Now that Neeva has collapsed, I’m back at Kagi. But I also bought the highest tier $25 plan because I want them to get my money. Even with these search increases on the lower plans, I understand now that building a privacy focused search engine is expensive. And Kagi has really hit a sweet spot of providing high quality search (often better than google)
I’ve also switched to Orion browser and might start donating for that too. It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab tree that doesn’t look like a hack, or setting a custom ‘new tab’ page).
Huge kudos to the Kagi team for building products that are not only privacy focused, but also just genuinely better products. Search and Orion are both fantastic. I really hope they can be financially sustainable.
Offtopic, but what answer were you expecting?
"Thank you for your message. We advise you not to start using our services, we are on the brink of shutting down, just haven't announced it yet."
Rather, I asked the Neeva support person if the $6 price was sustainable, and if they foresaw a need to raise prices. I mentioned that Kagi called out increased costs from Bing, and asked if Neeva was impacted as well, and whether $6 was enough to support their costs.
I was hoping to mostly just let them know that customers care about this stuff, but they responded to me by saying that they have an in-house index and Bing costs are not a problem for them, due to their private index.
So even though they likely answered my question honestly that Bing costs increasing didn’t impact them as much as it did Kagi, it seems they had much bigger cost problems instead!
Kagi appears to be more bootstrapped, so it's very, very important for them to always maintain healthy marginal profits on each user. In this case, your cash is probably very appreciated, and hopefully they're net positive overall so can afford years of potential stagnation after this boom time while still earning a decent living. That allows them to be around to get sudden influxes of new customers whenever various self-inflicted crises damage the incumbents brands. Time in market vs. timing the market.
I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account. They can then associate all of your searches to that account just like google and bing do when you use them while logged in.
More features (lenses, explicit personalization), more results (it’s bing + google indexes + extra), and better results (IMO).
> I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account.
Many don’t, but you lose a lot of what makes it so much better without it.
> They can then associate all of your searches to that account
Yes, but then the rationale is that they are so expensive, so they don’t need to do shady shit like that. Currently, they don’t even save your history which is planned as an optional feature for later (so you can look into your own history).
Ads are (often) a distraction. Mostly my brain just ignores them, but occasionally they trick me to some sidetrack and I forget for a while what I was doing.
Aside, but it’s so crazy to me that both Chrome and Firefox lack this option. There are third party extensions for it, which is the official solution, but I’d rather minimize the number of third-party extensions I use.
Then today I noticed they upped their quota. Talk about timing. Ill proabbly stick to monthly for a while. Honestly not sure what is better for them, a monthly sub or an annual (at a discounted rate). As it looks I'll probably be around 1k searches a month.
a 25/mon bill was kinda steep. But 10 is definately digestible for me. So I am quite happy with the swap and the quality of the searches.
Huh? Firefox has had great vertical tabs, thanks to Tree Style Tabs, for decades. Orion doesn’t supper hierarchical tabs, like Firefox does.
I use Orion and Brave, both of which are experimenting with vertical tabs, but if Firefox were as fast as Brave I’d be full-time on that. The tabbed browsing experience on Firefox has always been the best, in my book.
Don't pull a web3/blockchain pivot on us, Vlad!
Google and DuckDuckGo both ignore me when I type 2 terms for the sake of showing me more ads.
I just checked. Doesn't matter. Neeva is shutting down.
Lol, force is still strong with us, and we are commited to our mission. No distractions!
At present I just filter it out with ublock, but I wish I didn't have to, y'know?
Same things with TV and many more home appliances.
We are expected to pay extra to finance data collection ops on ourselves and be happy for the priviledge.
Look into B&O.
Google is worse every day. Bing isn't getting any better either. DDG is of course Bing, with extra filters. Yandex is.. well... for some very niche searches it's actually nice, as long as it's a topic Russians don't care about. But they display a captcha every 2nd click. Marginalia goes only for niche sites, which is great if you are looking for that. But it avoids mainstream. Have been playing with Mojeek recently, but it seems to lack a bunch of websites also.
Personally I'm considering running my personal Marginalia (at least it's open source), with my own sitefilter. But still just considering.
The last thing I want to do when making a decision about subscribing to a product is having to go through the list of organisations they donate to and checking for values alignment - nevermind what happens when that list changes and I don't notice it.
Yes, I'm fully aware that they could privately donate profits anyway. In my mind, this upfront commitment creates a direct link between my actions and the recipients of the donations. Since these are political organisations I then feel obligated to research them.
To be clear: I'm fine with donations to technical organisations like the Crystal Language or Python donations.
How do they square this mission statement with AI summaries and content-vectorized chat bots? are the summaries going to be so long and bad on purpose you are still forced to click though occasionally? just so the possibly human web site runner feels glee.
I'm thinking of my usage patterns here. I tend to leave searches (and results but that's not Kagi's problem) open in the browser for days/weeks and come back to them when I need them again.
I also use the auto tab discard extension, which will of course unload the tab after a few minutes out of focus.
Let's also consider the machine going into sleep mode.
Will those actions trigger a new Kagi search and bring down my monthly search counter?
Not to mention incrementally refining a search by adding/removing/changing keywords.
Those limits start to look increasingly low to me. As in, not your main search engine but the option to use when all else fails.
Of course they don't mind because it's subscription pricing.
As for the AI, I really don't care. I am cautious for now, I just hope the work on actual search doesn't get left by the wayside to chase the latest GPT trend.
Preferring AI-filtered results over a what is basically a full-text search over a massive index is why Google Search has become so useless. Sorry, machine, I know better.
I guess Kagi has to choose whether they want to court the power users like me, or the grandmas that Google is focusing on and want a more natural query interface. The reason why I'm paying for Kagi is because it seems to respect my queries, and does not try to interpret, rewrite them or do anything more than I have asked.
Is it really that important to stay within the quota? You're literally counting cents.
I have used Kagi for the last 4 months and I’m happy with the experience. The results are good enough that I rarely fallback to Google, even for searches localized to France.
I should sign my wife up for the search to see how she likes it and how much she searches, so I can decide if we need duo ;)
I want to utilise lenses and optimise my search better. Any tips?
I use lenses for specialised searches (I have one for HN/Reddit) ND recipes (to avoid spammy sites). My favorite lenses are "non-commercial" (to surface results from the non-commercial part of the web) and "forums" (usually similar thing but focusing on human comments).
Now I find that I rely heavily on the firefox smart bar to go to pages I've been to before, as well as rely on "bangs" more, which don't count toward the searches.
E.g. !archwiki !mdn !gmaps
It is a front end to the Google Search API.
It has made my life so much harder when trying to search for <popular product> <rare issue>. 100s of pages showing the product, none with my problem...
Kagi is pretty great, by the way. I was using DuckDuckGo before and Kagi is significantly faster and gives better results.
Keep up the good work.
