The $10 plan gives you unlimited searches. The $25 plan has additional features like AI. For comparison, OpenAI charges $20/month for premium access to ChatGPT, with free accounts being rate-limited, and not having access to the latest model. And of course all ChatGPT users have their usage tracked.
I haven’t signed up for a paid plan yet, but I’ve been using the free plan (which has limits on searches and AI use) for a little while now and it seems pretty good. It’s not a slam dunk, since I found myself going back to Google a couple times and getting better results there. But it seems pretty good overall, and the FastGPT chatbot has been consistently giving me better results than Bing Chat.
If you believe Kagi’s privacy statement, they are not logging your searches, and the account is only used to track membership. I don’t like the idea of being logged in either, but it’s something.
I will likely revert to duckduckgo or something similar for incognito search, personally.
Paying for web site access is a hard pill to swallow, but I’m afraid the time of reckoning has come. I’ve been part of the problem for decades, using sites and services that are, by their ad-supported nature, misaligned with my interests. Google’s dominance has ruined not only the quality of searches, but the quality of journalism and other content across the entire internet, since the primary goal of anyone trying to make money on the internet is to get at the top of Google results. This is why you can’t find a cookie recipe without scrolling through some absurd human-interest story. It’s why you can’t read news articles without clicking through slideshows. It’s why you can’t find pretty much any meaningful product reviews without researching it like it’s a goddamn dissertation.
The poison of advertising has seeped into the groundwater of the internet. I hope that in time we can reverse the damage. I don’t know if Kagi’s business model is the way forward, but I’m damn well sure the status quo of advertising and user tracking is not.
bugsmith@programming.dev 1 year ago
Well, the reality is, search costs money. Quite a lot of money it seems.
So that is either paid for by you, or by someone else. Nobody is going to run search as a charity. So it’s going to be paid for by parties interested in paying for your attention.
Even if you run ad blockers or use meta search engines like searx, you are going to be finding results by companies that have paid to be there.
I am a heavy search user. My search quantity is reasonably large just from personal use (I’m a curious dude, what can I say?) but my professional use of search as a software developer is staggering some days. My anecdotal experience is that that Google search has been declining in quality for years, and especially over the last two or three. DuckDuckGo is a nice alternative for privacy (potentially), but I while I find myself feeling less in a walled garden with them, I don’t actually find their results to be any better than Google’s.
I have tried Kagi recently. So far, I really like it. I genuinely feel like I get good results (read: find something quickly that is relevant to what I searched). I love their lensed searches that let you search the indie-web, and I love that they let you add weightings to websites that you trust.
Is is expensive, no doubt. But for a certain audience that relies on quality web search, prefers to not be walled in by paying search engine optimizers and values paying for a product rather than opting to be the product, Kagi offers a solution.
Having said that, I would love to see the cost come down and make it more accessible to the many and I appreciate that for most people, the “free” search engines are good enough.
Blizzard@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
I see all your points and fully get it. I just naively wish something new will pop up by popular demand, some breakthrough idea out of the box, like some kind of open source search engine supported by p2p network or federated instances where everyone would contribute resources. If such demanding projects like operating system or social media can be open source then I don’t see why search engine couldn’t be.
HKayn@dormi.zone 11 months ago
I have a feeling that you mainly wish for something that you can use for free.
Reality is, money needs to come from somewhere. It will either come from you, or someone who might have different motivations than you do.
Blizzard@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
That’s not reality, that’s a mindset promoted by corporations for the last decade. How much do you pay for using Lemmy, Linux, Mastodon and other FOSS?
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I wonder how big the database needs to be for useful search, and how much new data is added every day. Is this something that could realistically be run locally or widely mirrored?
hayalci@fstab.sh 1 year ago
Nope, not realistic for “mirroring”. Federated could be possible, but I wouldn’t have high hopes about (good) latency and coverage.