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Comment by ldayley | Hacker News Reader

I've been using (and occasionally paying) Kagi on and off for a couple of years now. I truly think they're building something interesting and valuable! While I haven't agreed with every product decision they've made, the founder is very good at both understanding his business and also explaining their decisions. This is a well crafted explainer of the search business and the monopoly case-- much better for sharing with less tech-savvy peers than most mainstream media explainers on this subject!

Edit: wording

Edit 2: Can you imagine a world where Google's Internet Search Index is legally considered an "Essential Facility"!? https://law.stanford.edu/publications/essential-platforms/

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I think its instructive to look at the early history of Google and Facebook. In the early years they did not really turn on the ad revenue levers and just focused on increasing users (i.e. Don't Be Evil) - until a decade after offering their respective services.

Similarly Netflix is just now starting the ad revenue model after years of only subscription based services.

Eventually the temptation for multiple sources of revenue (i.e. subscription AND advertising) will likely be too great due to:

- IPO and Wall Street demands net income growth (i.e. FB/Google)

- Private Equity buys the company and needs to pay back leveraged debt

- The number of customers willing to offer up a credit card for Search stagnates and a lower cost ad tier appears and the ad infrastructure that is built is applied to the paid tiers

I'd argue the minute they turn to an advertising model that subscriptions would churn overnight, but in the same vein as the don't be evil motto being dropped I nod at the scepticism.

i honestly cant imagine paying for a search engine with whats out there for free

Then you don't understand what you're getting. If you want to be targeted and misled by opposing incentives, that's on you.

Nothing stopping you from trying for one month to confirm.

You get what you pay for

The other three answers to your question were dumb, so I'll try to do better. Kagi has a free trial of 100 searches without requiring a credit card to sign up. Honest to god, try it. Just bookmark it and search once or twice when Google or Bing is giving you meh results.

As an engineer... googling for stuff is a good fraction of your job. It's quite reasonable to pay to improve that experience. The only real question is what is reasonable to pay.

I don't think it's that amazing for an engineer. Google is much better if you're looking for things related to Intel compilers, for example. Try searching for «intel ipo fuse-ld=lld icx» on both engines.

Note: I am a paying Kagi customer

I did - and Kagi results look pretty darn good to me. What were you trying to point out?

You’re getting downvoted but I agree. I didn’t see the value and stopped after a while of paying. It is sad that basically any comment that isn’t pro-Kagi is downvoted but I guess that’s the Reddit-ification of this site.

Most people who complain about Google don’t even use it properly (e.g. PSE).

When you use Google or another ad-powered search engine, you're saying that it's okay for some company to pay to bias the results away from your best interests.

When you use, say, Kagi, you become the customer; they have a vested interest in providing you with the best experience they can, because they know they're relying on your continued patronage to be able to keep competing with those other free search engines which you already admitted are pretty good.

I wonder if there are any big companies paying for kagi for their workers.

Kagi allows you to permanently blacklist Pinterest from appearing in any search ever.

It also gives you exactly what you ask for. If you put words in quotes, you only get results matching that phrase. Same with +- modifiers, and all the other "advanced" search operators.

Meanwhile on any free engine, they often completely ignore your query to show you unrelated SEO slop. You can completely forget modifiers and advanced queried, they aren't even parsed. About the only thing that still works is the site: modifier. And I'm pretty sure they only keep that because 40% of google searches include site:reddit

As well, if Kagi can't find a result for your query, it returns nothing. Try searching something incredibly obscure on google or DDG. You get pages upon pages of results and they're all useless garbage or just straight up ads disguised as results.

That's why I pay for Kagi. It stays the hell out of my way and only gives me exactly what I ask for and absolutely nothing else.

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