Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

Tough to go from free to $10/month without any obvious to me improvements, as much as I’d like to support the cause

Totally valid. For me the killer feature is being able to change the weights for various sites, making it so websites with content that's not useful to me or I don't like don't appear^[e.g. apple.com, facebook, nypost, quora], pinning websites that I consider best-of-class for their relevant searches^[e.g. wikipedia, the ffxiv wiki], and prioritizing websites I do like, but aren't always the best answer^[e.g. opencritic, speedrun.com, cbc, w3schools, github].

They also have a "Lenses" feature that lets you make your own search lens (like I have one for Lemmy-only results), but I've not really had much use for those.
- The regex redirect feature is another massive pro. I hope they bring it into Orion as well.
  
  I already use Stop the Madness for this, and probably will continue to as it’s a more global solution, but having it built right into the search engine at least shows they’re taking real steps to hand control back to the user.
- I'm pretty sure there are browser extensions that already do this for you on Google. You can do it manually on each search but that's obviously cumbersome. But browser extensions are basically what you're describing and still free
Have you tried it? At least for me, I often get better results compared to google. Also Kagi has a free trial of 100 searches.

Granted I'm a developer, so my job is basically just searching for information, so getting better results is really valuable for me.
There's the 5$/month option available if you don't search more than 300 times a month.
It has a free trial. If you don't see the improvements, don't pay.
It's cheaper to just run SearXNG instance. People claiming any new search engine is better than established ones are hallucinating with their anecdotes.
- How easy is it for an average Joe to set up their own SearXNG instance?
- ….have you used Kagi?
  
  I’ve been mixing it, DuckDuckGo, and Google and the results so far have been rather competitive.

I posted this further down the thread, but I'll put it here so it's more visible in case the discussion is interesting.

According to this source, DuckDuckGo makes ~$0.0027 per search from ad revenue. Kagi @ $5/300 searches is ~$0.01667/search, or >6x higher than DDG's ad revenue. So is the overall value proposition from Kagi >6x higher than DDG?

Or to put it another way, for ~$5/month, I can get unlimited VPN through Mullvad, which if I'm not mistaken is quite a bit more resource intensive than search per added customer.

So $5/month for 300 searches, or $10/month for unlimited is a tough pill to swallow, especially when I have no guarantees that they're not also selling my data. If they were a nonprofit, I'd trust them a bit more and just chalk the higher cost up to limited scale, but AFAIK they're private so they have little incentive to reduce prices as they get more popular.

So I'm skeptical.

I've been paying $10 per month for 1000 searches for a few months now and had no plans on cancelling. This unlimited change makes it even better. Not being constantly frustrated by poor search results trying to sell you stuff or influence what you're looking for is worth the money.

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the 300/month is for the 5$ plan? possible "fair use"-like hidden limits aside, the 10$ sounds unlimited
from their front page they claim that "We do not log or associate searches with an account", and their privacy page is fairly detailed
- Businesses like this always end up veering towards changing privacy policies to the worse.
  
  And depending on your threat model, not even a good privacy policy is enough.
Are you more content with instead giving your search history to a company whose business model isn't as transparent?

@narwhal Anyone recommending self-hosting searchx instead

https://dalf.github.io/searxng/donate.html They also ask for donations to help improve code
Cheapest server is at around $5/month.
Maintenance, upgrades, DDOS protection and whatnot also costs money.
You're still only as good as Google results allow you to be.

Correct. Same dum dums complaining about the proce are there ones buying $12 lattes/day.
- For some, money is tight, and there are already so many subscriptions available for premium service. Many of those are solutions to combat forced enshitification. The Internet is too powerful of a tool to back us into paying for every little feature. So forgive me for being a dum dum and not giving in and enabling these services that aim to nickel and dime.

300 searches per month for 5 USD sounds a bit expensive. That's about 10 searches per day. Sometimes I have had to try four or five variations of a search query to find what I am looking for on Google. Having to worry about exhausting a paid search quota sounds a little bit nerve-racking.

They now offer unlimited searches for $10/month.

ITT: People who haven't tried Kagi.

Edit: Not shilling, Google just doesn't do what I need/want anymore.

What is ITT?
- In This Thread.
- You’d know if you looked it up on Kagi ;)

Sweet. I guess I will use that for a month or two and then reevaluate.

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Oh nice! That's cool.

Pay for search? There should be another approach… at this rate will be paying for every single thing we do on internet and navigating properly would require a bunch of money .

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- I understand and I agree. I tried it already and kagi is great. But I’m concerned about the amount of services we will need to pay in order to stay out of the eyes . I’m not sure if it’s the way.
- This is how we will likely end up paying for services AND STILL having our data sold. It's just the nature of capitalism. Businesses have to grow, and in today's world selling data is always the natural progression towards it.
  
  A parallel example is streaming services starting out as "tv but no ads and on demand!" or "just pay for the service and you won't see ads!" but now we are paying and there's still ads.
- Paying a monthly service fee to not have the company sell your data under the guise of “free” sounds quite reasonable.
  
  How do you know they don't make you pay and still sell your data to get even more profit? Because no company who said they're not evil was ever evil?
You are already paying everywhere with your attention and your time by watching ads, it's just been normalized to the point of you not realizing it.

And if you're using an ad blocker, that's effectively piracy.
It's either this or ads or selling your data
- Oh, there's a third way. Like DuckDuckGo & Qwant for example. Just have sponsored ads unrelated to you, or ads related to the specific search only (Without detailing your actual search terms to the one buying the ads) and selected companies in such "store" articles results.
Yeah, I want to pay some sort of tax so that I can afford all of this stuff. Patreon this, patreon that, pay email, pay for search, I'm not made out of money
This is so unfathomably misunderstood that I don't even know how to set you straight. You don't want to pay for things? Then you must do without or sell your personal data to advertisers or use subpar halfway-between-the-two-extremes services like DDG. There is no alternative. Nothing which costs money in the back is free and good in the front.

Kagi is for people who do not want to sell their personal data to advertisers, and who do not want to be tracked by advertisers, and who do not want in any way to support the big data-scraping ad companies that run the world by using questionable frontends. Yes, there is a way to avoid seeing ads and being tracked while using free services, and believe me, our browsers and systems are already set up that way, but we recognize that dodging these things is not a sustainable approach in the long run, and so we support paid, high-quality services like Kagi.

Just who the hell do they think they are?

Who wants to celebrate by gifting me a year? Good news though as the prices were pretty ridiculous overall. I think I’ll stay on the $5 plan as I seem to be hitting ~170 searches a month ATM.