It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet.
I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over and over again.
Kagi is well-known on HN, but I guarantee my parents have never heard of it. I told my wife about it the other day, and she had never heard of it either. She thought it was a cool idea. $10/month is just too much.
Sure, YellowPages had lots of ads. Hell, PCMag was ~35% ads. The difference was that their ads were clearly labeled and physically distinct from the actual content. They didn't camoflauge the ads to make them blend into the rest of the page layout. Advertisers occasionally tried, sure, but the layout would still be visibly different. Ads on the web are more insidious, and more intrusive.
Us, people in engineering and web tech operate in a fairly different mindset. Ads piss us off more than the average people, who have accepted it throughout the years.
Trend wise I think it is like organic food - 30 years ago, many of us laughed at paying extra for it ("what's wrong with regular food?") But over time we started caring what we feed our bodies. The same shift is happening with information. It will not happen over night but we're starting to care more about the quality (and incentives) of what we feed our minds.
I don't really care about the sustainability of business models. And really, Google is not about search. It's an advertising company.
And, since I started using Perplexity, I barely use even Kagi. Since the responses are based on search results, they are mostly void of hallucinations, and they save me time from reading unnecessary fluff on the web.
It's not like there aren't people focused on sustainable businesses. 90% of businesses are probably SMBs - just not in tech. For most people in the world, the word entrepreneur means "someone who's opening a McDonalds across the street" or "someone opening a pizza shop". Even in tech, there are plenty of not-hypergrowth companies around (I run a small dev shop, for example).
The reason we here are exposed more to VC-style startups is because a) they make more news, for obvious reasons, but also b) there are structural reasons in tech that favor that style of company, most importantly because software itself is scalable in a way that most things aren't.
If even a fraction of that talent and investment was redirected toward building sustainable businesses that create real value, rather than just competing for finite resources like user attention or market domination, I believe the tech industry, the tech workers, and society would benefit more in the long run.
In any case, I'm not sure I trust you, me or anyone to be smarter about how to get innovation than our current relatively-free-market capitalistic system, where there's actually pretty good incentives to pursue innovation. Look at how many things today that absolutely improve our world have been created through this messy process. It's apparently monetarily worth it to have 95 failed startups in order to get 5 ones that change the world, and that's probably a good thing for society, because the world is better than it war 20 years ago in terms of technology/innovation.
(The world is worse in other ways, and a different criticism of tech is that some of it can also be negative for society, but that's a separate concern than it being wasteful, which I just don't agree with.)
Of course the industry is mostly dumb investments. Looking back Google+ was part of a wave of social websites that didn’t really go anywhere. Facebook was founded in 04, Twitter in 06, but in 2011 suddenly everyone wants in on the action… The wave of crypto was similarly almost pure waste but most VC firms aren’t really about wise investment. It’s about charging high fees for funds under managed, they succeed when someone invests not when companies become profitable.
Also, if you're looking at trillions invested, I'd hardly call them startups or speculative investments. It's certainly true that something like OpenAI or Uber spent (and still spend?) many years without making profit, but by the time they're raising rounds of billions, it's no longer anywhere near the same level of risk, and the statistic that "most fail" rings less true.
Kagi: I use and pay for it and I love it. I'm very hopeful that they have made something excellent - each time I dip into Google with a !g (and it's becoming more and more rare!) I'm horrified by the clusterfuck it's now become. The clean, simple, accurate results of Kagi are fresh air and well worth paying for.
I've seen the founder say on many occasions that they're not aiming to be "a Google killer" and I'm glad. With scale comes inevitable enshittification. I just hope their business model is enough to support a thriving - but small - business.
That is, the vast majority still fail, most do not make enough profit to come close to sustainability, and the 80-90% of revenue is earned by the top 10% of SMBs
Even if you go through the data and try to restrict it to some definition of "not going to be an obvious failure" it's not pretty.
It is a fascinating read though.
So while I agree with your sentiment it does not seem to help much in practice.
I hope that by then, they have deployed their own crawlers and indices, so that there's still an alternative, rather than merely adopting the latest industry trends.
Edit: that should be 29K subscribers
I always thought Kagi was still the old Mac focused company that enabled independent software makers to collect payments from customers.
I didn’t realize that the old company had been out of business for years until I heard the founder interview on the Talk Show podcast
https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...
And relevant to this submission. I couldn’t find any information on Google, I used the paid version of ChatGPT that has had web search for almost two years
Of course, they are not going to grow to the level of FANG with this approach but do they have to?
I am a very happy Kagi subscriber myself. And I loathe when I have to wade through SEO spam sites on the few occasions where I have to use Google, Bing, etc. due to being on someone else's computer.
They do if they want to demonstrate that paying is a viable alternative to ads, and not just a niche curiosity.
They run a profitable company that is supported by fees paid by clients. Just this alone is the proof it works. And is far, far away from the speculative nature of stock market and FANG.
That 20K subscribers wouldn’t fund them enough to make their own engine nor could they compete for the engineers to maintain it.
More problematic (for Kagi) is that it's not a free-standing engine (“Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide” per https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...), so it's still dependent on the weird business practices around non-paid search. I assume these other search providers wouldn't be able to provide API endpoints like this with just the business from API clients.
> I think it's a bit of a cultural defect that we consider a product with 29K (supposedly satisfied) users a failure.
> More problematic (for Kagi) is that it's not a free-standing engine (“Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major
20K subscribers can’t support the creation of a quality search engine.
(Years later Joel cofounded Stack Overflow)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
> A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
> Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter.
I can't help feel that when the competition is free - and on precisely the recognition that people don't pay for search - that a more aggressive $2 tier for personal customers could get a much wider penumbra of folk such as myself over the line, rather than be yet another $5 service that when applied consistently actually start to add up.
The question is, could they get 100x? Or even 10x? I don’t know, and I assume they’ve done their homework and believe that they can’t. I just wonder, what if they’re wrong?
my sense is their fixed costs are relatively low.
A while ago they sent me an email saying "we grew enough that now we are obliged to collect VAT from you", so the actual final price grew a bit.
Using Kagi for a year now and only a handful of times I’ve checked if Google would give better results.
I think it’s really convenient that you can pay for extra searches, as you never have to worry about actually running out.
They also need to be able to pay for the servers that run searches.
That’s quite a privileged thing to say. This forum is read by folk all across the world and I would say that it’s up to each individual to say how much $5 means to them.
And yes, it definitely has a “let them eat cake” vibe which is absolutely worth a push back.
If someone does not want to pay $5 then they’re perfectly within their rights to do so, but saying it’s “a lot of money” feels like pinching pennies. By comparison to any other plan that’s practically the lowest you’ll ever see.
$5 is not one coffee here. It's about 4 coffees in a coffee bar. And that $5 is without VAT so that's enough for another coffee :) So basically it's a whole working week of morning coffees. To put it into perspective.
This is why I think it has more chance to take off in America than here. Though northern European countries do have a lot more money.
What does keep me paying personally though are three things:
1. I use search constantly for my job (and personal life) and Kagi makes me much more efficient compared to Google for both. I could easily filter out most ads for free with other tools - the ad free nature of Kagi is more of a plus on top personally than a main selling point.
2. While I generally avoid subscriptions 10$ per month is very little spread over days worked in a month. I comparatively probably spend much more for other things that benefit my job and personal life and bet you do too (better laptop - more reliable internet - etc etc). Even at 40$ a month (given your example) I would imagine it's a net benefit in terms of time savings per hour vs salary earned.
3. They are very transparent about new features and bugs fixed and blog updates and also are adding new features at a very impressive pace. There are lots of little things added that improve the experience and I don't see them buying into trends just for hype - everything's seems highly useful.
I also mostly drink loose leaf tea at home which can be either a hell of a lot cheaper than a daily coffee shop visit in either of our countries (mid tier tea in bulk) or a hell of a lot more expensive (fancy tea bought from smaller vendors). If I am ever going through a financial down period I can easily see myself choosing to go exclusively with the cheap bulk tea and keeping Kagi - total cost per work day for both would less than 50 cents USD / day.
I think it's also that for me search isn't a huge deal. I probably could easily get away with the $5 plan, I don't think I do 300 searches a month.
Even when I have computer issues I try to figure them out and searching is more of a last-resort. My goal is to have a deep understanding of how things work. And that pays off too, I have kinda a reputation at work "If you can't figure it out, talk to him".
But yes it's nothing compared to what I spend on hardware and other software (I donate to some FOSS projects I use a lot, like KDE).
However in terms of services I'm very very focused on self-hosting, hence SearXNG appealed to me a lot more than Kagi. Not even because of the cost, but because of the above: I like to deeply understand and be able to control the tech I work with.
Maybe I will use kagi some day, but for now I'm happy with what I have. But yeah the cost for me would be a bigger factor in that decision.
And in terms of coffee: I brew it at home too of course. But for us at work it's not just about the coffee, it's a social moment. Every morning there's a message going around: "We're just going down to our friends" by which they mean the girls in the coffee shop across the road. We then sit outside for 20 minutes taking a cofee and some of us smoking one. It's nice and not as forced as like a "standup" talk.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t decide against it. Just challenging the assertion that 5 coffees constitutes a large amount of money (I think I can get 7 coffees in Japan for my $5).
But search, it's just not that high in priority in my workflow.
The coffee thing was just to put the Silicon Valley: "It's just one starbucks coffee" into perspective, to show it's not like that all over the world :)
When I go to the super market I walk past thousands of products which I'm not interested in. The same for any store or virtual market place. So it's not about $5 being a "considerable" amount.
If you spend $10 per day, how can $5 be anything to fret about for hours? You're losing more spending your time fretting about it right?
The US is also a huge outlier in salaries compared to the rest of the western world.
[0]My opinion. Probably true.
Similar to why many people pay for OpenOffice and Ubuntu. They want them to keep existing.
In all seriousness, I am sure you are right and don’t deny the promise on offer. I’d also be willing to pay for search much more so than many other online services of more questionable value.
But I just don’t think they’re going to get cut-through at $5, not least $10, in the way they might exponentially do so if they could stretch to an entry tier that really starts to feel accessible to a much, much wider set of people.
WhatsApp took over the world at $1/year.
Things cost money. Some people can't afford a certain product. Some people don't want a certain product. But you don't see people in the grocery store arguing all day why they don't want to purchase a certain product on the shelf.
And people spend a tremendous amount of time discussing the price of essential goods like groceries. Economists go bananas of it. Especially in some regions with a cost of living crisis. What a strange example to make.
After infrastructure and DNS, I think it's the most important tool for using the internet (at least for most people in most cases). It's what most people use to actually find information. It saves me uncountable hours each year.
Need to find a phone number to a company? I don't have to guess what their domain is, I just search for "<company> Phone Number" and probably land on an "About Us" page.
Need to find an owners manual to a device? I don't need to browse for 20 minutes on the product vendor's website.
Trying to look up an error in code? I don't have to search Github, StackOverflow, Gitlab, that tiny self-hosted forum for the library throwing an error, and Reddit individually.
And ultimately, ad-supported search presents a conflict of interest: what information should the search engine return to you? A near-exact result you're looking for or advertiser-funded results to be presented first? Whoever provides search has to raise money somehow, and they aren't going to sell ads if the advertiser results are always at the bottom.
Lastly, Hackernews seems primarily geared towards North America/Western Europe/AU(?)/NZ(?). For this area, generally, $5 is not unreasonably expensive.
My hunch is that they are happy just growing a sustainable business. And I say good for them.
Another idea might be if they partnered with some other service provider so they were a line item on something people are already comfortable paying for. I could imagine a cross-promo where you paid a few bucks extra a month when subscribing to like Fastmail or Proton to get Kagi with it. There's likely a fair cross appeal there.
Search is central to my internet experience. If there is one service worth paying for, it should be search. But for that it should be better enough than ad-supported options to be worth the subscription. I think Kagi has got so close that I should start shelling $10/mo for it.
(Another service I think is a no-brainer to pay for is YouTube, mostly because ad-ridden YouTube is insufferable.)
If we want the productivity unlock of search (and AI) to be accessible to the entire world and not just to niche internet nerds who live and work online all day, we probably are going to get ads again. I’m sorry that this is true and has always been true. OpenAI is just a few years from admitting this themselves.
Even if they reach 100 million paid users at $20/m, it’s not enough to stay competitive given competition will offer a free product that shows ads to monetize the other 5 billion AI users on earth in addition to a pro subscription tier and will always have the superior model.
Not all humans are the same as you and care about the same stuff enough to pay for it, I know, it’s upsetting. But this is reality. And its better for the world. It helps the most people in a sustainable way.
I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however.
Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.
hmmmm I am not sure what you mean here? wherever I consume the media I will be bombarded with ads (regardless of my blocking skills...) :)
You know what else does this but in a non-creepy, non-tracking way that doesn't try to artificially create needs/wants in people? Accurate search results.
If I want something I can search for it and find it. SEO and advertising and sponsored results are the way companies try to skew search results (usually by making them less accurate and useful for the person searching) in a way that benefits them.
A bidding-based advertising system ultimately results in the most valuable solution winning, since the ad spend will be marginally bid up as close to the value the consumer is willing to pay for the product/service minus producer input costs.
The most successful companies ultimately have the most to spend on ads. Again, this does not result in perfectly rational outcomes all the time (because humans are irrational), but comes damn close.
Now, whether we should let one company take the profits off of that ad bidding system (since it inherently trends to monopoly) is another question.
For a more distilled scenario, if you manually accepted open stock trade offers, and your broker took kickbacks to always show you the worst bids/asks that they think you might fall for and make it difficult to find the best quotes, that would obviously be bad. In fact not providing best execution is illegal. The ad economy runs on exactly this conflict of interest. Money flowing through ads represents inflated transaction costs.
Now turn off your ad-blocker, look at the next ten ads you see on the internet, and count how many of them fall into that category.
Unfortunately, this is a clear clash of "line goes up" versus "corporate integrity".
In the print media days, there was somewhat of a code of conduct-- publishers generally didn't want to run outright fraudulent or misleading ads because it damaged the image of the publication itself.
I'm not sure that Google has proven itself capable of rising to the same standards.
I will! (Kagi CEO here, and Happy New Year!)
It is closer to 0.01%, comparing the number of daily queries which is my favorite metric. Other way to put it is that Kagi is currently ~7 seconds of Google's daily search volume.
You may say it is a small number, but each one of Kagi's searches is paid and deliberate - and I dare say - a vote for the better web.
Currently I think the only piece of clothing I own that has an actual logo on it is my Kagi T-shirt (for being an early subscriber) - you could say I am a fan :-D
Without taking this too seriously, define "sustainable." The free, ad-supported model is what has given us the social media companies, which has contributed hugely to making the global order look less sustainable than ever.
There are couple of main complaints about ads:
1. Too many of them plastered all over in least expected places.
2. All that is done to privacy in the name of accurate profiling and targeting.
3. Malicious and misleading ads.
Should we accept that ad based industry can't survive without resorting to any of the above ?
It may not be possible to do anything about ads being misleading - marketing is just another word for lying and deception, after all.[ß]
For everything else you listed, I put together a tolerable set of behaviours a ~decade ago: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html ; and if that makes online advertising a lot more expensive, well... have you considered that maybe the obnoxious, intrusive, scummy and/or malicious ads are everywhere because advertising is too cheap?
ß: fine, maybe some miniscule fraction (< 0.01%) are factual. I consider numbers of that magnitude rounding errors.
On contrary, probably the ads became so expensive that only scam can afford it.
I think I could live with that.
Let's try again. Very few services that ask for "the price of a Starbucks coffee" subscription are actually worth that much to consumers.
Search or not search.
As long as the service providers don't understand that, they'll be limited in audience to high income techies and won't be able to grow any further.
And until users understand that, they will continue being tracked and shown advertisement.
In the average tech case (maybe not Kagi but definitely a lot of others) by managers fighting for dominance by increasing their departments head count.
And generally speaking, aren't you supposed to charge what the market will bear? What has that to do with costs?
Sure, that can happen.
> And generally speaking, aren't you supposed to charge what the market will bear? What has that to do with costs?
Because if you can't recoup your costs you're in the red and will have to close down soon?
I couldn't care less about tracking.
No, the reason I block malvertisements is because they are malicious. Malvertisements are viruses and you cannot convince me otherwise, I cannot find any difference. Blocking malvertisements are a matter of fucking safety.
What? We're talking about advertisements? No, all advertisements are malvertisements.
No, people are irritated by just the existence of ads -- with-or-without the tracking.
E.g. the "native" advertising of sponsors embedded in Youtube videos or podcasts have no technical way to track the audience and yet people are still annoyed such that they use Sponsorblock to get rid of it. https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock
Lots of ads-without-tracking still anger people. The commercials interrupting the tv and radio broadcasts, the ugly billboards around the city, etc. What gp is saying is that most of them would still listen to the radio "for free with the ads" rather pay extra for ad-free Sirius XM music or ad-free Spotify subscription. That majority preference is why ad-funded businesses dominate the paid-membership business models.
Note that this is not the same thing as the outliers who complain about ads also choosing free-with-ads products. I never choose ads given a choice, but my wallet-vote isn't strong enough to counteract the majority that do.
hence it is the ads - not the “interruption” that most people are against (s/most/all)
Many states have laws limiting billboards or posters to avoid obscuring nature and stop them from littering their communities. My hope is we can reign in the fraud and rampant escalation of ads, even if it means paying a bit more monetarily or trading a bit more privacy. So long as there is transparency and safety.
It has two sections, typically called 'white pages' and 'yellow pages' because the paper for the latter was tinted yellow. The white pages had subscriber phone numbers, listed alphabetically, with no advertising except that one could pay extra to have the entry in bold, to grab attention.
The yellow pages were for business numbers, arranged by topic. A business could buy ad space to put on the same page as the topic.
In the linked-to example, the white and yellow pages were in the same book. In a more populated area, the two would be separate books, and in larger cities even two books for the white pages and one for the yellow.
The funny thing was that the yellow pages used to be printed on yellow paper but they switched to white with a lot of yellow printing ink because some advertisers wanted to use white in their ads :)
The yellow pages used to be called "the golden guide" here.
The only flogging I've seen has been of Google for daring to offer a way of paying to use Youtube without ads, but clearly the whining on social media hasn't prevented it being economically viable as they're still offering it ten years later.
The way they seemingly randomly have a family plan in some countries but not in other is very annoying and the bundling of Youtube Music is problematic from a fair competition standpoint, but that's about it.
It's not that expensive for what you get, it removes ads which are the worst thing about Youtube and it ends us giving more money to the creators you watch compared to if you just watched the ads. What's not to like?
Just now on r/popular: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1htc0ec/ill_die_a_slo...
Posts like this come up regularly. The responses seem to have shifted over the last couple of years, with most now pointing out how dumb complaining about ads while refusing to pay is, but there are still plenty of people agreeing, and a strangely angry "how dare you not provide this service free!" vibe to them.
I cancelled prime and stopped sending amazon about £600 a year when they added adverts. They don’t care because 100 other people didn’t and they got an extra £10 a year from pushing them adverts.
Companies can’t resist the double dip, and the majority don’t care.
1. the majority user base does not care and/or is not willing to pay for the ads 2. these platforms/products do not want to cater to the minority that cares about their privacy and not being exposed to any advertising