Automatically redirect search query to other search engine when run out of credit

jason

We are doing this as a courtesy to the free user and is not something I would spend more time building (our resources should go building features that paid users want).

Vlad The post starts with "It will be quite annoying for users testing the service with $5", which would be the "standard" plan, right? I don't see how you concluded from there that this is a feature request for free users 🤔.

This said, I am a paid user and I agree with the request: I have seen many people online saying "I am ready to pay for my search engine, but not $25". You can try to convince them that they probably won't have to pay $25, or you can offer them this feature: "Just set your limit to $10 (or whatever you are willing to pay) and a fallback. After your monthly credit is used, Kagi will automatically redirect all your searches to your fallback until the end of the month".

Maybe that would help people get started, and for those who would need the "ultimate" plan but can't afford it, it allows them to support you up to the amount of their choice. I am maybe naive, but I believe that quite a few users try Kagi not because it's the best, but because they want to support your model (at least it is my case). Maybe you should not under-estimate that.

mumu

I agree with jason. I'm a paid user and found this because I was looking for a fallback after my $10 of searches is up for the month. I think Kagi's search results are the best out there and I support the model of paying explicitly instead of implicitly with my privacy for my searches, but I can't bring myself to spend more than $10 a month for search still right now. My hope is that by continuing to pay, eventually you'll be able to bring the cost of search down to the point that I can always use Kagi.

In the meantime though I'd love to fallback automatically to another better-than-Google engine of my choice once I run out of credit. I keep slamming bug queries and other random things at work into my browser's search/address bar out of habit. I'd rather that does something useful I've configured in Kagi vs needing to change browser settings on each device twice a month to default to something else until the next billing cycle.

Vlad

mumu Thanks for chiming in,. How would you imagine the UX/UI for this feature to be?

mumu

Vlad A setting in either settings/search or settings/billing to specify a fallback search engine if credits are exhausted. I probably would look for it in settings/billing, and expect it on the splash screen that shows up currently when you try to do a search, have no credits, and don't have a fallback set.

Vlad

mumu How would one specify a fallback search engine (given there are 20+ search engines out there?) Would you expect us to list them all?

MagicMouse

Vlad Rather than listing all possible options, perhaps there could be a small list of the most "popular" fallback search engines, followed by a box which would allow users to enter their own search string, like when defining custom bangs.

mumu

Vlad In general a select with 20+ items in it is not normally seen as a hard problem. How you solve it depends on your chosen design language. Personally I'd probably like a filterable select box with all 20+ of the common options alongside an option to define a custom search string for an option not covered (as MagicMouse suggested).

jason

To me the minimum viable would be to allow this "fallback bang". Then people can just learn to setup their favourite fallback.

If you want to add a list of popular search engines, why not. It may help some users, but on the other hand it is more work on your side to implement. Anyway I think that the custom bang is necessary. Users can learn to use it, or get help from the community.

Vlad

jason You can already just use !g , what would fallback bang do ?

Browsing6853

Now that we have hard limit spending, it would be interesting to set this fallback for when this limit is reached.

Vlad I think he means automatically adding a user-defined prefix like "!g " to each query.

Vlad

Browsing6853 We'd like to work on getting towards a future where we do not have a notion of included searches and pay per use. It seems that just adding !g if the user wants is easy enough if they do not want to pay for the searches on Kagi at the time. But automatically changing user queries or sending users to another search engine somehow does not feel right.

Browsing6853

Vlad I mean, there is already the hard limit. If the user reached it, they will just be stuck with the Kagi's website on every single search even though they don't want to give more money? It's not a good UX at all. If one day Kagi is unlimited for every plan, the hard limit spending won't make sense, which means you can remove it and the redirection bangs.

My suggestion now is for redirections to be an improvement and appendices of the hard limit spending.

Vlad

Browsing6853 How big of a problem is this in practice currently?

Browsing6853

Vlad Well, there's much less reason for a "search anxiety" if your searches will work completely even after spending all your search credits.

mumu

Vlad

In the meantime though I'd love to fallback automatically to another better-than-Google engine of my choice once I run out of credit. I keep slamming bug queries and other random things at work into my browser's search/address bar out of habit. I'd rather that does something useful I've configured in Kagi vs needing to change browser settings on each device twice a month to default to something else until the next billing cycle.

I'm not sure what you're looking for on how big of a problem is. As a paying user, it's quite annoying. I'm not about to collapse from consternation over it, but it's annoying and I frequently forget to use a bang when I'm out of searches, hit the wall of needing to pay more, and have to search again with a bang. If it happens enough in a given pay period I'm likely to switch my browser default to not have to deal with it. If that happens too many times I'm likely to stop giving money to Kagi because the eventual annoyance of my searches not "just working" when I want them to will override my desire to continue supporting a product with good values that shows a lot of promise.

Are there significant technical challenges to allowing users to configure some sort of fallback bang? Or is there a strong desire to force people to be confronted with the "you're out of searches, pay more" message many times a pay period once they're already paying users? I'm not following the resistance to the basic form of the feature that would satisfy (it seems like) most of the people who have come through this discussion, but I'd love to understand.

Vlad

mumu Simple answer is neither. It is just a matter of prioritization with a small team that is backlogged to 50x our size. We are going towards the future where $10/mo will have unlmited searches thus rendering this question obsolete which is the main reason we are reluctant to allocate rsources to it now.

Value7609

Steps to reproduce:
Use up all your free Kagi credits. And go to https://kagi.com.
There will be google and bing recommend as other places to search.

Expected behavior:
I'd expect from a search engine like Kagi, that exists because of search engines like Google et al. are not privacy friendly/powered by ads, to show other Search Engines like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, MetaGer, Searx, etc ... (See https://searchengine.party/) that at least to some extent try to be more privacy-friendly.

I don't expect, to not even show Google and Bing (as they are the major search engines), but at least some of the other search engines.

Image/Video:

Vlad

Value7609 There are over 50 search engines in the world. Whatever we put on the page, we will leave someone missing one they like (plus there is no space on the page to fit them). Furthermore from our perspective all of these other search engines are ad-supported and not really different from the standpoint of business model, so this is why we decided to use the two biggest ones.

Value7609

Vlad Sure, completely understandable, there is nothing really like Kagi and that's why I just started paying for it.

But Firefox at least contains DuckDuckGo in their selection of per default available search engines (The other search engines available in Firefox are Google, Bing, Amazon, Wikipedia), and DuckDuckGo seems to be the most common alternative to Google and Bing when it comes to privacy. In DuckDuckGo, you can at least disable the Ads in the settings, but this does not change that they are still ad-supported/funded.

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