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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

Be careful with the "100 free searches" limit, it's not always really 100.

If you click the "More" button at the bottom of the search results page it reduces the number of free searches left.

In hindsight, it probably means they're re-running the search again with different parameters, thus "using" another free search.

However it's not at all obvious to the user that asking to display more results from an existing list would do this. :(

Frankly, it seems a bit dishonest to me. Which is unfortunate, as I otherwise liked Kagi.

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This is my only “complaint”, having used it as a paid service and now just on the free trial after cutting subscriptions en masse. I was doing some research and had maybe five tabs open to different searches, had a browser update, then after the reload I had five less searches available. In your example they are actually running a new query, mine I wish the result could simply be cached since I’m a logged in user etc. I was disappointed but not sure what they should really do– flash a warning to all new users? Perhaps just when they bring a similar query, “hey we noticed you’re making another search, this time it slides but normally it costs another search”? Like others in this thread I’m hoping they can drive down the cost of unlimited searches rather than spend time creating special cases for us plebs.

In my case, if they'd just made the "More" button say something like "More... (search again and display new results)" it would have been clear what would happen.

That's very much how new/intro users should be treated, if not all users.

And I would have subscribed. Alas, they didn't, and I just can't mentally clear the hurdle of paying money to a place which I feel deceived me. So, I didn't become a subscriber. :/

Heya, I work at Kagi. This sounds like a great idea, thanks for the input! We'll put it on the requested features list (which our users contribute to).

Cool. Any chance you could let me know if it's implemented? I'll likely subscribe at that point. :)

When we’re at it, could you add a (toggleable) remaining search count in the header so that it’s immediately visible when some action spends a search?

I agree they should make you aware of that more directly when using the feature/before registering but to be fair it's in their FAQ.

Heh. Didn't even know they had an FAQ. :(

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