Technology

I also liked the part where they decided they don't need to pay the VAT.

I must have missed that, can you explain what you mean by that?

Which instance do you use? Or do you selfhost it? It has been hit and miss for me. Not sure if I’m doing it wrong

They tried various pricing plans although I forget if they experimented with both usage based and capped plans. Anything other than unlimited did not go over well with users. I had no desire to manage a monthly cap since my own daily usage varied so much. People had also become very conditioned to having unlimited search.

On the one hand yes but on the other hand this would also kind of set wrong incentives: to use Kagi search less because you'd need to pay more.
That's not an incentive they or you would want.

I think what I'd like is how my mobile carrier handles their data limits: It's not an entirely fair comparison because in that case, contrary to Kagi, there is no real cost associated with my degree of usage of the service, making them entirely arbitrary and unnecessary but besides that the unused data rolls over to the next month and that's something Kagi could mirror.

I hover around 600-1000 searches per month but sometimes exceed 1000. If I could pay for 1000/month and accumulate a little buffer in the months where I search less, that would work for me. Though perhaps I'd still want to just simply pay for unlimited usage for peace of mind.

They do. The $10/month search plan is unlimited.

The only LLM stuff in their search product is the quick answers which can be turned off and page summaries which you have to explicitly click on in a submenu in any case.

As someone aware of how limited LLMs are, I've actually found both of these features to be useful for gauging whether a site is worth visiting or not at times which is part of the core feature set of a search engine IMHO.

A good while back they claimed that Google search index fees make up the vast majority of their costs, so I doubt any of your money is going towards LLM BS unless you actually pay for their assistant product.
I doubt Google has given them any discounts since then.

I'd expect the development of all of their product to be mostly funded by VC. If they can get VC idiots who fell for the """AI""" hype to subsidise building an actually useful thing (the search product), that's a win in my book, even if they also have to build the AI crap on the side to keep said VC idiots happy.

Same for me. It's like going back to the dark ages.

Seems such a weird edge case to me. If I pay for a search engine you can rely on me using it as my primary search engine. And I search the Internet daily, and certainly monthly. So this change wouldn't help me at all

Are you referring to using Yandex?

I think they did explain that implementing turn off and on of specific engines per user is a complete rewrite of their querying system, so it is an expensive and complex change.

Removing yandex is OTOH not a great move as results in Russian language often come from there. Also morally I would generally agree, but then - especially now - you could argue about "giving money to US companies", and that means they need to shut down, they can't use bing, google, yandex.

I've been searching for an alternative search engine. Found Searx to be subpar.

Was thinking about Kagi, but if they work with the russians, that's an immediate no go for me.