Tough to go from free to $10/month without any obvious to me improvements, as much as I’d like to support the cause
Totally valid. For me the killer feature is being able to change the weights for various sites, making it so websites with content that's not useful to me or I don't like don't appear^[e.g. apple.com, facebook, nypost, quora], pinning websites that I consider best-of-class for their relevant searches^[e.g. wikipedia, the ffxiv wiki], and prioritizing websites I do like, but aren't always the best answer^[e.g. opencritic, speedrun.com, cbc, w3schools, github].
They also have a "Lenses" feature that lets you make your own search lens (like I have one for Lemmy-only results), but I've not really had much use for those.
The regex redirect feature is another massive pro. I hope they bring it into Orion as well.
I already use Stop the Madness for this, and probably will continue to as it’s a more global solution, but having it built right into the search engine at least shows they’re taking real steps to hand control back to the user.
Oh ya I use that as well, to turn Youtube results into Invidious, reddit into web.archive.org/save/, twitter into nitter, tiktok into proxitok, and AMP results into normal articles. It's nice because, since I use kagi on my phone, it reaches where extensions don't normally.
Have you tried it? At least for me, I often get better results compared to google. Also Kagi has a free trial of 100 searches.
Granted I'm a developer, so my job is basically just searching for information, so getting better results is really valuable for me.
There's the 5$/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.
@narwhal Anyone recommending self-hosting searchx instead
300 searches per month for 5 USD sounds a bit expensive. That's about 10 searches per day. Sometimes I have had to try four or five variations of a search query to find what I am looking for on Google. Having to worry about exhausting a paid search quota sounds a little bit nerve-racking.
They now offer unlimited searches for $10/month.
ITT: People who haven't tried Kagi.
Edit: Not shilling, Google just doesn't do what I need/want anymore.
Sweet. I guess I will use that for a month or two and then reevaluate.
Oh nice! That's cool.
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