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JumpCrisscross

For perspective, it would cost $20.4bn to provide every American with a Kagi starter account for a year [1].

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10

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Google had 274 million unique visitors in the US as of February 2023 [1].

So it would cost closer to "only" $13.7bn/year for every American using Google to switch to Kagi.

And Google generated $76 billion in US ad revenue from those users in 2023 [2], just goes to show how "cheap" Kagi really is compared to being monetized by ads.

[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/1001/google/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/469821/google-annual-ad-...

Google provides email, and that’s how they track people across properties, not search.

Kagi doesnt have 25-year emails, and it costs $60 per year per user at Google’s.

Just bit the bullet and paid for a kagi account 2 days ago. It is nice to have a simple, easily configured, non seo-borked, search engine again. I do worry if it becomes popular seo will start to target it. But at least my incentives align with kagi regarding seo, since I'm paying them rather than the advertisers.

>since I'm paying them rather than the advertisers.

You don't pay advertisers with Google. Advertisers pay Google. Google is incentivized to give you useful results so that you continue coming back and using them for search. If they gave poor results people would stop bothering to use their search and they would get less ad impressions. By paying a flat rate to kagi there is less incontive to maximize the amount of searches people do over time.

I guess they haven't been doing their job very well then as I switched to Kagi.

But if they delivered poor results for advertisers then they won’t pay Google. So ultimately you as the non-payer are second in line in terms of interests.

Google will try and give the most relevant ads and the most relevant search results. Advertisers love relevant ads and relevant ads give users a better ad experience.

Google is incentivized to improve the system for both advertisers and users.

Yes but when you have 5 relevant ads, the highest bidder goes to the top. The highest bidder can stay there by charging the customer more of what it has to pay Google to stay at the top. As long as the customer is not vigilant, Google pockets this money. So if you ignorantly believe Google gives better ads then they'd abuse this to just charge advertisers, and thus you, more.

> Google is incentivized to give you useful results so that you continue coming back

This is only true if they are not exploiting an unfair market position.

Google delivers shit results and then pays every browser vendor that isn't themselves for a dominant search position.

> flat rate to kagi there is less incontive to maximize the amount of searches people do over time

Aren’t we seeing evidence of this incentive structure spinning in the opposite direction at Google? Shitty results mean more searches leading to more ad impressions.

> You don't pay advertisers with Google

Of course you do. That’s the whole point of ads. Where do you think the money comes from?

Ads manipulate you in order to spend more on the advertised products. The consumer ends up paying for them.

How's the search quality for non-english contents? Is it better than google?

Visibly worse than searching for English content, but not bad overall. You still get random English results in between, like in DDG, which doesn't happen in Google.

It is better than Google for non-English content. You can try it for yourself.

When people say that Bing or DDG is good enough to use instead of Google, it is obvious to me that they are only searching in English. Kagi was the first search engine that could compete.

I really like Kagi for a lot of search results and used it for a month, but when looking for local results, I always had to revert to Google.

For example, looking for local stores and businesses: usually, they just don't come up at all. I had forgotten how I used to have to tack the city I am in on to each query back in the day with Google.

Even then though, the lack of reviews, mapping, etc. makes it almost useless for what I really need.

I'd love to see Kagi improve in this area, and I'd happily pay again.

Agreed. I've also been using Kagi for the last month and love it, but local results are just not as good. They provide some Yelp locations but usually not as well as Google does. I wouldn't be surprised if this is improved over time. It seems like Kagi is a small team with the founder replying to me emails/bug ticket directly! Very effective people over there.

On a side note, Yelp is an awful platform. They show recommended/similar locations down your throat so hard on mobile that it's hard to learn about the actual location you're looking at.

Thanks for the information. Last week when HN was praising Kagi, almost to the point of saying it had no faults whatsoever, I wondered if they were just blinding themselves to obvious flaws in the application. Disappointing, from this community that is usually so critical.

Some people might not search a lot for local stuff. Or it doesn't hurt them to use two search engines for different purposes.

This is me. Google Maps for local stuff, Kagi for everything else. It's not ideal but it's the best we have right now. Don't even bother mentioning Yelp.

And what about ChatGPT?

I've used it some, but in the free version the results are outdated for a lot of things. I just don't think to use it instead of search, guess I'm old fashioned that way.

In fairness to both Kagi and other commnters, it works great for the searches I make all day while working on my desktop. I would go so far as to say it is significantly better than other attempts at replacing Google (e.g. Neeva.) It just doesn't work so well for the searches I make after work when making plans or on my phone while out and about.

> when looking for local results, I always had to revert to Google

I use Kagi for local too, as Google hijack the top 10 results for other crap that I don’t want and am not interested in.

It’s taken me a long time to start using the top hit in Kagi, as google has trained me to ignore top hits.

Google local results are mostly dependent on Google maps, where the business owners themselves provide all the information. Kagi can never get those millions of businesses to provide them with that data. Even Apple have a hard time with that. So the option for Kagi is to try to hook in to Google maps. Because business owners anno 2023 refuse to make decent websites for their businesses.

Heads up that the link you sent seems to only work if you're already signed into Kagi.

Thanks--fixed.

sorry to be bad about this, but why should „all americans“ be insightful, sufficient or relevant? that’s like a „libraries or congress“ scale.

btw: Kagi is perfect!

> why should „all americans“ be insightful, sufficient or relevant?

It's an American antitrust action. The predominant recipient of Google's largesse, Apple, is an American company whose products are the predominant devices in America.

Given all that, it's notable that Google is spending what is essentially a lower bound on Kagi's domestic TAM on keeping the likes of them down.

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