Technology

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.

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.

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)