[sph]

Good. I'm a paying user from day one, and I never used, nor want to see any AI features on my search engine. I'd use Google if I cared about any of that stuff.

Honestly, I just want my money to be used to improve good old match-keywords-against-index search.

[jasonvorhe]

Unless you append a question mark to your queries you're not going to interact with AI. Just don't use it. They're not forcing it down your throat. Cheering for people losing access to the service while paying the same price just seems wrong.

[wpm]

And on the other hand, I have the "end with question mark? That means you want AI" thing disabled. I am subsidizing the tokens other paying users are using far more than I am, which is approximately zero. Why should I pay for features I don't use?

[xigoi]

According to the Kagi team, customers who don’t use AI cost them more, so you’re not subsidizing anything.

[Affric]

I am interested in this claim. Do you have a link?

[xigoi]

https://kagifeedback.org/d/1338-provide-a-plan-without-ai-fu...

> A common misconception is that AI is more expensive than search. Opposite is true - performing a search is 100x-1000x more expensive than doing an interaction with AI.

> A single search is about ~ 1.5 cents (probably bit less these days, but general ballpark)

> A small AI model can generate a lot of tokens for the same price

> To put this in perspective, 1.5 cents of Gemini Flash usage:

> 50,000 input tokens ≈ 37,500 words (roughly 75-150 pages of text) or 6,000 output tokens ≈ 4,500 words (roughly 9-18 pages of text)

> That is A LOT of information for the cost of just 1 search.

> It may be counter-intuitive but that is how it is. If someone is using AI to answer common questions, learn about a concept, do a quick brainstorm or a translation - instead of searching - our cost is (much) lower.

> So if anything, having AI lowers our cost, not increases it. This is why when we added access to AI models to Pro tier we didn't increase the price.

[greatgib]

Doesn't make sense because AI responses are not grounded, still for AI to make sense in this context, and have any relation with Kagi purpose, you need to have the search still, and then the AI process the search results.

[Affric]

Makes sense.

Thank you.

[EbNar]

Well, good for you, I guess. But for the rest of us who use the Assistant this would be a net downgrade, AKA paying the same for less.

[digitalPhonix]

Wasn’t it also a free upgrade when it launched? They didn’t bump the price of their search plans when they added Assistant.

I wish they’d separated them from the start because I knew immediately that my subscription (where I don’t use Assistant) was going to subsidise subscriptions that do. Now I don’t know what the right thing for them to do is, given they’ve been marketing Assistant as a feature.

[fgonzag]

Same here. I'd definitely drop the subscription immediately, unless the assistant was super cheap, like $1 or $2 more which is the most I'd pay for kagi personally.

[genthree]

Is it any better than Google's or the one in DDG? Those things are wrong most of the time for questions that couldn't have been answered by looking at a few words in the summary of the very first search result anyway. I find they only save me time if what I was searching was so trivial that it doesn't matter at all if it's wrong ("How old is such-and-such actor?") and I didn't really even need to search it in the first place. Otherwise, if it actually matters, I still have to check the sources, because no matter how confident the answer looks, it's wrong way too often to rely on it.

(Gather 'round, kids: used to be, questions of utter trivia like the exact ages of actors or whatever didn't even take root in our minds in the first place, we didn't even feel the itch to answer them to begin with, because it was far more effort to answer them than it was worth, unless it was a topic you cared enough about to have a bunch of books about it on-hand, so such questions would usually fall out of our brains before we even consciously engaged with them. Our heads were a lot less noisy then. It was very nice.)

[EbNar]

I've never user Google or DDG assistants, tbh. My use for Kagi's assistant is for stuff related to work. I'm a university prof., so it "saves me a bit of time" while checking for errors in assignments, clarify concepts to explain to students and so on. I almost never use it to search for stuff.

[shaky-carrousel]

For the rest of us that deeply distrust and despise the anti-ethical and wasteful assistants is an upgrade.

[mpalmer]

You haven't thought too hard about it then; Kagi is (in part) looking to get better margins on its AI spend here.

[EbNar]

Friendly reminder that you're not forced to use it. "I despise soccer, so soccer should disappear".

[cardanome]

You still have to live in a world where LLMs exist and are based on the stolen labor of millions of people and are actively destroying the livelihood of people, our environment and democracy.

[EbNar]

Again, right now the assistant is entirely optional. Oh, summarizer and translate are base on the same models, by the way.

[TACD]

Soccer is not destroying the planet and making basic computer hardware unaffordable.

[EbNar]

You're looking at the finger and missing the Moon.

[willis936]

I think a more fair analogy is "I despise soccer, so the specific cable package I choose should not include it".

[card_zero]

I am interested in your manifesto

[torben-friis]

I happened to be checking out kagi just yesterday (as a first time costumer) and I can say the AI focus put me off it.

I was running away from the constant shoving of AI features by google, so most of their landing page advertising AI related stuff wasn't really selling it for me.

Totally anecdotal evidence, of course, but I'm sure I'm not the only one dropping off the funnel for that reason.

[sph]

My comment sounds negative, but for what it's worth, I still am a very happy user, and you can disable assistant/quick answer so it's never pushed on you if you don't care about it.

I just don't want Kagi to get enshittified. If everybody and their dog are focusing on AI, good-old search becomes a vanishing product space which definitely still has its place in the AI era, when you want determinism from your search.

[112233]

So how much Kagi without AI costs? It should me much cheaper subscription, right?

[mastermage]

hahahahaha as if.

[plutokras]

I’m also fine with the change. Claude is my go-to for research as the standalone app and shortcut are very convenient.

The Kagi team should focus on the core product; that’s what I’m paying for. I stopped being a ProtonMail customer once they began chasing side projects instead of polishing their actual offering. I hope Kagi doesn't go down that same route.

[chrisandchris]

That's fine for me - as long as the new subscription (Pro+AI) is the same price as it is now.

If they increase the prices, well then my Kagi subscription is gone and I will move on. I'm a happy user for noe but I think search wuality has gotten worse lately and I'm more often using the AI instead of search because search just does not bring any good results anymore.

[greatgib]

I agree with you for a general assistant but even if I'm also not interested to pay for an assistant there are 2 features that I like and bring a lot of value by default in my opinion: - if you put an interrogation point at the end of the query you have an AI reply based on the search query. - you can ask a question about that to investigate more.

[Apreche]

Exactly. Same as you I am just paying for search. I never used the assistant, and never will. Right now Kagi is good enough at search that it would be annoying to lose. But if I was forced to go back to Google I could survive by using adblock. I really wish Kagi would just put all their engineering efforts on search to make it so good that I couldn’t possibly live without it.

I don’t need a new browser. I don’t need a replacement for Google Maps, since Google Maps is actually good and Kagi will never even catch up to Apple Maps. I don’t need any AI trash.

Just have everybody work on the search engine to make it is faster, more reliable, and free of content farms or slop. That is the only reason I’m paying for Kagi.

[type0]

They could use AI is to remove web pages with AI generated spam content in search results. I don't know how accurate that could work. For technical blogs there should be a lens that ranks GPG signed articles higher, is that even possible?

[sph]

They're working on it: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

Discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716806

[petcat]

Can't AI sign their articles with GPG too though?

[imjustmsk]

Wouldn't a a feature to turn all AI features work? You can turn of all AI from Brave search and duckduckgo and for Google just use startpage.

[cyanydeez]

He's say splitting the pot for AI features reduces the value of improved search quality.

I'd rather that too. Kagi should try to curate like a Librarian and not some kind of oracle. They're not going to capture people with offering AI assistants. They will capture people by filtering out all the garbage places like Google throw into their results to get ad dollars.

[yunwal]

Why are people pretending that search and AI are unrelated things that distract from each other? They’re obviously compliments

[zapzupnz]

I think is because, whether intentional or not, Kagi wound up being aimed at (or sought by, either or) people who don't see these things are related.

I don't know if they're arrogant to consider themselves the main customer base, but I don't think it's an unfair assumption, either.

Kagi was almost advertised to me as what Google used to be. Again, I don't know if that's ever how Kagi put it themselves, but that's the impression that was given.