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How a start-up built the search engine of the future — and then died
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Same, would have definitely checked them out. Sounds like they did a really bad job at getting the word out there that they even existed.
I've been using duckduckgo instead of Google for a few years now and love it. I've gotten used to the shortcuts in it now and probably couldn't go back if I wanted to haha
Kagi boasts about not spending money on marketing and I think that's a little bit of PR bs, a little strategic, and a little because they probably don't have a ton of money for it.
Strategically, it let's them grow more organically, through word of mouth, and probably in a more long-term sustainable way.
I just started paying for it and I am so amazed at the quality of search results. I haven't done a ton of A/B testing versus Google or bing but I've noticed that it's a cleaner interace and I get to results way faster. I'm genuinely shocked too, because ecosia or duckduckgo always had me going back to Google to actually get the answer I needed 50%+ of the time. Those other searches just had shitty results. Kagi hasnt let me down at all. The results are either on par or vastly superior to Google.
I will say that I more apt to check more results before I refine the search terms because they technically "cost". Which is hilarious because I do the 300 search tier and I doubt I'd hit it. And if I did it's literally a penny for additional searches. Just thought that was an interesting observation I made about my search habits.
The question most people will want the answer to: how much is Kagi?
They state that most people use Google 3-4 times per day, or 90-120 times per month.
Edit: Crunching the numbers, ~~if you had the $10 plan you would need to make 10,000 searches every month for a year for the $255 annual unlimited plan to make sense.~~ (255-120)/0.015 = 9,000 additional searches at 1.5c each.
Edit2: No wait I completely fluffed the maths. You would need to make 9,000 additional searches over the year, 21,000 total over the year or 1,833 searches total per month, for the $255 annual plan to be better value than $10 per month.
Ecosia is similar to DDG but maybe better. Personally for me, I like that Ecosia gives you the option of Bing or Google for maps, while DDG just dumps you into Apple Maps. Ecosia uses the same tags, eg !g for google, but they also do stuff with trees or whatever.
Ecosia's search itself is through Bing, just like DDG.