[HN Gopher] Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search
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Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search
Author : simonebrunozzi
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-04-04 21:06 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pluralistic.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (pluralistic.net)
| smcleod wrote:
| "I tried it. It was magic. No, seriously. All those
| things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile.
| Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking
| pristine on Kagi - the right answers, over and over again.
| ...(contd)"
| curmudgeon22 wrote:
| Interesting tidbit:
|
| > In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-
| end to Google.
|
| >The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's
| enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-
| Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug.
| Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more
| money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good
| product:
| ctrw wrote:
| I've tried kagi and really wanted to like it.
|
| But it returns the same results google does. I even asked people
| on here to give me the queries that kagi is best at. Even then
| google still returned the same results.
|
| Like the OP said, Google's shittiness is a choice and one they
| can turn off whenever too many people look like they are about to
| leave.
| mordae wrote:
| Yeah. It's the same results. Sans 90% of the spam. And it gets
| better as you blacklist the frequent offenders yourself.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It is slightly better search results compared to Google, but
| only just. The game changer in search is seeing the results
| without stupid ads. If they offered just that feature for
| $0.99/month, I would switch. Their current price is simply too
| high for daily use.
| awithrow wrote:
| What I like about it is the ability to bubble up domains that
| are more useful to me and also downrank or filter out the ever
| growing domains of seo filler.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| Think i'll finally give Kagi a try - also thinking about moving
| to Fastmail or similar.
|
| The results are so ridiculous now i've actively begun hating
| them, that coupled with a short stint using Google Ads a few
| years ago and i'm convinced Google is a very, very shady company
| that i can't wait to ditch fully.
|
| Docs wise i've begun to look up on GPT-4 a lot though instead of
| stack, official sites etc. so i'm already using search less in
| general.
| dhc02 wrote:
| I switched to fastmail from gmail a few months ago and I'm
| incredibly happy with it. I even got to keep my *@mydomain
| wildcard addresses, and the fastmail calendar implementation is
| not half bad.
| omoikane wrote:
| I was on Fastmail until Opera bought them. Looks like they have
| since bought back their company, but there wasn't a compelling
| reason for me to go back.
| laurentlbm wrote:
| I don't get the point of your comment. They were only owned
| by Opera from 2010 to 2013, that's more than 10 years ago.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I get paying for a search engine rather than having it be ad-
| supported. And I get that running all those servers costs a fair
| chunk of change. But the cost just seems insane -- $10/month?
| That's on par with a streaming service that needs millions of
| dollars to make content. I just can't see even the best search
| engine either costing that much to run or providing that much
| value.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Isn't it a matter of scale still though? Presumably search
| engine cost could be much less per account once you have as
| many users as Netflix has. Assuming a large chunk of the cost
| of Kagi is the quality and curating, not just sheer server
| OPEX.
|
| (Maybe a bold assumption, I don't have insight.)
| mordae wrote:
| Most of it goes to Google.
|
| I am based in central Europe and Kagi is less than 1/2 of my
| hourly rate per month. And it definitely saves at least that
| much.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| Really? I was ready to ditch Google not pay them through
| third parties. Oh well..
| mordae wrote:
| I totally get you, but we both have work to do and through
| Kagi it's easier and more respectful to our attention
| spans.
|
| Google is getting the money either way. At least for now.
| piva00 wrote:
| I use Kagi an order or two of magnitude more than what I use
| the streaming services I pay for.
|
| It's a small operation with no VC money to dump prices and
| subsidise it for you, it's very in line to what I imagine
| paying for under these conditions.
| olieidel wrote:
| I disagree - I don't think $10 / month is insane. Our low price
| expectations are driven by SaaS companies optimizing for
| growth, not profitability. Look at some of those "affordable"
| products out there: Slack, Asana, Shopify, all not profitable.
| The biggest surprise here, I think, is that VC-driven "growth
| first" companies have shifted customer expectations to think
| that everything should either be free or sub-$10 / month. The
| economic reality, however, looks quite different, if companies
| would aim for profitability (not many in the HN bubble do).
| bananapub wrote:
| > I just can't see even the best search engine either costing
| that much to run or
|
| why is that hard to imagine? the fixed costs of a search engine
| are enormous, and Google has 1) coming on three decades of
| investment in sunk costs and 2) billions of users now.
|
| > providing that much value.
|
| that's obviously a personal judgement you have to make for
| yourself.
|
| having a quite good search engine that is happy to just take my
| money in exchange for a useful service is definitely worth
| three coffees/month to me.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Theoretically, you're not just paying for the lost revenue on
| serving ads and/or server costs, but also the lost revenue on
| harvesting your personal data.
| summerlight wrote:
| If you really want to have a good option for ad-free search
| engines, you will need to pay more than what search engines
| could get from ad revenue. And this is a non-trivial amount;
| Google's ARPU is reportedly more than hundreds bucks. Given its
| scale, Kagi might be running at loss even with $10/month...
| JohnFen wrote:
| I pay for Kagi and I honestly feel that I get more than my
| money's worth out of it. YMMV, of course. Maybe it isn't worth
| it to you.
|
| But for me, Kagi opened up the web again. I can finally find
| what I'm looking for. I can make sure that my results never
| include BS websites. I even got serendipity back in my
| searches.
|
| In a sense, the $10/mo I pay is really for access to the web
| itself. Without Kagi, most of parts of the web I was interested
| in were almost entirely unfindable.
|
| But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account,
| but Kagi has a free tier.
| gmuslera wrote:
| Essentially $10 to take out the garbage, because the one that
| did it for "free" is doing a bad job at it.
| troyvit wrote:
| * It's a gallon of grass-fed milk every month.
|
| * It's a car wash every month.
|
| * It's two mid-range store-bought frozen pizzas every month
|
| * It's one Febreeze plug-in air freshener complete with 2 oil
| refills every month
|
| * You would be out just over 300 matches per month if you
| instead put that money towards Kagi.
|
| * And in homage to A Tiny Armageddon it is about 500 plastic
| spoons per month.
| D13Fd wrote:
| It would be worth it at 10x the price.
|
| $10 is a couple of cups of coffee or a cheap lunch in my area.
| I use Kagi a dozen times a day for work. The value proposition
| is very good. Every once in a while I'll use a computer that
| doesn't have Kagi and remember how much Google stinks these
| days.
|
| Eventually Google is going to wise up and cut off Kagi's API
| access. But until then I'm very happy to pay $10/month for
| greatly improved search.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Lol at 10 times? What about 100 times? Does it start losing
| value?
| bananapub wrote:
| to add another anecdote: I've been using it for a year and it is
| really good. less garbage in the results of the sort of searches
| I make, no ads, no tracking, no logging, a nice UI to affect my
| own personal search results in ways I prefer (banning sites I
| consider crap from results, up and downranking others based on my
| opinion).
|
| most importantly, it's just a simple, clear business transaction:
| I give them money, they provide a search engine in return. no
| trying to make me click on ads, no trying to encourage me to use
| it or let it track me to make money some other way, no worries
| about how they manage to provide a service to me, no worries
| about what future management might do with the huge morass of
| personal data they have acquired.
|
| every now and then I can't find what I'm looking for and try
| Google, and the vast majority of the time Google can't find it
| either. it's pretty sad that a tiny new upstart can actually
| replace the once formidable Google Search for me, but c'est la
| vie.
| api wrote:
| Kagi works for you. Google works for advertisers.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I wish we could go back to the good Google with ads in the
| sidebar. It paid to keep the lights on and felt like a fair trade
| for a free service.
| xnx wrote:
| > All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the
| search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google
| results? Fucking pristine on Kagi - the right answers, over and
| over again.
|
| No examples?
|
| > When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of
| "anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google,
| Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,
|
| Is this allowed by Google's terms?
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > Is this allowed by Google's terms?
|
| Why does it have to be?
| infomiho wrote:
| Every time I write a search query like "best tool for X" or
| "alternative to X", I use Kagi instead of Google. Because Google
| results for those kind of queries tend to be SEO optimized
| articles where the first recommended thing is the advert. Or even
| worse, I get some sort of spam/scam sites that get paid to shill
| stuff. I think got conditioned with bad Google results to not do
| it for those kind of queries.
|
| For all other searches, Google seems good enough.
| gmuslera wrote:
| Depending on what your main competitor gives you is a bad
| pattern. If it gets adopted enough, or somewhat Google see it as
| a threat, conditions will change, maybe for everyone.
|
| Think in what Reddit did when seemed that ChatGPT was trained on
| Reddit content, they put a price to such 3rd party requests,
| ended a market of good frontend alternatives for it, some tools
| and bots stopped working, etc.
|
| Google could do something similar, or poison/watermark the
| results sent to them or even put Gemini to be creative enough
| with the way it send back results to make very hard to parse to
| send an unified answer.
|
| It is what is available now, and it may work, but it may stop
| doing so because things happening outside their control.
| ladzoppelin wrote:
| I also am getting value from Kagi and think their AI/Summarize is
| really good. The search lenses are also very cool, actually its
| like Google was before they silently deprecated all useful
| operators. Honestly I hope they make it as it really is a better
| way to do the web.
|
| edit: So I pay 20 bucks a month and get the "early adopter"
| package which is all the AI stuff in beta and its amazing. I
| think it completely makes Kagi much more desirable. Its a lot of
| money but I don't use any streaming services anymore and honestly
| just learn stuff and mess with LLM's to kill time when before I
| was watching something. I guess its not for everyone but I am
| surprised its not an instant buy for [more people in the
| industry.
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