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jesterraiin 51 points 3 years ago

Neeva!

Jesus Christ, that was the biggest find for me in the last year, and the biggest blow to my online life, when it failed.

What's the worst is that it wasn't the cost of the subscription that ruined it. They simply couldn't reach enough people to build a required fanbase... Damn...

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noodlejetski 22 points 3 years ago

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whynotzoidberg 14 points 3 years ago

I’ve seen that name pop up a few times. I should give their 100 free searches a try. The 1.5 cent / search fee seems reasonable enough.

That being said, I find it a bit of a stretch the way they try to reason their value add.

. . . Google generating USD $11 revenue per user per month. However the value you receive is well below USD $11 because your results are influenced by ads. Choosing to subscribe to Kagi means that while you are now paying for search you are getting a fair value for your money . . .

source

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jesterraiin 6 points 3 years ago

Kagi. This is the name I haven't heard for long time...

So, what's the story?

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zzz 7 points 3 years ago

If you have macOS* (Edit: read on, their search engine is cross-platform, my bad duh), they have a browser built on top of the Safari technology (WebKit), but actually even more performant than it, with the extremely, extremely neat feature that they ported most Firefox and Chromium Extension APIs on top of that WebKit tech, meaning you get basically all of the world’s extensions available to you – even Safari ones!

Other than Orion (name of that browser), Kagi is also offering a paid search engine which I have to admit I still haven’t tried out, whoops… I should really get around to doing that, but the thing is, I use duckduckgo, my current primary search engine, only somewhat rarely…

*Supposedly also coming to other platforms sometime in the future. I’m rooting for them!! And planning to buy the Orion+ upgrade, too. They deserve it… I really hope their financing is somewhat stable and secured.

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stirkenbok 32 points 3 years ago

Damn, I’d never heard of Neeva. A shame that they closed down, reading this had me wanting to switch.

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procrastinator 13 points 3 years ago

I think you'd like Kagi (Also paid). It's similar to Neeva though not using their own index but their search quality is really good along with their AI

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enu 8 points 3 years ago

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

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cybersandwich 8 points 3 years ago

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TWeaK 4 points 3 years ago

The question most people will want the answer to: how much is Kagi?

Free trial account has 100 searches. That's it.
$5/month gets you 300 searches. Each search is 1.5c afterwards (which works out to $4.50 for 300 additional searches).

They state that most people use Google 3-4 times per day, or 90-120 times per month.

$10/month gets 1,000 searches, 1.5c per search afterwards.
$25/month gets you unlimited searches. You can pay a year up front for a 15% discount, ie $255 per year - which is still more than double the annual cost of the $10 per month plan.

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.

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TWeaK 3 points 3 years ago

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.

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PhelanWulf 21 points 3 years ago

To anyone interested: Kagi is a great alternative!

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dan 17 points 3 years ago

Kagi is so expensive. $5/month for 10 searches per day, $10 for 34/day. A staggering $25/month for unlimited searches.

I gave it a try after it came up a couple of weeks ago. It’s quite good, but it’s not that good. Its better than DuckDuckGo, it’s a bit less overloaded with seo spam than google, but it hasn’t found anything that I haven’t been able to find with my usual method - a combination of mostly DDG with smatterings of Google and a lot of adding “reddit” to searches.

I would pretty happily pay $5 a month for a single search engine that did everything, but I just use search too much so I’d have to keep my existing multiple search engine approach or pay loads.

I think it’s too expensive.

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TWeaK 4 points 3 years ago

I crunched the numbers in another comment.

Supposedly $5 for 300 searches a month is enough for most people - they claim on average people use Google 3-4 times per day, or 90-120 times per month. However, when you phrase that as 10 searches per day you can easily imagine that you might go over your 300 per month every now and then.
Additional searches are 1.5c each, or $4.50 for 300 searches.
$10 gets you 1,000 searches per month. 1c per search if you use them all.
$25 per month is unlimited, but you get 15% discount if you pay a year up front - $255.
You would need to make 1,833 searches a day with the $10 per month plan for the $255 annual plan to be worth considering.

I agree that it's too expensive. The fact that their individual search rate is cheaper than the lowest tier monthly search annoys me. Then, the only way to get less than 1c per search is to make more than 21,000 searches a year on the most expensive plan.

If I could share my account across a family or a small business, that might make sense, but otherwise it's asking a lot for only a small improvement over the competition.

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dan 4 points 3 years ago

Fair enough. I must say I didn’t even consider the per-search payment option - I just assumed it would be abusively expensive to encourage committing to a monthly fee, but clearly not! Thank you for demonstrating that so comprehensively.

That’s better but it still means I’d be using multiple search engines just so I don’t rack up costs indiscriminately. And honestly if I’m paying to use it that seems unnecessarily inconvenient.

$5/month for 100 searches per day (or something high enough I’d be unlikely to hit it when using it as my sole search engine) and I’d be totally willing to switch. As it is it’s just too expensive.

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TWeaK 2 points 3 years ago

Yeah I mean even $5 for 400 would be ok, that's like 1.25c per search, and more likely to be something you don't tip over accidentally some months. That would still fit in with $10 for 1,000 - so long as you make 800 733.3 searches a month it's better definitely value.

Right now, at 1.66c per search ($5 for 300), you would need to make 600 searches for $10 to be better value. However, in the $5 plan you'd pay less after 300 searches (1.5c each), so it's actually 633.3 searches to break even, under the current price plan.

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Dave 3 points 3 years ago

There are blog posts but basically these guys don't have investor funding, need to cover costs, and the cost structure is representative of their costs.

Running a search index is expensive, it's honesty pretty amazing a company of this size can manage it.

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Magister 3 points 3 years ago

what about https://www.qwant.com ?

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CautiousBrowser 6 points 3 years ago

Honestly, I've been using it as my default research engine for a year and... I'm now manualy changing to Google everytime I'm REALLY searching for something.

Qwant results are generaly several steps below.

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TWeaK 2 points 3 years ago

May as well just use DDG or Ecosia, then use the !g tag any time you want to hop back.

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CautiousBrowser 2 points 3 years ago

Yeah I'll try these for sure! Thanks for listing them here. I wasn't aware of alternative search engines outside of DDG and Qwant.

Once again it's a shame i wasn't aware of Neeva, would have loved to at least give it a try (and probably pay for it). :(

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Very_Bad_Janet 19 points 3 years ago

Someone on the Fediverse introduced me to:

https://www.perplexity.ai/

I love it. Thank you whoever shared this with me.

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MHLoppy 6 points 3 years ago

This just seems equivalent to e.g. bing's AI search. The only thing that stands out to me are the names of their investors, not the product - they're not advertising themselves as privacy-respecting, for example.

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Very_Bad_Janet 3 points 3 years ago

Can you recommend a Bing based search engine that works comparably? I've used DDG and it's ok, not great. (I compare most search engines to Google of 10 years ago, which was wonderful.)

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MHLoppy 3 points 3 years ago

Sorry, can't say that I have anything specific to suggest that hasn't already been mentioned in the comments! As the original article shows, getting a search experience that's good, privacy-conscious, and financially sustainable is evidently extremely difficult. If big tech companies continue to implode it might get a little easier to compete though.

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HubertManne 13 points 3 years ago

"You almost can’t overstate how dominant Google is in search. Most studies put Google at about 90 percent of the global search market, and that number has been steadily climbing for 20 years. Google is the default search engine in almost every browser, on almost every device. We don’t search the internet; we Google it. Bing and Yahoo are the second and third largest players, and when was the last time you Binged or Yahooed anything? "

what the heck year was this written. Is yahoo even still in business?

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noodlejetski 11 points 3 years ago

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HubertManne 7 points 3 years ago

holy crap. I can't believe they beat out duck duck go or even brave or ecosia.

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RobotToaster 1 point 3 years ago

They bought tumblr remember?