Personally I’d like to see an ad-supported, or partially ad-supported version that isn’t evil.
The way Google started out with relevant ads in the sidebar or a single relevant ad at the top is acceptable in my opinion if it means bring the cost way down for the end user and ensuring sustainability for the company.
I don’t think asking users to shell out $10, $20, $30 per month for search is a viable long term model that’ll ever appeal to the masses.
In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you. The converse, just display a random ad, is not valuable to advertizers and they won't pay for it.
Equally, the kagi user base is so small that even if I -wanted- to put an ad on Kagi, I'd get very few impressions per month.
Lastly given that the user base is self-selecting as a group paying money not to see ads, my ads will likely get no clicks.
Thus, imo, you can be subscription supported, or ad supported but not both.
I don't think so. Selling ads based on keywords in search terms has always been a viable strategy.
But you're right about Kagi's current user base. Selling yourself as an ad-free alternative and then introducing ads sounds difficult to say the least.
They most certainly do not. Ads can be contextual for the search like AdWords was. Instead of selling their users they could sell their content.
Which thus leads to a value proposition for you. Would you pay 1.5c to have this search Ad free?
Personally I think the pricing model is presented incorrectly - it would be better to charge per search, with say a $5 minimum and a $25 maximum.
Why does it matter when 95% of the links you click on those results will carry a dozen adverts?
You are paying for a minor level of practical self righteousness
With Google you become used to skip the first paid results that visually differ every so slightly — so much so that less technically inclined people, when I observe them, will click the paid results not knowing the difference.
I believe that, currently, Kagi is not building a profile of me based on my searches.
Basically, if I’m searching for something, and I’m not looking to buy something, the search is a lot more honest and a lot less stressful.
Ads on other sites can be adblocked, this is orthogonal; you can block ads on Google, but I just don’t trust that the algorithms are in my best interest, because I didn’t pay for anything.
Then I find my result
That said. I have used Google less than 20x since subscribing to GPT4. AI killed Google for me and I've been using it for half my life.
The only place where Kagi is mostly worse is figuring out that the query is actually about a specific place and results should point to a map. At least for me.
Which makes sense. There are no Kagi maps. It might be interesting to leverage OSM.
It doesn't do that because that's impossible. If you search for something that's in the news, you visit the news site retrieved by the search engine. That has no bearing on the fact that site will, most likely, be heavily ad supported, most likely.
> organic sites get a boost.
Sorry but I can't infer any meaning from that fragment. What is an "organic site"?
If you’re talking about a niche topic with only one result you obviously still get that one result, but I’d argue for most search terms the issue lies in ordering the very many results.
Just because two things are on the computer doesn't mean their prices are comparable. Go to a bar and get a drink for $9 and you won't raise an eyebrow at the price, even though your VPN is immensely more useful to you. If you pay for parking downtown you won't write a comment on HN about it, even though you pay the same price for a couple of hours of parking as you pay for watching Netflix every evening the whole month. You get a meal in a restaurant for the same price as you pay for bed sheets that you use for hundreds or even thousands of hours.
Kagi is very reasonably priced for the quality of life increase the better search results give.
Of course, I would pay 2c per search! Or even 5c. Or maybe even 10c!
But, no, I’m not going to pay a lump sum up front. And certainly not every month through a subscription.
There are good paywall options out there that don’t eat into your % and that are effortless to set up. The user on the paying end doesn’t have to make a profile with the payment processor, either.
For a proof of concept, just look at Yalls.
Just to be clear: I know Yalls runs on the bitcoin "Lightning Network." I am fully aware that many HN readers don't see the use case for bitcoin yet. It is my firm conviction, if micropayments had existed earlier in the development phase of the internet, we wouldn't be flooded by adds today.
The Lighting network allows for such payments, as little as a fraction of a dollar cent.
Users don't even need to know or see that in the background you're running your payment rails over bitcoin. A wallet like BBW can simply show you a dollar amount, and when paying, all the uses sees is that he paid a few dollar cents.
I think that the current obstinacy or refusal to use the micropayment tools that exist today are holding us back and are keeping the world firmly in the grasp of Big Advertising.
And I get it: the market if flooded by nonsense "crypto" coins or nonsense NFT projects, that are obvious scams or money grabs. Numerous early websites were plain nonsense, and plenty of people thought that because of that, the Internet would go nowhere. Some pushed through though and saw the bright future behind the clouds.