What's the best paid search engine?
-
Kagi is my absolute favorite.
Sounding off as another kagi user. It's great. If the company doesn't do anything extra stupid or come out pro-techno fascist they'll have my business for life.
If for no other reason than to decrease my digital footprint, get rid of ads, and pay billionaires less.
-
I think you'd be right that the direct cost of running the crawler and index would not be the issue. But fighting SEO to keep your results decent is probably a cost that dwarfs the basic technical cost of running the crawler and index.
And you'd need a technical security team on top of things as link farms aren't your only risk, I'm sure there are countless ways to manipulate the algorithm to put your site on top that Google probably have multiple teams working on fighting it full time.
Many of these things would likely not be a problem for a startup, though. No one is paying SEO firms big money to get into a search index no one has heard of and hardly anyone uses, so these costs probably grow exponentially over time as you become more well known.
-
I think you'd be right that the direct cost of running the crawler and index would not be the issue. But fighting SEO to keep your results decent is probably a cost that dwarfs the basic technical cost of running the crawler and index.
And you'd need a technical security team on top of things as link farms aren't your only risk, I'm sure there are countless ways to manipulate the algorithm to put your site on top that Google probably have multiple teams working on fighting it full time.
Many of these things would likely not be a problem for a startup, though. No one is paying SEO firms big money to get into a search index no one has heard of and hardly anyone uses, so these costs probably grow exponentially over time as you become more well known.
Yeah, and on the smaller / earlier side of a theoretical search engine company, google offers their api for free. I think this is actually another one of the biggest contributors to why nobody has tried to make a new search engine with their own index. Why waste hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware, and even more on personnel costs, when you can just have google do it for you instead?
-
Yes offering everything for free to prevent competition has been a surprisingly effective strategy for Google.
-
You can pay me and I'll setup a searxng instance for you if you want.
Or just use the free ones, mine is here
Kagi is the only paid search ive heard of but its more of a AI company that just happened to have a search engine as their most successful product. Consider reading this before switching to them: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Wow! Your search engine is fast. Nice layout, simple, clean. I really like it!
So we can use your magic?
-
ALL HAIL KAGI
Everyone should be aware of the fact that Kagi supports Russia by buying Yandex index API. They excuse themselves with neutrality. Well, DuckDuckGo for some reason took the L and dropped them after the Ukraine invasion, so make your own conclusions here. I think it's easy to come up with all sorts of justifications for your actions and I cancelled my sub a couple of months back. They do have a decent product, though but it's also pretty expensive.
-
Everyone should be aware of the fact that Kagi supports Russia by buying Yandex index API. They excuse themselves with neutrality. Well, DuckDuckGo for some reason took the L and dropped them after the Ukraine invasion, so make your own conclusions here. I think it's easy to come up with all sorts of justifications for your actions and I cancelled my sub a couple of months back. They do have a decent product, though but it's also pretty expensive.
Bummer. Yes it is kind of spendy for what you get . 5 dollars doesnt cover my searches for a month.
That really sucks because kagi was so good at finding content that wasn't typical ad spam and slop. Oh well.
-
It's French and free.
By free, I assume you mean that you pay with attention for advertisements? Or is it donationware or something else?
-
I feel like there are probably some ad based search engines which are privacy and service oriented, but in general even for those there remains a misalignment problem. Hence if I don’t want to be a product now or in the future, what good search engines are there that I can pay for?
Non-targeted ads and funding from investors, as far as I can tell.
-
Everyone should be aware of the fact that Kagi supports Russia by buying Yandex index API. They excuse themselves with neutrality. Well, DuckDuckGo for some reason took the L and dropped them after the Ukraine invasion, so make your own conclusions here. I think it's easy to come up with all sorts of justifications for your actions and I cancelled my sub a couple of months back. They do have a decent product, though but it's also pretty expensive.
What a way to morally stand up to one evil while supporting a greater evil. Google and Microsoft are complicit in the Israeli genocide, like they're not just American companies, they provide resources, infrastructure, and intellectual support for the genocide and apartheid systems. But you have no problem with DDG using them, right?
Just be consistent.
-
What a way to morally stand up to one evil while supporting a greater evil. Google and Microsoft are complicit in the Israeli genocide, like they're not just American companies, they provide resources, infrastructure, and intellectual support for the genocide and apartheid systems. But you have no problem with DDG using them, right?
Just be consistent.
And what do you think Kagi uses? They rely heavily on the same Bing and Google. If you played around with them you will see most of their searches are identical to what you would get if you did a bing search and then follow up with a google search, you're not getting much more.
The fact of the matter is that there are only 2 real choices of search engines. Google and Bing. There's a massive gap between them and every other independent search index. -
And what do you think Kagi uses? They rely heavily on the same Bing and Google. If you played around with them you will see most of their searches are identical to what you would get if you did a bing search and then follow up with a google search, you're not getting much more.
The fact of the matter is that there are only 2 real choices of search engines. Google and Bing. There's a massive gap between them and every other independent search index.wrote last edited by [email protected]I didn't push for Kagi... You're spilling out my point though
I'm just saying that saying "use DDG because it doesn't use a Russian company's search engine" while ignoring that DDG uses objectively more evil companies is stupid.
-
Bummer. Yes it is kind of spendy for what you get . 5 dollars doesnt cover my searches for a month.
That really sucks because kagi was so good at finding content that wasn't typical ad spam and slop. Oh well.
I do some dev and linux stuff and I still found it a bit hard to justify the cost. Like it's not a bad deal, however i did find myself going through days not really using it properly and just doing simple searches like "product x documentation" or just "site:" searches that i can do with simply DDG or Ecosia (Google). I think it's cuz a lot of the internet is converging into larger sites rather than being scattered all over and i do find myself relying a lot more on LLM's. If you actually test out their search results you will get something like 97% there if you do a Google search and a Bing search to follow up or just use searx.
What has helped me completely stop using them is finding sites with valuable information for my use case and creating a manual "lens" something similar to what Kagi offers. It's really simple and works better than theirs. I have this pasted into my obsidian note for linux (example):
site:archlinux.org OR site:endeavouros.com OR site:reddit.com/r/arch OR site:reddit.com/r/archlinux OR site:reddit.com/r/endeavouros OR site:manjaro.org OR site:reddit.com/r/hyprland OR site:hypr.land
Everytime i search for anything arch linux related so i paste this in and enter the search phrase at the start.
I use t3.chat for my LLM needs (you get way more for the price that you pay, including premium models) so I don't need their LLM's. I havent found LLM web
search to work well for my use case so don't need that.I use DDG as my daily driver and then switch to Ecosia (google wrapper) if i cant find stuff. DDG is a nice search engine overall, fills in that "gap" left by Kagi.
I use zen browser and have created search engine keywords like @ecosia, @ddg, @wolfram so i can CTRL + T and "@ecosia search term" easily.
Overall, I feel like they're not offering anything groundbreaking but their whole package is nice, i see the appeal especially if you browse on mobile. Whether you find them useful or not will depend on your use case. For those 10$ + tax I personally don't. The Russia support is disgusting though.
