this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month | Kagi Blog (blog.kagi.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by HKayn@dormi.zone to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.

Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:

  • Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
  • "Lenses", which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
  • All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type "!yt" in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
  • Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more

This blog post goes into full details about Kagi's capabilities.

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[–] dan@upvote.au 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better

Providing the service is not free, especially something like search that uses a LOT of storage and compute power to index websites. That's very expensive to do. There's two options as to how to pay for it:

  1. Pay for it yourself (like what Kagi is doing)
  2. Have someone else pay for it for you. For example, advertising like what Google and Bing do

The latter is what people mean when they say "you're the product". The advertisers are the customers.

self-host a searx instance

Two totally different things.

Searx is a search engine aggregation service. It is not a search engine itself, and you still need the backend search engines to make it useful. Searx could use Kagi though.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

Kagi doesn't index, it's Google results as a proxy. That's literally what Searx does, and it's free. The issues you said with needing to pay for search is solved with Searx even if you claim it doesn't, it does. Also other search engines like DDG does a crawler + bing results is funded by ads, they're profitable. The mental gymnastics to pay for a shitty service makes no sense to me, but you do you if you want to support this terrible practice. Not to mention the numerous other issues I listed that you ignored.

Searx could use Kagi though.

Lol that makes no sense, and it probably violates Kagi's ToS. You're running a self hosted proxy through a service that's just a proxy for Google results. Just set Searx to search Google for the exact same thing.

"If you aren't paying for something, you are the product" sounds nice, but isn't true. Advertisment can exist and you can still not the product.

Instead it somehow makes more sense to pay for a privacy invasive search engine that requires a login, requires cookies, and doesn't work in private search.

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