Kagi now has a Fediverse Forums search toggle
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That’s not new. They’ve had it for a long time now.
That’s fucking awesome but the ranking is highly questionable.
I searched myself and a 4 upvote comment was the top thing.
That’s because 4 upvotes here is like 4k upvotes on that other site.
I would have expected plenty of results from lemmynsfw given your username.
It’s too bad they require a subscription. I’ll never use this shit for this reason alone.
This attitude is why the internet is full of ads. Doing shit for free doesn’t happen on an empty stomach. I’d rather pay a fair price for software and services I use. I’m not saying anyone’s pricing is fair, just pointing out I don’t agree with this behavior.
Naah. People actually paying for the crspnis what drives it. YouTube was ad free backing the day. And when they allowed adds. It was intentionally to create an annoyance that they cooked profit from- so that when they offered a add free, they could ALSO profit from.
A one time fee, I understand. A monthly rate to use a web browser is shameful.
Why don’t you make an alternative without ads or subscriptions? I’d love to use a video platform as big as youtube without having to pay with money or my attention.
Quick question, how were you plnning to cover costs?
You would understand a one-time fee for an active, ongoing service? I’m a fucking communist, please don’t make me stan capitalism.
Most platforms usually start ad free and with no restrictions. That’s how they capture a chunk of the market. Then, once they have an established customer base, they typically introduce ads or a subscription so they can actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth the service runs on.
This is what YouTube, Google, and pretty much everyone did. It’s the standard play book.
One-time fees are not feasible for this type of business model. If the server costs are ongoing, meaning you have to pay for the user’s usage constantly, then you need to either constantly charge them too or take money out of your own pocket to subsidize it.
A one-time fee would have to be absurdly high (think hundreds of dollars) to take into account multiple years of usage, otherwise it’s too risky and you’re most likely losing money.
This mindset that subscriptions are all evil when hardware and bandwidth are billed to you every month/year is ridiculous.
Kagi at least is honest from the get go and never tried to trick customers into believing their service would be free forever. That’s what’s actually shitty behavior, when companies put out a product that they then enhsittify for the purposes of extracting profit.
Kagi was a subscription from the get go and told you that’s how they pay their bills, and in return you get the service they promised with no compromises. I’m not arguing whether the price is fair, but at least the business model is honest and doesn’t try to take advantage of me and my data.
Youtube also didn’t have a subscription option back in the day, and it also limited the length of videos you could upload. Things cost money to run, and something on the scale of Youtube costs a lot of money to run.
Now to be clear, I don’t pay for Youtube or watch ads, but that’s more because I object to directly giving Google my money with how much value they already generate just tracking and selling what browsing habits I am unable to obscure from them. If there was an option to pay Google $5-10 a month with the enforceable assurance that it came with absolutely no personal tracking and data collection, I would strongly consider it.
I would pay, for my personal use. But a lot of the time I’m on my company corp network, on a company device. And I don’t mix that with my personal logins and personal devices.
Petition your IT for a subscription. Worst they can say is no right?
“Just use chatGPT.” -IT
I’m guessing you haven’t worked for a big company before.
I’d pay if it wasn’t based in the US.
Uruki presents itself as a European alternative to Kagi. They seem to have a different vision, however (no AI and just focused on a search engine). On the other hand, I didn’t try because I find the price a bit high for the little comfort it brings me, but it’s still good to test!
Same. If ecosia or qwant had subscriptions I’d probably pay for at least one of them.
Fair point.
They have a free tier with 100 searches! It doesn't sound like a lot but I usually don't cross it.
the free tier is a static 100 not a monthly 100 isn’t it?
The pricing page says limited to 100 total searches and 100 AI interactions with standard models. I read that as once you hit your total 100 you need to get a sub.
I crossed it in a few days. Some people use the web pretty heavily.
I’d pay for it if their $5 a month tier wasn’t so limited
Same tbf. 5$ for 300 searches is so limited. I just checked my DDG history for the month and I average between 2500 and 3500 searches a month. I don’t even use it professionally, its just general consumer use.
Honestly I likely would pay for it if it was 5$ for 3k-4k searches. I would just swap to another engine for the remainder but, 1$/1k searches up to 10$ which moves to unlimited would be more than fine, even if they decided to remove the bloat like lens, and translation from the package. but they are likely hoping more people are not like me and will just pay the 10$ a month to have unlimited rather than just not use the service at all.
Especially considering how many other services that I get way more value of are not much more than the unlimited plan… I can have internet browsing for 10$ which i already have for free, or I can pay a couple $'s more and get a streaming service or a news site which contains content that I don’t already have access to.
I like the mentality but, it’s just not worth it for me for a non-essential service that adds nothing of value to me outside one less site harvesting my data.
Ok sorry ignoring the rest of your comment but how do you do 2500-3500 searches a month? That’s 100 a day, and you explicitly excluded work related searching.
You’re doing a search every 10 minutes of every waking hour of every day, not including searches done for work. You barely have time to read what you are searching.
Why so many searches?
The $5 a month tier is more than enough for me; I don’t think I’ve gone over the 300 queries a month in almost a year, and I feel like I search a lot. Those couple of times I have, all it means is starting a new 30 day period a little early. It’s painless.
Does this mean it’s effectively $0.0167 per search, and you have to buy batches of 300 searches, but they have an expiration date?
I definitley search a lot in that case; I tried it for a few months and I think I hit the 300 cap after three weeks each month.
No one should have to pay to search the web. They’re as bad as all the other monetized bullshit.
tl;dr: you’re paying for search either way. A reliable and secure open-source non-profit would be better but I’d rather be paying directly than use a “free” service which extracts an opaque and invariably sinister cost in perpetuity.
No one should have to pay for anything. We have enough excess that a gift economy is entirely feasible. Convincing folks of that, creating new systems to realize the possibility, and shifting from our existing systems, are all separate and difficult tasks.
In the current system I do think an independently run organization funded by the public (likely via taxes but possibly via private donation) does make sense though. In lieu of that, or something better, there is no useful internet search without payment. Using free search engines means either someone else eats the cost (which may work for small/local communities but isn’t scalable without massive public funding and/or taxes) or the cost is subsidized a la surveillance capitalism and advertising.
Using free services run for profit extracts a cost that may be difficult to measure but there is no doubt it exists. When for-profit companies obscure that cost I am compelled to assume it is because they estimate I would not be willing to pay the asking price for their services.
Adjust this relationship to the magnitude of entire societies enveloped within, and seemingly dependent on, those services and the choice to personally decouple from that paradigm is an incredibly attractive option. I think, if one has the means, it may be ethically compelling as well (but that’s a different conversation).
I think your first sentence is a valid opinion to hold, but I disagree that they’re just as bad when they’re very upfront about what you’re paying for. Google et all meanwhile don’t make it clear that they monitize user data unless you’re paying attention
Im okay with it tbh. The everything must be free on the internet mindset is what led ads working its way in everywhere.
It costs money to maintain software?
I like what Kagi are doing, even though I don’t pay for their search engine. I’ve been enjoying browsing the Kagi Small Web portal recently.
You can easily selfhost a portal like that with wander or try one of these linked wander consoles.
Sick