This is great. This was one of things that I disliked about Lemmy, as being federated makes it harder to use external search engines.
I think that might be the final thing to make me switch from DDG to Kagi.
If Kagi were Free (as im Free Beer), Libre (as in Free Speech/Freedom) and Open Source, it were perfect.
But not only it’s not open source, but also it’s paid. I ain’t using nothing FLOSS.
And they use Yandex as part of their underlying search.
It’s five bucks a month and has a lot of functionality.
For only 300 searches, that’s 10 searches a day. I do probably 50 to 100 searches per day.
So, it’s really $10 a month.
I might pay $5 a month for unlimited but I’m not sure about that. Because, you know they’ll raise the price if they get successful enough. And, then it’s just a constant march to more enshittification.
They offer a genuinely good product and I think it’s important to support companies that sell a good product rather than their customers’ info.
I paid $5 for a couple of years but eventually stopped because I kept running out of searches after a few weeks. $10 a month for a search engine is excessive but 300 searches a month is too limiting.
why are you doing 50-100 searches a day? that seems high
I pay per search using their APi and my SearXNG instance, it’s like ¢0.03 per search which I capped to $5 a month, we’re currently on the 23rd of October and I owe them a whopping $2.03, I usually don’t hit that $5 limit.
I only wish they weren’t an American company.
So let me get this straight. Not only it’s closed source and SaaS but you guys are paying for your data to be stored on US based servers that are vulnerable to the patriot act? You’re paying for that privilege?
What do you use?
And they apparently contribute to Yandex.
Thought i remembered something problematic
As opposed to what exactly?
What ? This isn’t new. They have had this for years.
As a long time user… definitely had it for years.
New to one in 10k, or whatever (xkcd)
That doesn’t mean invalidate their comment. The title’s claim is false.
The title’s claim is false?
Does Kagi not have a Fediverse Forms search toggle now?
No, they don’t have it now.
Though they may again by the time your read this.Schrödinger’s Feature!? O.o
Came here to say the same.
I was gonna say I thought I remembered seeing that when I used kagi. Is enabling it buried in a settings menu? I don’t recall
Right there under the search bar on my setup at least.
Kagi calls them lenses, and there’s a bunch. You can change the default by selecting the current one (in my case below, “Small Web”)
Degoog has a Lemmy plugin
Is degoog any good?
I was self hosting searxng for a long time then after one of the updates I stopped getting results. A friend of mine told me about degoog so I switched and so far I like it. It has a lot of plugins and addons. I basically have it looking or feeling like Google used to. I was also able to incorporate my ollama instance for LLM summaries if I add a question mark in my searches.
How did you integrate ollama with it? That sounds like an interesting setup.
Others are saying its not new, but it is to me. Thank you for sharing OP!
I mean it can be a good share and also not be new
Which is why I commented in affirmation to be more wholesome and encourage more people to post about what new, to them, things they discover.
are they still giving money to brave
you can also find something similar in SearXNG
Yeah, and that one is FLOSS (Free [as in Free Beer], Libre (as in Free Speech/Freedom] and Open Source Software). So SearXNG >>>>> Kagi.
But are the results better?
I like what Kagi are doing, even though I don’t pay for their search engine. I’ve been enjoying browsing the Kagi Small Web portal recently.
Do y’all remember StumbleUpon?
You can easily selfhost a portal like that with wander or try one of these linked wander consoles.
That’s cool, thanks.
I’ve been a Kagi subscriber for 6 months and this is the first I’m hearing of the small web portal, so thank you!
You can also use marginalia, an open source small web search engine for this :)
That’s not new. They’ve had it for a long time now.
Kagi, who still pays money to Russia?
No, thanks!
Think of all the web services who still pays money to USA or Israel. If you want to moralize, at least don’t use a double standard of morality for the people you hate vs the people you venerate.
they’re a us company from palo alto…
The Russia thing is that they pay Yandex to use their results in addition to the other engines they use.
i also use yandex if i need to find something google doesnt find. Had good results with some pirated jav. I have no good thoughts about russia but i like to find stuff on search-engines.
kagi small web lens is honestly the best thing <3
That’s fucking awesome but the ranking is highly questionable.
I searched myself and a 4 upvote comment was the top thing.
I would have expected plenty of results from lemmynsfw given your username.
How many upvotes did the other results have?
56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, and 237
Oof.
That’s because 4 upvotes here is like 4k upvotes on that other site.
Sick
It’s too bad they require a subscription. I’ll never use this shit for this reason alone.
This attitude is why the internet is full of ads. Doing shit for free doesn’t happen on an empty stomach. I’d rather pay a fair price for software and services I use. I’m not saying anyone’s pricing is fair, just pointing out I don’t agree with this behavior.
I’d rather, and I do, donate to apps like Blender, LibreOffice, Wikipedia, and Lemmy, etc. Free to use for people who can’t afford to donate. I donate monthly to those because I use them a lot and I can afford it.
Sounds like we’re in agreement, great. Not everything can have that scheme but I support things as best I can, again as long as it’s fair. Affordability is different for everyone.
Not all people can pay anything (myself, for example). I’m with him, and Kagi isn’t FOSS too so it’s even worst.
Things should be not only accesible, but also affordable for all.
That’s not really my point, but for what it’s worth I don’t mind if I was paying for something and it allowed you to use it because you can’t afford it.
Nothing in life is free, someone’s paying for it. If I use a service, I think it’s fair for me to pay a fair price.
Naah. People actually paying for the subscription what drives it. YouTube was ad free backing the day. And when they allowed adds. It was intentionally to create an annoyance that they cooked profit from- so that when they offered a add free, they could ALSO profit from.
A one time fee, I understand. A monthly rate to use a web browser is shameful.
Most platforms usually start ad free and with no restrictions. That’s how they capture a chunk of the market. Then, once they have an established customer base, they typically introduce ads or a subscription so they can actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth the service runs on.
This is what YouTube, Google, and pretty much everyone did. It’s the standard play book.
One-time fees are not feasible for this type of business model. If the server costs are ongoing, meaning you have to pay for the user’s usage constantly, then you need to either constantly charge them too, take money out of your own pocket to subsidize it, or sell customer data to once again subsidize it. Nothing is free.
A one-time fee would have to be absurdly high (think hundreds of dollars) to take into account multiple years of usage, otherwise it’s too risky and you’re most likely losing money.
This mindset that subscriptions are all evil when hardware and bandwidth are billed to you every month/year is ridiculous.
Kagi at least is honest from the get go and never tried to trick customers into believing their service would be free forever. That’s what’s actually shitty behavior, when companies put out a product that they then enhsittify for the purposes of extracting profit.
Kagi was a subscription from the get go and told you that’s how they pay their bills, and in return you get the service they promised with no compromises. I’m not arguing whether the price is fair, but at least the business model is honest and doesn’t try to take advantage of me and my data.
At least make prices fucking progressive. If you’re under certain poverty threshold, you don’t pay anything. If you’re over that same threshold, you pay an amount equivalent to what you actually have, so you’re barely over the threshold, then you pay drastically less than the ones that have the more money.
Youtube also didn’t have a subscription option back in the day, and it also limited the length of videos you could upload. Things cost money to run, and something on the scale of Youtube costs a lot of money to run.
Now to be clear, I don’t pay for Youtube or watch ads, but that’s more because I object to directly giving Google my money with how much value they already generate just tracking and selling what browsing habits I am unable to obscure from them. If there was an option to pay Google $5-10 a month with the enforceable assurance that it came with absolutely no personal tracking and data collection, I would strongly consider it.
You would understand a one-time fee for an active, ongoing, online service?? I’m a fucking communist, please don’t make me defend capitalism…
Even back in the day, people would buy versions of software on disks and updates were limited. There’s a reason why the idea of perpetual licenses died hard and fast and every company everywhere either reneged or died.
I pay for Kagi. If they offered a “one-time lifetime purchase” I’d probably just stop because that would be a giant red flashing neon warning sign.
Why don’t you make an alternative without ads or subscriptions? I’d love to use a video platform as big as youtube without having to pay with money or my attention.
Quick question, how were you plnning to cover costs?
Aaah! So you weren’t around when YouTube was add-free for over a decade.
EDIT: it’s amazing how many people flock to defend the monetizing of YouTube and how they run their shit, yet so many people whine about how they monetized.
I wonder if they’re the same people.
Over a decade of running at a loss. That is only possible for companies, like Google, that are already very rich.
Actually that’s a quite typical time for tech start-up to break even. The whole time they’re funded by business angels.
But for some cases, the loss can be considerable, and still the “start-up” keeps finding investors. Ex: Uber, lost 30 G$ on over 14years before turning around. Or just look at all the AI pure-players companies right now.
It ran at a financial loss every year until more recently.
YouTube started with a lot of angel funding, which is why it eventually monetized in the way that it has
YouTube began as an angel-funded enterprise working from a makeshift office in a garage. In November 2005, venture firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million,[20] and Roelof Botha (a partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal) joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia and Artis Capital Management invested an additional $8 million in the company, which had experienced significant growth in its first few months.
Costs that they’re now paying for with ads and subscriptions. So I’ll ask again. What would you do differently?
I’d pay for it if their $5 a month tier wasn’t so limited
Same tbf. 5$ for 300 searches is so limited. I just checked my DDG history for the month and I average between 2500 and 3500 searches a month. I don’t even use it professionally, its just general consumer use.
Honestly I likely would pay for it if it was 5$ for 3k-4k searches. I would just swap to another engine for the remainder but, 1$/1k searches up to 10$ which moves to unlimited would be more than fine, even if they decided to remove the bloat like lens, and translation from the package. but they are likely hoping more people are not like me and will just pay the 10$ a month to have unlimited rather than just not use the service at all.
Especially considering how many other services that I get way more value of are not much more than the unlimited plan… I can have internet browsing for 10$ which i already have for free, or I can pay a couple $'s more and get a streaming service or a news site which contains content that I don’t already have access to.
I like the mentality but, it’s just not worth it for me for a non-essential service that adds nothing of value to me outside one less site harvesting my data.
Funnily I feel just the other way around ^^
Like, it’s only 10$ for something as fundamental as a search engine. It gives me way better results than any other engine I tried, and so far they kept their promise of making it better for me and not for some advertiser or data collector.
And then a streaming service wants more than that, is not as important in my daily life and chances are that the one thing I’d like to watch right now is on another service anyway.
Although I have to say, that recently I find the results not so good anymore. But I suspect that’s more to do with LLMs, because people just don’t communicate their troubleshooting anymore. So if I search “how do I get xy to work”, there’s just no quality content about it anymore, as people ask their LLM.
Ok sorry ignoring the rest of your comment but how do you do 2500-3500 searches a month? That’s 100 a day, and you explicitly excluded work related searching.
You’re doing a search every 10 minutes of every waking hour of every day, not including searches done for work. You barely have time to read what you are searching.
Why so many searches?
I hit about 1,250 searches per month on average. I once did 2K in a month.
Probably a good number of those are refinements on an initial search query. Like if I search for a movie title, but there are multiple that go by the same name, I’ll append the year the one I care about came out. Doing that it’s easy to get like 3–6 searches in a single minute.
Yeah at times I’ll do 1000 a month, but 3500 excluding work related seemed pretty big.
And if you’re doing that many searches and refinements, it seems the $10 a month should be more worth it.
But $10USD can be anything from a coffee to a week’s wages depending on where you are in the world, so I can understand different opinions on whether it’s worth it.
is it really that much? I search a lot about my current desktop, and some about my proxmox server. I also like to search about ongoing tech trends like currently ive done a lot of research on the current ps5 jailbreak.
I just went and checked my current month usage at the moment and You are right though with the average. For this month so far I’m sitting at 2209 searches, my daily range is 28-308 queries (if I search “duckduckgo” as the keyword) the majority of them are in the 40-90 query range. A good chunk of them falls into gaming questions and linux questions.
for fun I just checked septembers, page total is 2627 queries and ranges between 40 and 167 pages a day with an average of 87.56 a day
august is 2445 with range of 29-189 and an average 78.87
The average searches per user on Google is something like 30 a month lol. But I’m a 500-1000 kind of guy.
Depending on what I’m doing it can get higher, especially if I’m doing dev stuff.
I guess I’m just surprised that you do that many searches and think paying for search is a waste of money. Being able to customise search results (block Pinterest, have MDN ranked higher, rewrite reddit.com to old.reddit.com, etc) is easily worth $10 a month to me.
But as I said to someone else, $10USD can be a coffee or a weeks wages depending on where you are in the world, so it’s probably going to hugely sway people’s views on if it’s worth it.
Are you rephrasing searches often?
Not getting what you wanted the first time?
Because that’s a ton of queries.DDG gets to show more ads that way.
It might not be you, but part of the plan to make you run more queries.yea a lot of my searches are technical in nature so I need to reword them in order to have the right critera show. Like looking for a linux virtual display will require 3 different types of searches depending on how its phrased, and will try to show queries about vGPU setups or KVM which are not related to that type of virtual driver (but it technically could be). and sometimes it needs to be narrowed down to specifically your setup as well which adds more searches to it. Specific error codes such as CRTC errors require multiple searches until you can find the right code, gaming wikis and questions can be similar especially if its about more secretive parts of it such as easter eggs or secret endings.
The $5 a month tier is more than enough for me; I don’t think I’ve gone over the 300 queries a month in almost a year, and I feel like I search a lot. Those couple of times I have, all it means is starting a new 30 day period a little early. It’s painless.
Does this mean it’s effectively $0.0167 per search, and you have to buy batches of 300 searches, but they have an expiration date?
Basically, yeah
I always go well over 300. I search everything
I definitley search a lot in that case; I tried it for a few months and I think I hit the 300 cap after three weeks each month.
300 searches is ten per day, they aren’t that many. Most days I think I’d do less than that but then there are days that I’m looking for something specific and might do many times that.
It is definitely not something to use instead of bookmarks like most people use google.
Yeah, if you’re hitting the search engine to bring up YouTube instead of going to the site or something, probably the $10 a month tier makes more sense.
No one should have to pay to search the web. They’re as bad as all the other monetized bullshit.
It costs money to maintain software?
I Kagi’s case they are paying per search to connect to APIs to search other search engines and aggregate the results. They have a very real cost per search that isn’t only maintaining software.
Wouldn’t that be part of the “maintenance” cost? If I run an ice cream cart, I need to keep purchasing supplies to keep selling ice cream.
Technically yes I guess, but I would expect “maintenance” to refer to the cost of keeping the ice cream cart working and looking good, I wouldn’t expect the wholesale cost of ice cream to be in the “maintenance” column of my cart finances.
Sure! I mean, my point was this stuff costs money. Wasn’t meant to be as technically correct as possibly.
No, usually materials cost is tracked separately from equipment maintenance.
God dang people, maintenance is in quotes for a reason.
Wasn’t supposed to be as technically correct as possible. Meant to express to the original person that things cost money, that’s it.
Ahh. So you’re fine with all the ads on YouTube? Two and a half minutes of commercials every 8 minutes on streaming services? Unblockable ads on websites?
No, but if you DON’T want ads then they need to get money from somewhere?
I RARELY use YouTube
I block all ads from all sites on the internet.
I pay money to the fediverse hosting foundation because hosting software costs money. I pay creators to create content because creating content costs them time and if they are going to do that thing, they need money.
Ahh. So you’re fine with all the ads on YouTube?
No, that’s why I pay for YouTube too. If I wouldn’t use it as much that the price is worth it, I would likely not use it at all (besides the irregular link thrown over my fence ever once in a while).
You’re why there are ads.
I thinks it’s all the people and companies uploading thousands of hours of video every second. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason for the ads.
Im okay with it tbh. The everything must be free on the internet mindset is what led ads working its way in everywhere.
I think your first sentence is a valid opinion to hold, but I disagree that they’re just as bad when they’re very upfront about what you’re paying for. Google et all meanwhile don’t make it clear that they monitize user data unless you’re paying attention
tl;dr: you’re paying for search either way. A reliable and secure open-source non-profit would be better but I’d rather be paying directly than use a “free” service which extracts an opaque and invariably sinister cost in perpetuity.
No one should have to pay for anything. We have enough excess that a gift economy is entirely feasible. Convincing folks of that, creating new systems to realize the possibility, and shifting from our existing systems, are all separate and difficult tasks.
In the current system I do think an independently run organization funded by the public (likely via taxes but possibly via private donation) does make sense though. In lieu of that, or something better, there is no useful internet search without payment. Using free search engines means either someone else eats the cost (which may work for small/local communities but isn’t scalable without massive public funding and/or taxes) or the cost is subsidized a la surveillance capitalism and advertising.
Using free services run for profit extracts a cost that may be difficult to measure but there is no doubt it exists. When for-profit companies obscure that cost I am compelled to assume it is because they estimate I would not be willing to pay the asking price for their services.
Adjust this relationship to the magnitude of entire societies enveloped within, and seemingly dependent on, those services and the choice to personally decouple from that paradigm is an incredibly attractive option. I think, if one has the means, it may be ethically compelling as well (but that’s a different conversation).
I’d pay if it wasn’t based in the US.
Uruki presents itself as a European alternative to Kagi. They seem to have a different vision, however (no AI and just focused on a search engine). On the other hand, I didn’t try because I find the price a bit high for the little comfort it brings me, but it’s still good to test!
I have never heard of that before but, they have a really weird requirement for source release.
Source code will be made available to customers who have been paying for at least 12 months.
I don’t think I’ve heard of any software doing that before,
also I really don’t like how the “how do you know we don’t track queries” is basically referring to pay them to see the source code once you hit the 12 month req.
That being said I just tried the trial account on it, it is pretty cool. I like the anonymity feel to it, even if the UI isn’t super friendly.
Kagi is European. Not in the EU: they’re based in Serbia. But they are European.
The US address that’s associated with them is just their founder’s home address.
Same. If ecosia or qwant had subscriptions I’d probably pay for at least one of them.
Fair point.
I would pay, for my personal use. But a lot of the time I’m on my company corp network, on a company device. And I don’t mix that with my personal logins and personal devices.
Petition your IT for a subscription. Worst they can say is no right?
“Just use chatGPT.” -IT
I’m guessing you haven’t worked for a big company before.
Depends on the big company. Like the one I worked for had a budget for specific software requests. Nobody used it, so I could snack through all the stuff and try everything.
Same glitch back in the day at the university library. You could request books and they just bought them, because apparently nobody else ever requested anything. I requested all the books and they just bought them, happy to be of service.
They have a free tier with 100 searches! It doesn’t sound like a lot but I usually don’t cross it.
the free tier is a static 100 not a monthly 100 isn’t it?
The pricing page says limited to 100 total searches and 100 AI interactions with standard models. I read that as once you hit your total 100 you need to get a sub.
The page isn’t super clear but older update logs state they moved from a “monthly 50” to a “one time 100”
I don’t know for sure, but it seems to say “100 searches total”, which is pretty lame.
If it was 100 searches a month, or even 50, then I would certainly try it. But I’m not gonna go through the process of making an account and changing my habits just to do 100 searches one time.
I crossed it in a few days. Some people use the web pretty heavily.
