So I’ve been using Kagi for a while now as a paid search engine. I always thought it’s $25 a month plan was a little steep for search, but a) I got work to pay for it, and b) startpage nee google was getting less and less useful, and bing and whatever used it has… well been worse for me always.
Anyway, I just got told that they’ve now adjusted their pricing / added features to Ultimate, and I think (at least now) that’s actually added a lot of value if you’re into the more advanced LLVM / AI models / chat. I have also been paying $20 a month through work for ChatGPT Plus. I might drop that because Kagi now lets you chat with / use GPT4 as well as Claude2 and a Google LLVM model with the one $25 a month, in addition to all the search and AI Search (with sourcing) together.
I don’t know how well paid search is going to ever do - it might be a short term tool. But for now, not having ads in the search, a straightforward pay for service model that seems to work just as well with their stated privacy goals, and getting multiple AI LLVM is pretty cool “one stop shopping” if you will. I also like giving a shot to less ad based models for Internet services that I can’t see how they don’t become privacy invasions.
As soon as I start thinking about what Kagi offers, there are the following cons popping into my head:
I’ll be watching their career with great interest, but I think I’ll wait for something different.
Well, the reality is, search costs money. Quite a lot of money it seems.
So that is either paid for by you, or by someone else. Nobody is going to run search as a charity. So it’s going to be paid for by parties interested in paying for your attention.
Even if you run ad blockers or use meta search engines like searx, you are going to be finding results by companies that have paid to be there.
I am a heavy search user. My search quantity is reasonably large just from personal use (I’m a curious dude, what can I say?) but my professional use of search as a software developer is staggering some days. My anecdotal experience is that that Google search has been declining in quality for years, and especially over the last two or three. DuckDuckGo is a nice alternative for privacy (potentially), but I while I find myself feeling less in a walled garden with them, I don’t actually find their results to be any better than Google’s.
I have tried Kagi recently. So far, I really like it. I genuinely feel like I get good results (read: find something quickly that is relevant to what I searched). I love their lensed searches that let you search the indie-web, and I love that they let you add weightings to websites that you trust.
It is expensive, no doubt. But for a certain audience that relies on quality web search, prefers to not be walled in by paying search engine optimizers and values paying for a product rather than opting to be the product, Kagi offers a solution.
Having said that, I would love to see the cost come down and make it more accessible to the many and I appreciate that for most people, the “free” search engines are good enough.
I see all your points and fully get it. I just naively wish something new will pop up by popular demand, some breakthrough idea out of the box, like some kind of open source search engine supported by p2p network or federated instances where everyone would contribute resources. If such demanding projects like operating system or social media can be open source then I don’t see why search engine couldn’t be.
I have a feeling that you mainly wish for something that you can use for free.
Reality is, money needs to come from somewhere. It will either come from you, or someone who might have different motivations than you do.
That’s not reality, that’s a mindset promoted by corporations for the last decade. How much do you pay for using Lemmy, Linux, Mastodon and other FOSS?
How the fuck do you think Lemmy, Linux and Mastodon are sustaining themselves, if not with money?
I donate to open source projects that I feel need the support, because unlike you I don’t take them for granted.
And what exactly would stop people from doing the same for search engine project?
You tell me. What’s stopping you from donating to SearXNG?
SearxNG is kind of a bad example, since they are only a meta search engine and don’t do any of the heavy lifting.
I wonder how big the database needs to be for useful search, and how much new data is added every day. Is this something that could realistically be run locally or widely mirrored?
Nope, not realistic for “mirroring”. Federated could be possible, but I wouldn’t have high hopes about (good) latency and coverage.
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The $10 plan gives you unlimited searches. The $25 plan has additional features like AI. For comparison, OpenAI charges $20/month for premium access to ChatGPT, with free accounts being rate-limited, and not having access to the latest model. And of course all ChatGPT users have their usage tracked.
I haven’t signed up for a paid plan yet, but I’ve been using the free plan (which has limits on searches and AI use) for a little while now and it seems pretty good. It’s not a slam dunk, since I found myself going back to Google a couple times and getting better results there. But it seems pretty good overall, and the FastGPT chatbot has been consistently giving me better results than Bing Chat.
If you believe Kagi’s privacy statement, they are not logging your searches, and the account is only used to track membership. I don’t like the idea of being logged in either, but it’s something.
I will likely revert to duckduckgo or something similar for incognito search, personally.
Paying for web site access is a hard pill to swallow, but I’m afraid the time of reckoning has come. I’ve been part of the problem for decades, using sites and services that are, by their ad-supported nature, misaligned with my interests. Google’s dominance has ruined not only the quality of searches, but the quality of journalism and other content across the entire internet, since the primary goal of anyone trying to make money on the internet is to get at the top of Google results. This is why you can’t find a cookie recipe without scrolling through some absurd human-interest story. It’s why you can’t read news articles without clicking through slideshows. It’s why you can’t find pretty much any meaningful product reviews without researching it like it’s a goddamn dissertation.
The poison of advertising has seeped into the groundwater of the internet. I hope that in time we can reverse the damage. I don’t know if Kagi’s business model is the way forward, but I’m damn well sure the status quo of advertising and user tracking is not.
You can generate a link, which has a token in the url, so you can search while in incognito (or even another browser.)
And to be fair, i pay $10 now because i hope one day it will only cost 5. It does not seem far fetched because they did just lower prices like a week ago. (Unlimited search was 25, now it costs 10)
I think $5 a month is reasonable especially if it means a good alternative to google exists. But yeah having to sign in sucks and it should be free but I definitely don’t want ads on a search engine. I wish they would open source at least.
This I don’t understand. Why should search be free? Who do you think would do that amount of work and donate it to the internet? Search has always cost money, we just paid with ads and that model has kind of reached its enshittification maximum to be useful to me,and apparently others.
Governments. The internet and the knowledge it gives to people is the same public good as roads, water, power, sewerage, etc. All of these in a reasonable modern society need to be owned and maintained by the government through taxation and provided to the public for free.
I get what you’re saying, but that’s still not free. You just roll up the cost in taxes.
Your government might offer it for their citizens, but do the taxpayers want to subsidize the access to other billion people on the internet who do not pay tax to your government.
As for my government, I don’t trust them enough to not push state propaganda in search results.
Then they would spend billions and it would be worse than the current alternatives. They have no incentive to have more users, in fact it costs more to be useful than to just take money from the government and have no users
Why should these things be free? The other things we get for free on the web are either supported by donations or they harvest something from you that’s valuable and sell it, that’s not free either.
I’m into the idea of paying for higher quality services and have enjoyed my kagi trial. Might see if I can find someone to split an account with.
To be honest, you can also pay with crypto which I imagine makes you less tied to the purchase.
I also don’t love being logged in, and I separate work and innocuous searches into kagi. And like I said work searches are noticeably better in kagi for me. But I’m more interested in the 40 plus dollars a month of AI access thrown in with search for the 25 a month. That makes it a steal. (for people using AI stuff)
There we go. Now I won’t do it. If the ability to pay with crypto is a feature, there’s something inherently wrong, imo.
Crypto is BS, but accepting payments in crypto isn’t really a comment on the quality of a product in any way.