This is a bit off-topic, but sadly, I have to agree. I AM a paying Kagi user, but the new limits have hit me extremely hard. I'm now paying twice as much per month and still almost hitting my monthly limit. I really don't want Kagi to go away but I think they have to adjust their prices if they want to keep thier customers around, me included
Same here. I was a customer for a long time and loved the service, but having to watch my “search spend” and constantly going over limits is really annoying. I ended up cancelling but I really wish I didn’t.
Personally I’d like to see an ad-supported, or partially ad-supported version that isn’t evil.
The way Google started out with relevant ads in the sidebar or a single relevant ad at the top is acceptable in my opinion if it means bring the cost way down for the end user and ensuring sustainability for the company.
I don’t think asking users to shell out $10, $20, $30 per month for search is a viable long term model that’ll ever appeal to the masses.
I'm not a Kagi user (yet) but I think you're missing the point.
In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you. The converse, just display a random ad, is not valuable to advertizers and they won't pay for it.
Equally, the kagi user base is so small that even if I -wanted- to put an ad on Kagi, I'd get very few impressions per month.
Lastly given that the user base is self-selecting as a group paying money not to see ads, my ads will likely get no clicks.
Thus, imo, you can be subscription supported, or ad supported but not both.
At least you'd want to track user language. There are many words that are spelled the same in different languages but have completely different meanings. Just one example.
>In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you.
I don't think so. Selling ads based on keywords in search terms has always been a viable strategy.
But you're right about Kagi's current user base. Selling yourself as an ad-free alternative and then introducing ads sounds difficult to say the least.
It matters to me because I believe the results are organically rated, i.e. nobody paid my search provider directly for top results.
With Google you become used to skip the first paid results that visually differ every so slightly — so much so that less technically inclined people, when I observe them, will click the paid results not knowing the difference.
I believe that, currently, Kagi is not building a profile of me based on my searches.
Basically, if I’m searching for something, and I’m not looking to buy something, the search is a lot more honest and a lot less stressful.
Ads on other sites can be adblocked, this is orthogonal; you can block ads on Google, but I just don’t trust that the algorithms are in my best interest, because I didn’t pay for anything.
How does any of that effect the fact that the results will probably be the same, taking you to the same page as bing or google, which in turn are ad supported?
Not really. Kagi weeds out those pretty well in practice. The results are mostly same as from Google, but the crap is removed and organic sites get a boost.
The only place where Kagi is mostly worse is figuring out that the query is actually about a specific place and results should point to a map. At least for me.
Which makes sense. There are no Kagi maps. It might be interesting to leverage OSM.
> Not really. Kagi weeds out those pretty well in practice. The results are mostly same as from Google, but the crap is removed and organic sites get a boost.
It doesn't do that because that's impossible. If you search for something that's in the news, you visit the news site retrieved by the search engine. That has no bearing on the fact that site will, most likely, be heavily ad supported, most likely.
> organic sites get a boost.
Sorry but I can't infer any meaning from that fragment. What is an "organic site"?
Please see their article [1] for details, before claiming something is impossible.
TL;DR: They check how many ads and trackers are on websites and punish those in the sorting.
Most of the useless websites are full of affiliate links, ads and tracking so they naturally get downgraded.
If you’re talking about a niche topic with only one result you obviously still get that one result, but I’d argue for most search terms the issue lies in ordering the very many results.
