All are welcome here. Even opinionated old geeks like me, who need a reminder to “dial it back” from time to time. 
1 Like
It is a pretty old rule: If you control the media, you control the crowd…
1 Like
Kagi went public (beta) today:
$10/month.
And that’s per user. It’ll be a while before there are family plans and business plans.
And now we we find out how motivated the privacy mavens really are. 
6 Likes
I hope it’s not just experts, but that everyone make use of privacy services, after all it affects all of us. I also hope this is just the first of many and we see a growing competitive market that helps keep private data private.
1 Like
Tried a few search results - very impressed with what has come back - seems very relevant and free of the usual suspect sites which clog up Google results.
That’s good news - privacy is important, but so is a service that actually works! I’ll need to try it some more to find out how effective it is.
Whether I care enough about privacy (ie $10pppm) beyond the steps I’m already taking remains to be seen, but privacy + better results may be a great proposition.
Anything is possible, but DuckDuckGo has only managed to capture 0.62% of worldwide search in the past 14 years. And it is free.
1 Like
And it’s based on their projected user base, with an explicit note that the pricing is basically tentative at this point.
If they don’t get large adoption numbers, the price will almost certainly go up.
1 Like
I’d be surprised that that would be a sustainable business model. My guess is that a service of this nature has a high elasticity of demand. I suspect a higher price would result in a large rapid drop in users; finding the breakeven price equilibrium point based on high elasticity will be a challenge.
3 Likes
I would tend to agree, but they’re the ones that called it out in the linked blog post above:
the price is experimental and may be subject to a change. If it does change, we will do our best to preserve the initial pricing option to everyone who becomes a paid member in the meantime.
It really doesn’t sound like they’re super-confident about the price point.
1 Like
Which is understandable as they’re the first launching in this line of business.
1 Like
Totally agree. I’m just noting that the $10/month, by their own notes, is far from a permanent (or even sustainable) price - so worth planning accordingly. 
I switched back to DDG today after the news, but I am already missing Kagi’s superior results. I can’t justify $10/m right now though.
I wonder, what “produced” this (for me) surprisingly high costs for a search?
Their API usage is heavy. They’re incurring per-search (or close to) costs on top of their infrastructure and staffing costs.
We use heuristics and deep learning to understand query intent, select the best information sources, query them directly using APIs, and rank the results. You can think of Kagi as a “search client,” working like an email client, connecting to indexes and sources to find relevant results and package them into a superior, secure and privacy-respecting search experience for you.
Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.
Teclis and TinyGem are a result of our crawl through millions of domains, focusing primarily on non-commercial, high-quality content. Our unique results help you discover some of the best content you can possibly find online, sometimes in the quieter places on the web.
And of course, we answer quick queries like “How far is the sun from the earth?” or “10kg in lbs” with our instant-answer systems that use dozens of sources and APIs, all connected to you quickly yet transparently.
So, they have to pay a fee for the use of those API?
What do you consider to be a sane cost per search?
Consider that every search either requires use of a third-party API / index, or owning all of the infrastructure that would be required to replicate that API / index in-house. I would imagine that either would be pricey for a small company.
just hypothetical : what if Google promises no data mining and no sponsored search results but charge for our search? How much we are prepared to pay? I guess with their massive infrastructure, their $/search cost will be cheaper than anyone else in the market
Are you suggesting that Google could offer a private search product?
If they asked us to pay the economic value that they’d lose by offering that option, take Google’s $200 billion or so in ad revenue, divide it by the number of people on the planet, then divide that by two (not everybody uses Google - but let’s say 50%), and you’d be around $5/month.
1 Like