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How a start-up built the search engine of the future — and then died (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by noodlejetski@geddit.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kagi boasts about not spending money on marketing and I think that's a little bit of PR bs, a little strategic, and a little because they probably don't have a ton of money for it.

Strategically, it let's them grow more organically, through word of mouth, and probably in a more long-term sustainable way.

I just started paying for it and I am so amazed at the quality of search results. I haven't done a ton of A/B testing versus Google or bing but I've noticed that it's a cleaner interace and I get to results way faster. I'm genuinely shocked too, because ecosia or duckduckgo always had me going back to Google to actually get the answer I needed 50%+ of the time. Those other searches just had shitty results. Kagi hasnt let me down at all. The results are either on par or vastly superior to Google.

I will say that I more apt to check more results before I refine the search terms because they technically "cost". Which is hilarious because I do the 300 search tier and I doubt I'd hit it. And if I did it's literally a penny for additional searches. Just thought that was an interesting observation I made about my search habits.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The question most people will want the answer to: how much is Kagi?

Free trial account has 100 searches. That's it.
$5/month gets you 300 searches. Each search is 1.5c afterwards (which works out to $4.50 for 300 additional searches).

They state that most people use Google 3-4 times per day, or 90-120 times per month.

$10/month gets 1,000 searches, 1.5c per search afterwards.
$25/month gets you unlimited searches. You can pay a year up front for a 15% discount, ie $255 per year - which is still more than double the annual cost of the $10 per month plan.

Edit: Crunching the numbers, ~~if you had the $10 plan you would need to make 10,000 searches every month for a year for the $255 annual unlimited plan to make sense.~~ (255-120)/0.015 = 9,000 additional searches at 1.5c each.

Edit2: No wait I completely fluffed the maths. You would need to make 9,000 additional searches over the year, 21,000 total over the year or 1,833 searches total per month, for the $255 annual plan to be better value than $10 per month.