Welcome to Kagi, the paid search engine full of surprises, which today opened an account in the Fediverse!
@kagihq is the very interesting project for a paid search engine, without tracers and with an accuracy in identifying results such as to exclude all Google spam.
Those who believe that #Kagi’s costs are too high, should reflect on a small detail: if Google lets all those searches be done “for free”, who pays those costs? The answer might seem simple: “advertisers”.
Yet this would be an incomplete answer: like saying that rain is caused by clouds!
In reality, those costs are paid by users, by being milked and letting Google extract their “value”, a bit like in the human farm in Matrix…
We first heard about Kagi on the @lealternative website (unfortunately, since then the prices have increased a lot, raising many doubts about the sustainability of the project) and recently Cory Doctorow also talked about it on @pluralistic
In any case, we are really happy that a service like Kagi’s, effective and respectful of users’ privacy, has landed here in the #Fediverse.
I subscribed to the lower tier for a while, but I kept running out of searches early on every month, and the price of the higher tier is just not excusable. So I found myself adding the !ddg bang most of the time to avoid spending my Kagi quota.
And as good as Kagi is, it’s still primarily a meta search engine, organizing results from the dominant actors. So it’s not like the price is justified by them having to crawl the entire web themselves. Their own crawler, Teclis, is currently small web only and can probably best be described as an interesting project.
Instead of making search cheaper or more affordable, they spend subscription money on creating AI services and various other non-search distractions. Maybe that’s good for some people, but I don’t want that shit. I just want a good search engine at a justifiable price. And for that, sadly, Kagi fell short.
For me, it took me several months to use the 100 trial searches. Paying $5/month for like 20 searches isn’t worth it for me. Also just not into getting more subscriptions… wouldn’t matter if it was just 50 cents/month for the basic plan. If they had one-time-payment no-expiration option like 1000 searches for $10, I’d probably lean towards getting that.