weren't even on the first two pages and even the helpful Stack Overflow answers were the 5th result down - give it a go, the results are trash.
I google things at least 20 times a day, and probably so do you. I would pay for something that can cut out the bollocks - if Kagi can follow through, they'll have a customer.
The first result is an info box from Stack Overflow showing use of the + operator to join two lists (with a link to source).
Then 4 more relevant SO posts (which are more nuanced and specific than the generic query, like concatenating into a single string, or concatenating without creating a copy.
Then a small inset box as a "blast from the past" with 4 older blog posts, at least 2 of which look pretty relevant here just from the title.
Then 5 more SO posts (again more nuanced and specific variants of the underlying question), and a digital ocean post on 6 ways to concatenate a list in Python.
And on free duckduckgo I get "instant answer" example from SO http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1720421 Though the official docs are also not on the first few pages
(Btw, you could also use an extension to 1-click filter garbage out from search if it has a high impact on life)