Reduce number of searches for trial users

TyroneHelmsman

I think Kagi should reduce the amount of searches for its trial plan.

I understand that Kagi needs to convince new customers to subscribe to a paid plan, as Kagi is a paid search engine. I don't think the trial plan should be ceased completely. But I think 100 searches is too generous, especially since creating a new account is comparatively easy and doesn't require any verification. Some users could rather prefer to create a new account than pay for the service. This may ultimately increase the prices of other subscriptions in future.

I personally think Kagi should limit the number of searches for trial members to 20 or 30. Consider that there are still free example search results on the main page that anyone can check. Maybe adding more example search results would be a good idea.

carl

TyroneHelmsman Consider that there are still free example search results on the main page that anyone can check.

That's an interesting point. Maybe the example results could also be expanded to dynamically show queries that are trending and popular at the moment?

Prostagma

TyroneHelmsman So you want to reduce the number of free searches because of a few bad actors? What about the users who are simply trying out the service to check if it's good enough for them? I think 100 is the perfect amount for a trial. It gives them plenty of time to use the search engine and not have to think about every search they want to perform.

Those normal users are not going to make account after account to try and get around these limits. Requiring an email for sign up reduces the amount of people who would try and do that by a lot. So no, I don't think it's reasonable to reduce the number of trial searches in order to save Kagi some money. It would hurt the experience for the average person trying out the search engine by far too much.

Vlad

TyroneHelmsman We found that 100 is a nice round number that is easy to comprehend, simple and effective. There are a few bad actors but any sort of number will run into the same problem with the existing system.

A better problem to solve would be perhaps how to get more people to try Kagi. Appreciate the thoughts!

TyroneHelmsman

Prostagma No, I want to reduce free searches because 30 searches are more than sufficient to test Kagi. And as I mentioned before, there are various example search results offered for free to anyone. I think Kagi should increase the number of these example search results to multiple topics, maybe including trending queries, as @carl mentioned.

As a side effect, trial spamming would become less attractive for externals. To explain: the trial plan currently offers 100 searches and is free. The starter plan offers 300 searches and costs 5,00 USD. Creating a new Kagi account takes less than a minute and doesn’t require any verification (which I think is very good for other reasons). Hence, it is not far to seek that Kagi is attractive for trial spammers.

If the number of users not paying for Kagi is growing faster than that of paying users, the consequential costs will be redirected to the subscribers of starter, professional, or ultimate plans. This will ultimately cause higher fees for all paid plans, making Kagi even more expensive.

One way to deter trial spammers is to limit the number of free searches on Kagi. The effort of creating new accounts may outweigh the savings in this case.

Another option might be to offer a monthly recurring number of free searches (e.g., 30 searches/month). What doesn't seem logical at first sight (as a trial user would have theoretically more than 100 free searches over time) could make sense if you deliberate it further. I don't think that many potential customers will return on a monthly basis to use their free searches over and over again. They will likely either subscribe to a paid plan to continue using Kagi or stick with their primary search engine, as 30 searches are insufficient for most internet users. Well, at least that's what I think it would be. No guarantees. ,

Anyhow, that is, again, just a suggestion, and maybe I'm right, or maybe I'm wrong. However I would be happy to discuss this further.

Dumb

Too lazy to create a new account and see if this is already done or not but an easy way to prevent bad actors from abusing the trial system is to have people attach a card to the account before being able to use the free searches. A simple authorization charge will let kagi know if they have any funds on the card or not. There’s no real way to truly stop people from abusing the system other than not offering a trial at all but such measures may discourage some people at least.

TyroneHelmsman

Dumb Any form of user verification is an efficient method to reduce abuse. But it comes to the cost of users' privacy. As Kagi claims to be a privacy-respecting search engine, requiring user verification should be avoided. Therefore, Kagi should come up with a different approach to decrease the occurrence of trial spamming.

voltaire

Dumb Please don't require credit card verification for any type of user. It would be a nightmare in terms of user privacy.

The main thing I’d like to add is that we don't know if there's any abuse at the moment. Only the developers know. So unless there's, in fact, a significant abuse, there might be no reason to implement anti-abuse measures. Of course, such features may still be implemented proactively.

carl

Vlad A better problem to solve would be perhaps how to get more people to try Kagi. Appreciate the thoughts!

What do you think of my idea suggested above, where Kagi has a "trending searches" page? Clicking any of the trends would bring up a free example search for that query. If this is dynamically updated, it could turn into something of a front page of the web. It would heavily favour news searches, but isn't news also something that people do search a lot for?

Vlad

carl We prefer not to save any searches.

nichu42

Vlad Thanks for that! Only non-existent data is safe data.