Shareable demo link

Vlad

theothertom Great explaination, thanks. What happens when this link gets shared on Reddit? How to keep it simple while providing value to non-malicious use cases?

theothertom

That’s a good point about the sharing publicly - logging people in, then considering the link “used” when they perform a search could get complicated.
Perhaps what would be easier to work with would be a service similar to an URL shortener. So the flow is a bit like this:
Paid user creates a link
Link is something like trial.kagi.com/start?abcd
That page explains how the trail will work, and has a button that will POST a “start trial” request - which would then redirect to a regular session token URL for the trial account.

Vlad

theothertom That does not solve the problem of someone creating a link and posting it on Reddit? This is why we have accounts and authentication, as every search costs money.

theothertom

Ah, perhaps I wasn't clear with the thought - it's a "one-time" link, but with a bit of protection to stop things like virus scanners from activating it.
If I were to create a sharing link and post it on Reddit, the intention is that it would work, but only for whoever clicks it first.

Vlad

theothertom Frankly it gets too complicated. Perhaps at this point it may be easier to just send a three month gift card (which will be around $15 once we change pricing) to people you really care about?

theothertom

Yeah, that's fair enough - I've got no idea how complex something like this would be to implement (or how much value it would provide you).

Thanks for talking it through!

Vlad

theothertom My pleasure. Thanks for sharing your thought process.

briskroad1698

What about sharing just the result page? For situations like: "the search engine I've told you about has better results, look: [...]".

Vlad

briskroad1698 You mean share this search? https://kagifeedback.org/d/1148-shareable-demo-link/2

briskroad1698

Silly me. I didn't see that post somehow. Sorry for the noise.