Oh sick!! I was already on the $10/month plan. This is great news!!!
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Technology
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Same. Looks like you and I both will be getting unlimited searches now. :D
Samesies :P This is awesome. Love being a user and not the product. EDIT:
With the redirector extension you can import the following to help with muscle memory.
{
"createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3",
"createdAt": "2023-09-22T00:00:00.631Z",
"redirects": [
{
"description": "Google->Kagi",
"exampleUrl": "https://www.google.com/search?q=kagi%20rocks&sca_esv=011101111&source=dv&ei=CN",
"exampleResult": "https://kagi.com/search?q=kagi%20rocks",
"error": null,
"includePattern": ""^(?:https?):\\/\\/(?:www\\.)?google\\.com(\\/?$|(\\/search\\?q=.*?(?=[&])))"",
"excludePattern": "",
"patternDesc": "Redirect Kagi",
"redirectUrl": "https://kagi.com$1",
"patternType": "R",
"processMatches": "noProcessing",
"disabled": false,
"grouped": false,
"appliesTo": [
"main_frame"
]
},
]
}
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Same too! I was literally considering the update to the family plan so I could share it. This is welcome news.
Edit: I’m actually going to update to the duo plan. Super affordable now!
We switched to Duo, too. Making that plan unlimited was the las barrier to my spouse jumping aboard the Kagi train. We're in for the yearly Duo sub as of this evening!
Probably a good pricing decision. To avoid hitting the 300/month usage I kept DDG as default and only used Kagi for more complex searches. If I upgrade to this I could then keep Kagi as default.
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This is fantastic. I've been a $5 Kagi user for a few months and have been really enjoying it. The only issue has been that sometimes when I'm working on a project I need to blow through a ton of similar queries to find what I'm looking for; I've been forced to switch back to google for those. Now I've upgraded and am going full Kagi.
I probably come in at ~30-50 searches/day so I never really considered it. But unlimited sounds interesting 🤔
This is awesome! I always wanted to try out Kagi but was not huge fan of the original pricing model. I think I might have to give Kagi a try now!
EDIT BEINGS HERE
So I actually watched a talk by the person who coinded "enshittification", Cory Doctorow, recently, and I have changed my perspective about Kagi. I no longer think Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
Enshittification requires advertisers. As long as Kagi finances itself with money that does not come from advertisers, it will not enshittify.
This does not mean that it's not problematic that their code is closed-source.
EDIT ENDS HERE
I like what I hear about the user experience, but there are many problems I see with the service.
For one, it's based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.
It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification. Currently, it is giving users loads of stuff so that users use it, but sooner or later investors will want their money back and Kagi will enshittify.
Finally, these two problems would be mitigated by open-sourcing and making libre their software. With that, alternatives in more sensible legislatures could open. Users could migrate to instances that are still libre and not enshittified.
It is really unfortunate that Kagi is doing so many things well while doing some fundamental things terribly. As it stands, Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
What's wrong with simply switching as soon as enshittification starts? You're not making any permanent commitments to it.
There is no law in the requiring data logging in the US, nor is it required to comply with FBI security data requests. and beat out gag orders over the subject. It is also deemed a violation of the first amendment.
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Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Also it's automatically not private when it requires a login. They know exactly what user is searching what, and basically breaks search in incognito mode. Also people love more accounts to manage.
"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
If you really want to pay while not having to login, self-host a searx instance and you'll be logging your own data. You'll have complete control, it's significantly cheaper, and it's far more private without having to even login.
"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
This is exactly what "you're the product" means. Google is selling your presence on their platform to advertisers - you are the product they're selling.
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No ads disguised as search results. Actually, no ads at all. Great search results. Lenses.
Also, there is a solution for incognito mode. And ad supported, in practice means tracked by advertisers, and hence you are the product.
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Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Providing the service is not free, especially something like search that uses a LOT of storage and compute power to index websites. That's very expensive to do. There's two options as to how to pay for it:
- Pay for it yourself (like what Kagi is doing)
- Have someone else pay for it for you. For example, advertising like what Google and Bing do
The latter is what people mean when they say "you're the product". The advertisers are the customers.
self-host a searx instance
Two totally different things.
Searx is a search engine aggregation service. It is not a search engine itself, and you still need the backend search engines to make it useful. Searx could use Kagi though.
Kagi doesn't index, it's Google results as a proxy. That's literally what Searx does, and it's free. The issues you said with needing to pay for search is solved with Searx even if you claim it doesn't, it does. Also other search engines like DDG does a crawler + bing results is funded by ads, they're profitable. The mental gymnastics to pay for a shitty service makes no sense to me, but you do you if you want to support this terrible practice. Not to mention the numerous other issues I listed that you ignored.
Searx could use Kagi though.
Lol that makes no sense, and it probably violates Kagi's ToS. You're running a self hosted proxy through a service that's just a proxy for Google results. Just set Searx to search Google for the exact same thing.
"If you aren't paying for something, you are the product" sounds nice, but isn't true. Advertisment can exist and you can still not the product.
Instead it somehow makes more sense to pay for a privacy invasive search engine that requires a login, requires cookies, and doesn't work in private search.
This says they index
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user.
But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic.
They just proxy searches and then sort them lol. Definitely caching thrown in there too, as if that even changes anything. You're paying $10/mo for that when DDG does the same thing for free.
It says right there they have their own index, that they are pulling from Google et Al and also their own. Whether it's worth $10, I dunno. But it sounds like more than just an aggregator
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what search engines are actually good these days?
because that's the problem, they aren't
search results have gone down a sharp hill lately
I don't think Kagi is the answer, but there is a problem - a big one
Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
They aren't, that is why.
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Does Kagi support languages outside of English? One issue I have with DDG is the lack of results outside English sites. If Kagi is similar then it would be a big issue.
It sea4ches in different languages, but there is no way to force language of the results. Instead, ot tries to be "smart" and uses languages of the region. So it has the same problem Google and Bing does: giving you results in random languages outside of language region (or in multi-lingual regions), even when request is explicitly in language A.
There is a feature request to implement this setting, but not much hope to have this soon.
On this note, if someone knows of a search engine that allows specifying language of results, please let me know :)
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Does anyone have experience with non-english searches? Are the results of similar quality?
@sculd asked the same question further down and got a couple of good responses.
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Awesome! The AI summarizer is very useful, and it gives quality search results from my experience with the free trial. $10 a month still seems a little high for a search engine, though I'm definitely eyeing it more now...
Hopefully we see more competition in the future with paid search engines, this seems to be new territory where everyone is still pretty unsure of the right pricing. I think $5 a month is going to be the sweet spot for me.
Same here. I did the trial 300 search thing and was very happy with that. Settling on the fiver a month plan as I can't justify a tenner. Plus I realised that I don't do much more than about 300 searches.
It's so refreshing to not have 'sponsored' posts or adverts in front of your results.
That's a curious project and I hope they succeed. But I have to wonder. On their "Why pay for search engines" page, they state the following:
Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search itself has a non-zero cost. In fact, it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches (wherever in the world you search from). So a user searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3 in search cost. But an average Kagi user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use.
So, will they dial the price back up or do they currently just hope that most people pay for the "unlimited searches per month" plan but use it less than an average user would?
They probably haven't updated the page. This blog post says:
With new search sources proving more cost-efficient, the improved efficiency of our infrastructure, and the broader market embracing Kagi, we can again offer an unlimited experience to a broader group of users.
So it sounds like they have made lots of efficiencies to make it cheaper per search. I'm sure more subscribers helps as well.
But I'm really curious about the "new search sources" part. Where do they source their searches from?
Their operations are very small scale still. I imagine as the economy of scale does its thing, that price/search will fall drastically.
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Just heard of this service but I am signing up first thing tomorrow.
Yesss! Immediately upgraded to duo unlimited for me and my partner.
Why on earth would I pay $10 a month for search when I can get everything I need using SearXNG? For Free.
It costs me exactly $0.00 to run SearXNG locally using Podman and WSL to host the docker image. It Just Works; and I don't have to worry about paying money every month to anyone; nor do I ever have to count my search queries as precious.
Unfortunately this "$10/month = Unlimited" is also likely to be available only for a limited time; and once Kagi feels it has enough users; then you'll be stuck back on some arbitrary number of searches each month.
Worse is logging in. To search. Yuck.
There are so many "Public" SearXNG instances as well for the less-than-technical; https://searx.space/
All of them provide the option(s) to use whatever engines you'd like.
Kagi has better search results than any other engine I've used. That is why people pay for it.
No it doesn't. SearXNG aggregates all engines anyways; and that gets far more helpful results.
This is literally "nuh uh" quality discussion. We get it, you like SearXNG, are you actually trying Kagi?
I just tried a few SearXNG instances and the quality is the same as what I get from Google or Bing anyways.
Trying out Kagi now to see if it's better or not.
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Ah this is fantastic! I've only been using Kagi for a few months, and have been concerned about running into the search limit, but this means I can go and set it as the default everywhere now.
That is actually great thing for now was using you.com might finally move
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Hadn’t heard of this but stoked to try it out!
Hmm I hope this one will live on. I remember Neeva which never let their users know that they could sign up and then shut down because they didn't have enough income..
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