This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Neeva!
Jesus Christ, that was the biggest find for me in the last year, and the biggest blow to my online life, when it failed.
What's the worst is that it wasn't the cost of the subscription that ruined it. They simply couldn't reach enough people to build a required fanbase... Damn...
I've heard good things about Kagi, if you're willing to risk having your heart broken again.
I’ve seen that name pop up a few times. I should give their 100 free searches a try. The 1.5 cent / search fee seems reasonable enough.
That being said, I find it a bit of a stretch the way they try to reason their value add.
. . . Google generating USD $11 revenue per user per month. However the value you receive is well below USD $11 because your results are influenced by ads. Choosing to subscribe to Kagi means that while you are now paying for search you are getting a fair value for your money . . .
Kagi. This is the name I haven't heard for long time...
So, what's the story?
If you have macOS* (Edit: read on, their search engine is cross-platform, my bad duh), they have a browser built on top of the Safari technology (WebKit), but actually even more performant than it, with the extremely, extremely neat feature that they ported most Firefox and Chromium Extension APIs on top of that WebKit tech, meaning you get basically all of the world’s extensions available to you – even Safari ones!
Other than Orion (name of that browser), Kagi is also offering a paid search engine which I have to admit I still haven’t tried out, whoops… I should really get around to doing that, but the thing is, I use duckduckgo, my current primary search engine, only somewhat rarely…
*Supposedly also coming to other platforms sometime in the future. I’m rooting for them!! And planning to buy the Orion+ upgrade, too. They deserve it… I really hope their financing is somewhat stable and secured.
Damn, I’d never heard of Neeva. A shame that they closed down, reading this had me wanting to switch.
I think you'd like Kagi (Also paid). It's similar to Neeva though not using their own index but their search quality is really good along with their AI
Same, would have definitely checked them out. Sounds like they did a really bad job at getting the word out there that they even existed.
I've been using duckduckgo instead of Google for a few years now and love it. I've gotten used to the shortcuts in it now and probably couldn't go back if I wanted to haha
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.
The question most people will want the answer to: how much is Kagi?
They state that most people use Google 3-4 times per day, or 90-120 times per month.
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.
Ecosia is similar to DDG but maybe better. Personally for me, I like that Ecosia gives you the option of Bing or Google for maps, while DDG just dumps you into Apple Maps. Ecosia uses the same tags, eg !g for google, but they also do stuff with trees or whatever.
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.
"You almost can’t overstate how dominant Google is in search. Most studies put Google at about 90 percent of the global search market, and that number has been steadily climbing for 20 years. Google is the default search engine in almost every browser, on almost every device. We don’t search the internet; we Google it. Bing and Yahoo are the second and third largest players, and when was the last time you Binged or Yahooed anything? "
what the heck year was this written. Is yahoo even still in business?
from a quick Yahoo search:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/
As of March 2023, online search engine Bing accounted for 8.23 percent of the global desktop search market, while market leader Google had a share of around 85.53 percent. Meanwhile, Yahoo's market share was 2.44 percent.
holy crap. I can't believe they beat out duck duck go or even brave or ecosia.
They bought tumblr remember?
honestly I thought they were subsumed by aol.
Someone on the Fediverse introduced me to:
I love it. Thank you whoever shared this with me.
This just seems equivalent to e.g. bing's AI search. The only thing that stands out to me are the names of their investors, not the product - they're not advertising themselves as privacy-respecting, for example.
Can you recommend a Bing based search engine that works comparably? I've used DDG and it's ok, not great. (I compare most search engines to Google of 10 years ago, which was wonderful.)
Sorry, can't say that I have anything specific to suggest that hasn't already been mentioned in the comments! As the original article shows, getting a search experience that's good, privacy-conscious, and financially sustainable is evidently extremely difficult. If big tech companies continue to implode it might get a little easier to compete though.
Fuck, I would have used this and this only, if only I'd have heard of it :(
Fuels my hate for google even more.
That's a surprisingly well written article.
The Verge has been increasing in quality lately, unlike every other news source
The Venture Capital giveth, the Venture Capital taketh away.
The Venture Capital giveth, the venture capital taketh away.
that first link looks promising, I do hope they'll be able to maintain long-term financial stability
