Tough to go from free to $10/month without any obvious to me improvements, as much as I’d like to support the cause
Have you tried it? At least for me, I often get better results compared to google. Also Kagi has a free trial of 100 searches.
Granted I'm a developer, so my job is basically just searching for information, so getting better results is really valuable for me.
Totally valid. For me the killer feature is being able to change the weights for various sites, making it so websites with content that's not useful to me or I don't like don't appear^[e.g. apple.com, facebook, nypost, quora], pinning websites that I consider best-of-class for their relevant searches^[e.g. wikipedia, the ffxiv wiki], and prioritizing websites I do like, but aren't always the best answer^[e.g. opencritic, speedrun.com, cbc, w3schools, github].
They also have a "Lenses" feature that lets you make your own search lens (like I have one for Lemmy-only results), but I've not really had much use for those.
The regex redirect feature is another massive pro. I hope they bring it into Orion as well.
I already use Stop the Madness for this, and probably will continue to as it’s a more global solution, but having it built right into the search engine at least shows they’re taking real steps to hand control back to the user.
Oh ya I use that as well, to turn Youtube results into Invidious, reddit into web.archive.org/save/, twitter into nitter, tiktok into proxitok, and AMP results into normal articles. It's nice because, since I use kagi on my phone, it reaches where extensions don't normally.
I'm pretty sure there are browser extensions that already do this for you on Google. You can do it manually on each search but that's obviously cumbersome. But browser extensions are basically what you're describing and still free
There's literally not. For blocking, sure, but not changing the behaviours of your search algorithm.
It literally lets you construct a blacklist so those sites don't show up in future search results.
This one has been around for over 5 years.
Blocks sites you specify from appearing in Google search results
I wonder if you even read my comment? Also chill, there's no need to condescend over a search engine lmao.
Yeah you're right. I only read up to the part about blocking sites and got excited to share my knowledge. Sorry.
I appreciate the apology ♥
There's the 5$/month option available if you don't search more than 300 times a month.
It has a free trial. If you don't see the improvements, don't pay.
It's cheaper to just run SearXNG instance. People claiming any new search engine is better than established ones are hallucinating with their anecdotes.
How easy is it for an average Joe to set up their own SearXNG instance?
It appears a bit more difficult than setting up the original Searx. I've been poking around in the code for SearXNG lately because I'm planning on migrating to it but haven't done any serious work with it yet.
I posted this further down the thread, but I'll put it here so it's more visible in case the discussion is interesting.
According to this source, DuckDuckGo makes ~$0.0027 per search from ad revenue. Kagi @ $5/300 searches is ~$0.01667/search, or >6x higher than DDG's ad revenue. So is the overall value proposition from Kagi >6x higher than DDG?
So $5/month for 300 searches, or $10/month for unlimited is a tough pill to swallow, especially when I have no guarantees that they're not also selling my data. If they were a nonprofit, I'd trust them a bit more and just chalk the higher cost up to limited scale, but AFAIK they're private so they have little incentive to reduce prices as they get more popular.
So I'm skeptical.
I've been paying $10 per month for 1000 searches for a few months now and had no plans on cancelling. This unlimited change makes it even better. Not being constantly frustrated by poor search results trying to sell you stuff or influence what you're looking for is worth the money.
I search way, way more than 300/month. I'm also not paying $10/month AND give my search history to a company that I made transaction with.
the 300/month is for the 5$ plan? possible "fair use"-like hidden limits aside, the 10$ sounds unlimited
from their front page they claim that "We do not log or associate searches with an account", and their privacy page is fairly detailed
Businesses like this always end up veering towards changing privacy policies to the worse.
And depending on your threat model, not even a good privacy policy is enough.
Are you more content with instead giving your search history to a company whose business model isn't as transparent?
Maintenance, upgrades, DDOS protection and whatnot also costs money.
You're still only as good as Google results allow you to be.
Correct. Same dum dums complaining about the proce are there ones buying $12 lattes/day.
For some, money is tight, and there are already so many subscriptions available for premium service. Many of those are solutions to combat forced enshitification. The Internet is too powerful of a tool to back us into paying for every little feature. So forgive me for being a dum dum and not giving in and enabling these services that aim to nickel and dime.
No one is saying that you should pay for every little feature.
This whole thread is about a service which, in my opinion, is worth that $10 (or $5 for the standard plan) when its results are way better than the alternatives and, as the business plan is clear, it doesn't sell you to third-parties.
And obviously, I don't assume that the same people above who suggest self-hosting SearXNG are in remote third world countries, because economically the price is on par with it. (Yeah, yeah, "But muh $5/mo vps can do it!" You manage that and keep up with it and see how you like it just to save those nickels and dimes.)
Search was never free. And we're talking about just $10.
ITT: People who haven't tried Kagi.
Edit: Not shilling, Google just doesn't do what I need/want anymore.
What is ITT?
In This Thread.
Thanks!
You’d know if you looked it up on Kagi ;)
Sometimes the results are things I regret looking up. Like yesterday I looked up CSAM rather than asking and now I've got that in my search history. At least I looked it up on Kagi and not Google!
Edit: I'm not even sure if Kagi keeps a user history. I think they might not.
It’s a setting you can toggle off or on.
Sweet. I guess I will use that for a month or two and then reevaluate.
Oh nice! That's cool.
Pay for search? There should be another approach… at this rate will be paying for every single thing we do on internet and navigating properly would require a bunch of money .
You are already paying everywhere with your attention and your time by watching ads, it's just been normalized to the point of you not realizing it.
And if you're using an ad blocker, that's effectively piracy.
It's either this or ads or selling your data
Oh, there's a third way.
Like DuckDuckGo & Qwant for example. Just have sponsored ads unrelated to you, or ads related to the specific search only (Without detailing your actual search terms to the one buying the ads) and selected companies in such "store" articles results.
I said it's ads or selling data - it can be any combination of those 3 factors
User choice in the form of multiple tiers would be ideal. I might or might not pay to remove non-creepy ads depending on how they’re presented.
Yeah, I want to pay some sort of tax so that I can afford all of this stuff. Patreon this, patreon that, pay email, pay for search, I'm not made out of money
Who wants to celebrate by gifting me a year? Good news though as the prices were pretty ridiculous overall. I think I’ll stay on the $5 plan as I seem to be hitting ~170 searches a month ATM.
Tough to go from free to $10/month without any obvious to me improvements, as much as I’d like to support the cause
Have you tried it? At least for me, I often get better results compared to google. Also Kagi has a free trial of 100 searches.
Granted I'm a developer, so my job is basically just searching for information, so getting better results is really valuable for me.
Totally valid. For me the killer feature is being able to change the weights for various sites, making it so websites with content that's not useful to me or I don't like don't appear^[e.g. apple.com, facebook, nypost, quora], pinning websites that I consider best-of-class for their relevant searches^[e.g. wikipedia, the ffxiv wiki], and prioritizing websites I do like, but aren't always the best answer^[e.g. opencritic, speedrun.com, cbc, w3schools, github].
They also have a "Lenses" feature that lets you make your own search lens (like I have one for Lemmy-only results), but I've not really had much use for those.
The regex redirect feature is another massive pro. I hope they bring it into Orion as well.
I already use Stop the Madness for this, and probably will continue to as it’s a more global solution, but having it built right into the search engine at least shows they’re taking real steps to hand control back to the user.
Oh ya I use that as well, to turn Youtube results into Invidious, reddit into web.archive.org/save/, twitter into nitter, tiktok into proxitok, and AMP results into normal articles. It's nice because, since I use kagi on my phone, it reaches where extensions don't normally.
I'm pretty sure there are browser extensions that already do this for you on Google. You can do it manually on each search but that's obviously cumbersome. But browser extensions are basically what you're describing and still free
There's literally not. For blocking, sure, but not changing the behaviours of your search algorithm.
Oh so I'm just imagining this? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe
It literally lets you construct a blacklist so those sites don't show up in future search results.
This one has been around for over 5 years.
I wonder if you even read my comment? Also chill, there's no need to condescend over a search engine lmao.
Yeah you're right. I only read up to the part about blocking sites and got excited to share my knowledge. Sorry.
I appreciate the apology ♥
There's the 5$/month option available if you don't search more than 300 times a month.
It has a free trial. If you don't see the improvements, don't pay.
It's cheaper to just run SearXNG instance. People claiming any new search engine is better than established ones are hallucinating with their anecdotes.
How easy is it for an average Joe to set up their own SearXNG instance?
It appears a bit more difficult than setting up the original Searx. I've been poking around in the code for SearXNG lately because I'm planning on migrating to it but haven't done any serious work with it yet.
I posted this further down the thread, but I'll put it here so it's more visible in case the discussion is interesting.
According to this source, DuckDuckGo makes ~$0.0027 per search from ad revenue. Kagi @ $5/300 searches is ~$0.01667/search, or >6x higher than DDG's ad revenue. So is the overall value proposition from Kagi >6x higher than DDG?
Or to put it another way, for ~$5/month, I can get unlimited VPN through Mullvad, which if I'm not mistaken is quite a bit more resource intensive than search per added customer.
So $5/month for 300 searches, or $10/month for unlimited is a tough pill to swallow, especially when I have no guarantees that they're not also selling my data. If they were a nonprofit, I'd trust them a bit more and just chalk the higher cost up to limited scale, but AFAIK they're private so they have little incentive to reduce prices as they get more popular.
So I'm skeptical.
I've been paying $10 per month for 1000 searches for a few months now and had no plans on cancelling. This unlimited change makes it even better. Not being constantly frustrated by poor search results trying to sell you stuff or influence what you're looking for is worth the money.
I search way, way more than 300/month. I'm also not paying $10/month AND give my search history to a company that I made transaction with.
the 300/month is for the 5$ plan? possible "fair use"-like hidden limits aside, the 10$ sounds unlimited
from their front page they claim that "We do not log or associate searches with an account", and their privacy page is fairly detailed
Businesses like this always end up veering towards changing privacy policies to the worse.
And depending on your threat model, not even a good privacy policy is enough.
Are you more content with instead giving your search history to a company whose business model isn't as transparent?
@narwhal Anyone recommending self-hosting searchx instead
Correct. Same dum dums complaining about the proce are there ones buying $12 lattes/day.
For some, money is tight, and there are already so many subscriptions available for premium service. Many of those are solutions to combat forced enshitification. The Internet is too powerful of a tool to back us into paying for every little feature. So forgive me for being a dum dum and not giving in and enabling these services that aim to nickel and dime.
No one is saying that you should pay for every little feature.
This whole thread is about a service which, in my opinion, is worth that $10 (or $5 for the standard plan) when its results are way better than the alternatives and, as the business plan is clear, it doesn't sell you to third-parties.
And obviously, I don't assume that the same people above who suggest self-hosting SearXNG are in remote third world countries, because economically the price is on par with it. (Yeah, yeah, "But muh $5/mo vps can do it!" You manage that and keep up with it and see how you like it just to save those nickels and dimes.)
Search was never free. And we're talking about just $10.
ITT: People who haven't tried Kagi.
Edit: Not shilling, Google just doesn't do what I need/want anymore.
What is ITT?
In This Thread.
Thanks!
You’d know if you looked it up on Kagi ;)
Sometimes the results are things I regret looking up. Like yesterday I looked up CSAM rather than asking and now I've got that in my search history. At least I looked it up on Kagi and not Google!
Edit: I'm not even sure if Kagi keeps a user history. I think they might not.
It’s a setting you can toggle off or on.
Sweet. I guess I will use that for a month or two and then reevaluate.
Oh nice! That's cool.
Pay for search? There should be another approach… at this rate will be paying for every single thing we do on internet and navigating properly would require a bunch of money .
You are already paying everywhere with your attention and your time by watching ads, it's just been normalized to the point of you not realizing it.
And if you're using an ad blocker, that's effectively piracy.
It's either this or ads or selling your data
Oh, there's a third way. Like DuckDuckGo & Qwant for example. Just have sponsored ads unrelated to you, or ads related to the specific search only (Without detailing your actual search terms to the one buying the ads) and selected companies in such "store" articles results.
I said it's ads or selling data - it can be any combination of those 3 factors
User choice in the form of multiple tiers would be ideal. I might or might not pay to remove non-creepy ads depending on how they’re presented.
Yeah, I want to pay some sort of tax so that I can afford all of this stuff. Patreon this, patreon that, pay email, pay for search, I'm not made out of money
Who wants to celebrate by gifting me a year? Good news though as the prices were pretty ridiculous overall. I think I’ll stay on the $5 plan as I seem to be hitting ~170 searches a month ATM.
Just who the hell do they think they are?