this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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To anyone interested: Kagi is a great alternative!
Kagi is so expensive. $5/month for 10 searches per day, $10 for 34/day. A staggering $25/month for unlimited searches.
I gave it a try after it came up a couple of weeks ago. It’s quite good, but it’s not that good. Its better than DuckDuckGo, it’s a bit less overloaded with seo spam than google, but it hasn’t found anything that I haven’t been able to find with my usual method - a combination of mostly DDG with smatterings of Google and a lot of adding “reddit” to searches.
I would pretty happily pay $5 a month for a single search engine that did everything, but I just use search too much so I’d have to keep my existing multiple search engine approach or pay loads.
I think it’s too expensive.
I crunched the numbers in another comment.
I agree that it's too expensive. The fact that their individual search rate is cheaper than the lowest tier monthly search annoys me. Then, the only way to get less than 1c per search is to make more than 21,000 searches a year on the most expensive plan.
If I could share my account across a family or a small business, that might make sense, but otherwise it's asking a lot for only a small improvement over the competition.
Fair enough. I must say I didn’t even consider the per-search payment option - I just assumed it would be abusively expensive to encourage committing to a monthly fee, but clearly not! Thank you for demonstrating that so comprehensively.
That’s better but it still means I’d be using multiple search engines just so I don’t rack up costs indiscriminately. And honestly if I’m paying to use it that seems unnecessarily inconvenient.
$5/month for 100 searches per day (or something high enough I’d be unlikely to hit it when using it as my sole search engine) and I’d be totally willing to switch. As it is it’s just too expensive.
Yeah I mean even $5 for 400 would be ok, that's like 1.25c per search, and more likely to be something you don't tip over accidentally some months. That would still fit in with $10 for 1,000 - so long as you make ~~800~~ 733.3 searches a month it's better definitely value.
Right now, at 1.66c per search ($5 for 300), you would need to make 600 searches for $10 to be better value. However, in the $5 plan you'd pay less after 300 searches (1.5c each), so it's actually 633.3 searches to break even, under the current price plan.
There are blog posts but basically these guys don't have investor funding, need to cover costs, and the cost structure is representative of their costs.
Running a search index is expensive, it's honesty pretty amazing a company of this size can manage it.
what about https://www.qwant.com ?
Honestly, I've been using it as my default research engine for a year and... I'm now manualy changing to Google everytime I'm REALLY searching for something.
Qwant results are generaly several steps below.
May as well just use DDG or Ecosia, then use the !g tag any time you want to hop back.
Yeah I'll try these for sure! Thanks for listing them here. I wasn't aware of alternative search engines outside of DDG and Qwant.
Once again it's a shame i wasn't aware of Neeva, would have loved to at least give it a try (and probably pay for it). :(
Yeah same. Ecosia suits me a little more than DDG, both are backed by Bing, both have tags like !g, and while I don't really care about the tree thing that Ecosia does I do like how they give you a choice of which maps to open and one of those is Google - DDG just loads Apple Maps.