I live in a country which uses a language I don’t speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).
Big fan of Kagi, though Bing chat is unironically very good for most of my needs.
Google has been worse than Bing for most of the last two years, but Kagi was working better for me than either for the last year. Bing chat is a whole different animal, though.
I had never heard of Kagi before; I’ll need to look into it.
I don’t think you can have a search engine that indexes the entire internet without monetization some direction: either as a set of eyeballs for an advertisement engine masquerading as a web search index, or as a subscriber. So, don’t be surprised they ask for money dollars! It’s ok if the maths don’t add up for you, though. For me, it’s nice being able to pay for something I use and know that that is the explicit relationship we have. I get pissy when it’s suggested as free but the cost is my attention, but maybe you don’t work that way and that’s ok too :D
I can completely get behind paying for a service if that means the service works and is better than all the other ones. I’ll at least try it out. Personally, I’d probably prefer if I could pay for a certain number of searches (like pay for a 1000 searches with 20 bucks) instead of the subscription model. I’m glad that there’s an ad-free search service though.
They were working toward adding some billing flavors like that but it’s unclear if it was like a prepaid cellphone or just a “for a sub you get X minutes a month” kinda deal (continuing the analogy). I’m grandfathered into the infinite searches that I’ve never used all that much of so I haven’t really paid any serious attention to it, just kinda peripherally somewhat-aware :)
Yeah, right now they offer 100 free searches and then 5 bucks a month capping out at 300 searches, along with other tiers. Would much prefer it to be more like a prepaid cellphone, and just buy searches… or maybe have the searches roll over to the next month lol. I’ll still try the free searches, but it would be nice to throw money at the thing instead of having the stress of yet another subscription service to remember to cancel if I stop using it.
I pay for Kagi annually if it helps. I get bogged down with the monthlys too. They also do a pay as you go for when you go over your plans limit: image of pay per use config
I understand that it’s a lot of work but I’m sorry, a starting plan of $5 per month is WAY to much. I’ll just use searxng.
Sure, if that makes sense for you go for it. To me, 60$ a year is a single pizza delivery, so it seems foolish for me to worry too much about it when it’s something I need consistent use of throughout the day, every day. I find a good search engine way more essential than a tv streaming service, so it really is a no brainer for me.
Edit: I also pay fastmail to host my email for me too, so I’m clearly not against paid-for services :)
True. I’m definitely not their target audience. SearXNG is great bc if configured right I get great results that aren’t too cluttered. I’d rather have it hosted by someone I can trust (a friend of a friend runs the instance I use) and not have to worry about it. I’m not against payed services but I do hate subscriptions except for when they’re truly necessary.