On most searches, especially with my phone, the results are almost all sponsored and rarely what I'm actually looking for.
Google search has gone from being one of the best to being ask jeeves at it's worst.
Ditto. My most recent example, I asked Google what the thickness of the Pixel 8 is including the camera visor, which was something not listed in the spec sheet since the official dimensions sneakily only list the thinnest point on the phone, not the thickest.
And Google proudly and confidently gave me the answer at the top ... but it was the thickness without the visor, something I already knew since that's in the specs everywhere. I looked through the other results lower on the page and nada, no correct answer.
So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top measured by some Android review site. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.
Sure, that's sample size=1 so probably not an accurate test, but still, to me it feels like Google sucks for anything but the easiest context searches where it works because it knows a lot of info about me like where I live and where I work so it can correctly deduct the context, but for other shit not related to me, it's like you're drowning in SEO junk.
I know, I'm not saying it was scientific, I was just sharing an anecdotal mainstream search query which I though was very relevant today for me and maybe others as well and also not super difficult for Google.
And the most annoying thing is, your phone will not. sit. flat. on a table, because the damn camera will always be unbalanced in height, which makes it an excellent attraction for feline companions. Tap on it and it wiggles. Tap harder, it wiggles more, and eventually the phone will fall to the floor, your feline will look at you with big round eyes and ask for f...ing treats.
What the hell did Google put in that thing, lenses from the Hubble space telescope? It's not like they have a 100x zoom lens in that thing or a camera sensor so large it makes a Hasselblad wet itself. And that's before we get to the visible PCB screw heads poking through the OLED panel. On a phone that costs 600+ Euros.
I feel like Google is at least 5 years behind the competition when it comes to HW and industrial design. Or they just culturally as a company don't give a shit about HW, thinking their SW is gonna be the main selling point and the HW is treated like some last minute "who cares, just ship it, it's gonna sell anyway" afterthought.
> The actual dimensions of the Google Pixel 8 are apparently 150.5 x 70.8 x 8.9mm, with the thickness rising to 12mm at the camera bar.
And nothing on Bing.
The Google Pixel 8, announced in October 2023, has the following dimensions:
Height: 150.5 mm (5.93 inches)
Width: 70.8 mm (2.79 inches)
Depth: 8.9 mm (0.35 inches)
However, if we include the thickness of the camera bump, the Pixel 8 measures approximately 12 mm3. The camera visor itself is notably thin compared to previous Pixel phones, but the overall thickness accounts for the camera bump and other components.
In summary, the Pixel 8 is a sleek device with a slim profile, and its camera visor adds a touch of functionality without significantly increasing its overall thickness.
I’ve been thrilled with Kagi. It’s the first time in over a decade that searching became fun again.
The Quick Answer feature (Kagi’s LLM) filters through SEO better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches, it’s cheap to try out (both for experience and if you actually notice the search limit).
I get their reasons for this, and it totally makes sense -- but that's also a big problem for their growth. I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
I agree, but it’s a good early filter for conversion. The difference in quality, for me and everyone I’ve gifted a month to, is stark enough to make paying for search for the first time worth it. Given the absolute cost (for the cheapest tier, paid annually, less than $50) it’s a psychological hurdle more than a financial one for most Americans.
Also, drawing those eyeballs from the ad-driven engines has a disproportionate effect on their marginal ad prices (in the long run). So if you need a sense of vengeance to get you over the hill, there you go.
If kagi saturates the market of people that can afford to spend $50/year for a decent search engine, then Google ads will only reach people that cannot. This would greatly reduce the value of their ad inventory (far more than the percent market share they’d lose).
But do they need to grow to the size of Bing, Google or just DuckDuckGo? If they just want to grow a sustainable business, then it's a feature of their business model.
I don’t know what Kagi’s minimum sustainable size might be, but it’s probably bigger than what it is now. Particularly if they want to stay competitive with LLMs.
Why not? There are tens of millions of people who need/want a high quality search engine and can pay for it. Kagi deserves to be successful for having made a better search engine than Google. And their success can inspire other entrepreneurs to start delivering quality information products, so that maybe we can get out of this ad/scam fuelled quagmire once and for all.
Good products and ideas should be successful, that's progress.
This is orthogonal to questions of morality and justice.
What?
If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures. Nobody owes anybody to keep a business running. So yes, it would die.
The question is: Does Kagi needs to grow to be sustainable, and if so, how much.
>If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures.
If you had a business that made you a $1 million per year profit, would you shut it down just because it wasnt growing?
Companies need to make a profit or they go out of business. However, most businesses don't need to continually increase users/ revenue to stay afloat. The coffee shop down my street is 100 years old, and didn't need to double in size every year.
I agree that nobody is owed anything. I also think that Kagi is "owed" or "deserves" tells us nothing about how many users they need to keep staff paid and the lights on.
Yeah, I would. We have to remember that these are guys who beat Google at their own game. They beat a company of a monstrous size and revenue at their own game. With that kind of capacity, I don't expect them to be satisfied with a million a year in profit to share. I expect them to go as far as they can.
If you're nobody special doing nothing special, then you can be happy with just needing to pay staff and keep the lights on. Like the coffee shop down your street, or my day job. But Kagi is clearly in a different category as a business.
Last I heard Kagi needs to grow a little bit more from current user base to break even.
Also, if you have a business that makes a million dollars a year and that's not enough, the typical solution is to sell it to someone else for 20 million or so instead of Burning It to the Ground
Frankly, I see this as a good thing. Maybe someone else will come along and solve the universal-search-engine-that-stays-good problem, but Kagi's best hope at being useful for me into the future is for them to stay where they are: tiny and used only by a small cohort of extremely savvy and skeptical geeks that aren't worth the effort to SEO-jack.
They just need to be sustainable—growing large would actually be counterproductive.
There are few consumer products that have held up against the competing demands of billions users in thousands of different markets and cultures. I'd say there's maybe even been none.
The kind of "growth" you're talking about is a bad but understandable habit among founders and cold financiers, but it's not a requisite part of running a business and generally runs counter to having a good product that serves a specific need well.
It's actually maybe ChatGPT et al. that have done most to warm me up to the idea. I've tried Plus for a few months, basically using it like better search. I don't think I'll stick with it mainly because it's a pretty steep cost (enough that I want to go back to not having it for a bit at least, see how much of a problem it really is) - but it does make me wonder if perhaps Kagi can get me a lot of the way for half the price (the non-LLM tier).
A 'fact,' which, if true, makes little sense when you look at it from the PoV as a tool.
With real physical tools, if you only use it occasionally, get a cheap one. But when you use it all the time, it pays to invest in a quality model.
Considering the frequency even the n00best of tech normies of the world use a search engine it makes sense for everyone to obtain such "a quality model." Sadly, that doesn't mean everyone will do so.
[me: Kagi unlimited user since they did the pricing change a couple of months back]
I'm not saying that should be Kagi's model, obviously it does have marginal costs for my usage that Makita doesn't, I'm just saying the analogy doesn't really hold up I suppose.
I think I'd probably prefer usage based pricing, but I know a lot of people here at least would complain that it gave Kagi an inverse incentive to build a good (at finding information quickly and easily) search engine.
It’s a feature.
If Google Search continues its downward trajectory, people will start to pay for Kagi or some other similar search engine. 10-20$ per month for unlimited search is nothing, at least in the western world.
We just haven’t reached that point yet
It actually sucks at finding the low cost product.
Want the cheapest esp32 c3... google is a better place to start. I can quickly find the "price to beat" and go deeper elsewhere.
If I add a ? to the end of the query, Kagi additionally suggests an $11 reference board and a redit forum on the topic.
Yes, the "cheapest" keyword incidentally gets me the answer in this case, but does it in every one?
Product spam has its upside when you're looking for product spam.
Wow, that's a lower search count than I would have thought. I am pretty sure I'd blow through that in a day or two...
Although Bing is generally OK at dealing with general queries, it's far, far worse at surfacing niche content, no? My non-commercial, hobby homepage fares reasonably OK on Google (although some queries are dominated by SEO spam). But on Bing, it ranks below a good number of spam websites, including ones that simply copied my content and serve it with ads...
Searches for "coronavirus" seem to be hard-coded, or interfered with. I get pages and pages of Covid-19 results, but that's not what I searched for. I even get a wikipedia link to its covid-19 page, but no wikipedia link to its coronavirus page within the first several pages of results.
How to use public transit? What to see and do? How to get an airport transfer? Here are machine-generated answers from myairporttransfers.com and copywritten posts from cheapairteavels.com.
I know lots of people will point to examples where it's wrong, but I'd suggest trying it out yourself. If you're not intentionally trying to trip it up, it really works quite well.