Ditto. My most recent example, I asked Google what the thickness of the Pixel 8 is including the camera visor, which was something not listed in the spec sheet since the official dimensions sneakily only list the thinnest point on the phone, not the thickest.
And Google proudly and confidently gave me the answer at the top ... but it was the thickness without the visor, something I already knew since that's in the specs everywhere. I looked through the other results lower on the page and nada, no correct answer.
So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top measured by some Android review site. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.
Sure, that's sample size=1 so probably not an accurate test, but still, to me it feels like Google sucks for anything but the easiest context searches where it works because it knows a lot of info about me like where I live and where I work so it can correctly deduct the context, but for other shit not related to me, it's like you're drowning in SEO junk.
> So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.
And the most annoying thing is, your phone will not. sit. flat. on a table, because the damn camera will always be unbalanced in height, which makes it an excellent attraction for feline companions. Tap on it and it wiggles. Tap harder, it wiggles more, and eventually the phone will fall to the floor, your feline will look at you with big round eyes and ask for f...ing treats.
I went today to a carrier showroom where they have the Pixel 8 on display to mess around with, and I though the reviewers were exaggerating, but that damn visor is nearly as thick as the phone itself. It almost doubles in height of the phone at that spot. The Pixel 7a next to it had a much much thinner visor despite sharing a similar design.
What the hell did Google put in that thing, lenses from the Hubble space telescope? It's not like they have a 100x zoom lens in that thing or a camera sensor so large it makes a Hasselblad wet itself. And that's before we get to the visible PCB screw heads poking through the OLED panel. On a phone that costs 600+ Euros.
I feel like Google is at least 5 years behind the competition when it comes to HW and industrial design. Or they just culturally as a company don't give a shit about HW, thinking their SW is gonna be the main selling point and the HW is treated like some last minute "who cares, just ship it, it's gonna sell anyway" afterthought.
Samsung phones can still be rooted, at least outside of the US (the only place I see complaints about is when people buy Samsung phones in the US from a carrier). It is a bit annoying though that you have to link your phone to a Google and a Samsung account and keep it active and connected to the Internet for at least 7 consecutive days because of Samsung's anti-theft system.
It's quite difficult to obtain EU SKUs for Samsung phones in the US, even without buying through a carrier. (If anyone knows an easy way to get them, let me know!)
This is honestly a terrible example even if it is completely valid. You can't even get Google to find the most basic possible content about, say, oranges, without it being some SEO ad-infested fandom.com page about fruit, let alone product specifications.
I know, I'm not saying it was scientific, I was just sharing an anecdotal mainstream search query which I though was very relevant today for me and maybe others as well and also not super difficult for Google.
In Bing I get nothing in the results, although I do get the written Copilot answer on the side:
The Google Pixel 8, announced in October 2023, has the following dimensions:
Height: 150.5 mm (5.93 inches)
Width: 70.8 mm (2.79 inches)
Depth: 8.9 mm (0.35 inches)
However, if we include the thickness of the camera bump, the Pixel 8 measures approximately 12 mm3. The camera visor itself is notably thin compared to previous Pixel phones, but the overall thickness accounts for the camera bump and other components.
In summary, the Pixel 8 is a sleek device with a slim profile, and its camera visor adds a touch of functionality without significantly increasing its overall thickness.
> Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing
I’ve been thrilled with Kagi. It’s the first time in over a decade that searching became fun again.
The Quick Answer feature (Kagi’s LLM) filters through SEO better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches, it’s cheap to try out (both for experience and if you actually notice the search limit).
The main problem with Kagi is that it's a paid service with no free tier.
I get their reasons for this, and it totally makes sense -- but that's also a big problem for their growth. I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
I agree, but it’s a good early filter for conversion. The difference in quality, for me and everyone I’ve gifted a month to, is stark enough to make paying for search for the first time worth it. Given the absolute cost (for the cheapest tier, paid annually, less than $50) it’s a psychological hurdle more than a financial one for most Americans.
Also, drawing those eyeballs from the ad-driven engines has a disproportionate effect on their marginal ad prices (in the long run). So if you need a sense of vengeance to get you over the hill, there you go.
If kagi saturates the market of people that can afford to spend $50/year for a decent search engine, then Google ads will only reach people that cannot. This would greatly reduce the value of their ad inventory (far more than the percent market share they’d lose).
If they can keep is sustainable and profitable without eat-the-world "growth", that's not a bad thing.
There are few consumer products that have held up against the competing demands of billions users in thousands of different markets and cultures. I'd say there's maybe even been none.
The kind of "growth" you're talking about is a bad but understandable habit among founders and cold financiers, but it's not a requisite part of running a business and generally runs counter to having a good product that serves a specific need well.
Frankly, I see this as a good thing. Maybe someone else will come along and solve the universal-search-engine-that-stays-good problem, but Kagi's best hope at being useful for me into the future is for them to stay where they are: tiny and used only by a small cohort of extremely savvy and skeptical geeks that aren't worth the effort to SEO-jack.
They just need to be sustainable—growing large would actually be counterproductive.
> I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
It's actually maybe ChatGPT et al. that have done most to warm me up to the idea. I've tried Plus for a few months, basically using it like better search. I don't think I'll stick with it mainly because it's a pretty steep cost (enough that I want to go back to not having it for a bit at least, see how much of a problem it really is) - but it does make me wonder if perhaps Kagi can get me a lot of the way for half the price (the non-LLM tier).
>> I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
A 'fact,' which, if true, makes little sense when you look at it from the PoV as a tool.
With real physical tools, if you only use it occasionally, get a cheap one. But when you use it all the time, it pays to invest in a quality model.
Considering the frequency even the n00best of tech normies of the world use a search engine it makes sense for everyone to obtain such "a quality model." Sadly, that doesn't mean everyone will do so.
[me: Kagi unlimited user since they did the pricing change a couple of months back]
To be fair though, I don't rent my physical tools. I don't pay £20pcm for access to a quality drill or whatever, I just bought it once.
I'm not saying that should be Kagi's model, obviously it does have marginal costs for my usage that Makita doesn't, I'm just saying the analogy doesn't really hold up I suppose.
I think I'd probably prefer usage based pricing, but I know a lot of people here at least would complain that it gave Kagi an inverse incentive to build a good (at finding information quickly and easily) search engine.
But do they need to grow to the size of Bing, Google or just DuckDuckGo? If they just want to grow a sustainable business, then it's a feature of their business model.
No I'm sorry. I don't mean "growth" as in infinite and unsustainable growth like VC-founded startups. I mean "growth" as in adopting a bigger market share.
But, again, do they need to? It seems to me like "market share" is a metric relevant to companies pursuing VC-founded, unicorn lottery-ticket scale. If they generate enough revenue to pay competive wages, cover their operating costs, and make a reasonable (real-world, not VC-world) return on investment, they're a gosh-darn success. It's only within tech, where valuations and evaluations sailed off into ZIRP-ified bizarro-world, that people think of that as a failure of ambition or execution. I think it's time to re-assess our mental models.
Why not? There are tens of millions of people who need/want a high quality search engine and can pay for it. Kagi deserves to be successful for having made a better search engine than Google. And their success can inspire other entrepreneurs to start delivering quality information products, so that maybe we can get out of this ad/scam fuelled quagmire once and for all.
Good products and ideas should be successful, that's progress.
> This is orthogonal to questions of morality and justice.
What?
If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures. Nobody owes anybody to keep a business running. So yes, it would die.
Sorry If I wasn't clear. But I think the question is pretty clearly stated in the post you responded to.
The question is: Does Kagi needs to grow to be sustainable, and if so, how much.
>If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures.
If you had a business that made you a $1 million per year profit, would you shut it down just because it wasnt growing?
Companies need to make a profit or they go out of business. However, most businesses don't need to continually increase users/ revenue to stay afloat. The coffee shop down my street is 100 years old, and didn't need to double in size every year.
I agree that nobody is owed anything. I also think that Kagi is "owed" or "deserves" tells us nothing about how many users they need to keep staff paid and the lights on.
> If you had a business that made you a $1 million per year profit, would you shut it down just because it wasnt growing?
Yeah, I would. We have to remember that these are guys who beat Google at their own game. They beat a company of a monstrous size and revenue at their own game. With that kind of capacity, I don't expect them to be satisfied with a million a year in profit to share. I expect them to go as far as they can.
If you're nobody special doing nothing special, then you can be happy with just needing to pay staff and keep the lights on. Like the coffee shop down your street, or my day job. But Kagi is clearly in a different category as a business.
Last I heard Kagi needs to grow a little bit more from current user base to break even.
Well if their goal is to make money, they haven't beaten Google yet.
Also, if you have a business that makes a million dollars a year and that's not enough, the typical solution is to sell it to someone else for 20 million or so instead of Burning It to the Ground
I don’t know what Kagi’s minimum sustainable size might be, but it’s probably bigger than what it is now. Particularly if they want to stay competitive with LLMs.
I suspect you're correct, and am rooting for them to hit sustainable, as soon as possible. I don't know what their maximum sustainable size is, either - that's equally important, though always a moving target. I only wanted to point out that neither inflection point, for a paid-service business model, has to do with "market share" - that's a VC thing, to which I'm increasingly allergic.
I didn't think I would. Then I tried it. Then I paid for the cheapest option because I really liked it. Then I paid for unlimited plan because I can't go back to crappy search after I tried the non-crappy one. And, thinking about it, why not pay for a good service? It costs less than cofee+pastry per month, and it improves the quality of my life. I think it makes sense. Some people may disagree, but as long as the service itself works, why would I care?
I know very few people who would pay for a search engine
If Google Search continues its downward trajectory, people will start to pay for Kagi or some other similar search engine. 10-20$ per month for unlimited search is nothing, at least in the western world.
You'd think so, and maybe that is indeed true for you. But I expected I would use several tens of searches per day, likely with some peaks over 100, but in the past 19 days I've only averaged ~15 per day, for a total of 291. The 300/mo plan wouldn't work for me either, but I don't blow past it as far as I would have expected.
Same, I finally gave up and tried it after Google just stopped being remotely useful, and DDG is just a reskinned bing. A week on Kagi and I signed up for an annual plan, and never looked back.
Something as basic as: "2,5 cm to mm" won't show up the unit conversion widget if it's not formatted as "2.5 cm to mm", at least for me. WolframAlpha also fails at this query. However, ChatGPT understands it and gives the right answer.
> Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing instead because of how horrible google results are.
Although Bing is generally OK at dealing with general queries, it's far, far worse at surfacing niche content, no? My non-commercial, hobby homepage fares reasonably OK on Google (although some queries are dominated by SEO spam). But on Bing, it ranks below a good number of spam websites, including ones that simply copied my content and serve it with ads...
Searches for "coronavirus" seem to be hard-coded, or interfered with. I get pages and pages of Covid-19 results, but that's not what I searched for. I even get a wikipedia link to its covid-19 page, but no wikipedia link to its coronavirus page within the first several pages of results.
In general, I find the same is true for all mainstream search engines, including DDG and Bing. You can't even search for things to buy anymore, ironically; it'll just dump you into Amazon or some "top 10" shitpost on CNN fake news or Forbes, much like the trash pit of websites shown in the header image of this article. Like others, I also find myself searching on Reddit or HN directly. What the point of a search engine is at that point, I don't know.
Even when the results are not sponsored, they're all generic answers from generic domains. I'm traveling at the moment and it's impossible to find anything written by someone in a 1000 km of the city I'm visiting.
How to use public transit? What to see and do? How to get an airport transfer? Here are machine-generated answers from myairporttransfers.com and copywritten posts from cheapairteavels.com.
The top 5 results (at least in the travel category) are written by copywriters across the ocean. It feels like a machine-generated average of the internet is not so bad.
I use the Azure GPT-4 offering. It's not always 100% correct, but for technical questions in areas I'm not very familiar with, it's close enough. I can get much more done in a given amount of time than I would have been able to reading docs and SO.
I know lots of people will point to examples where it's wrong, but I'd suggest trying it out yourself. If you're not intentionally trying to trip it up, it really works quite well.
Same. Done with Google search. In addition to the results having become useless, it's Google's frenetic sprint away from the "don't be evil" ethos, which turns out to have only been in Incognito mode all along.
On most searches, especially with my phone, the results are almost all sponsored and rarely what I'm actually looking for.
Google search has gone from being one of the best to being ask jeeves at it's worst.