Same tbf. 5$ for 300 searches is so limited. I just checked my DDG history for the month and I average between 2500 and 3500 searches a month. I don’t even use it professionally, its just general consumer use.
Honestly I likely would pay for it if it was 5$ for 3k-4k searches. I would just swap to another engine for the remainder but, 1$/1k searches up to 10$ which moves to unlimited would be more than fine, even if they decided to remove the bloat like lens, and translation from the package. but they are likely hoping more people are not like me and will just pay the 10$ a month to have unlimited rather than just not use the service at all.
Especially considering how many other services that I get way more value of are not much more than the unlimited plan… I can have internet browsing for 10$ which i already have for free, or I can pay a couple $'s more and get a streaming service or a news site which contains content that I don’t already have access to.
I like the mentality but, it’s just not worth it for me for a non-essential service that adds nothing of value to me outside one less site harvesting my data.
Ok sorry ignoring the rest of your comment but how do you do 2500-3500 searches a month? That’s 100 a day, and you explicitly excluded work related searching.
You’re doing a search every 10 minutes of every waking hour of every day, not including searches done for work. You barely have time to read what you are searching.
I hit about 1,250 searches per month on average. I once did 2K in a month.
Probably a good number of those are refinements on an initial search query. Like if I search for a movie title, but there are multiple that go by the same name, I’ll append the year the one I care about came out. Doing that it’s easy to get like 3–6 searches in a single minute.
Yeah at times I’ll do 1000 a month, but 3500 excluding work related seemed pretty big.
And if you’re doing that many searches and refinements, it seems the $10 a month should be more worth it.
But $10USD can be anything from a coffee to a week’s wages depending on where you are in the world, so I can understand different opinions on whether it’s worth it.
is it really that much? I search a lot about my current desktop, and some about my proxmox server. I also like to search about ongoing tech trends like currently ive done a lot of research on the current ps5 jailbreak.
I just went and checked my current month usage at the moment and You are right though with the average. For this month so far I’m sitting at 2209 searches, my daily range is 28-308 queries (if I search “duckduckgo” as the keyword) the majority of them are in the 40-90 query range. A good chunk of them falls into gaming questions and linux questions.
for fun I just checked septembers, page total is 2627 queries and ranges between 40 and 167 pages a day with an average of 87.56 a day
august is 2445 with range of 29-189 and an average 78.87
The average searches per user on Google is something like 30 a month lol. But I’m a 500-1000 kind of guy.
Depending on what I’m doing it can get higher, especially if I’m doing dev stuff.
I guess I’m just surprised that you do that many searches and think paying for search is a waste of money. Being able to customise search results (block Pinterest, have MDN ranked higher, rewrite reddit.com to old.reddit.com, etc) is easily worth $10 a month to me.
But as I said to someone else, $10USD can be a coffee or a weeks wages depending on where you are in the world, so it’s probably going to hugely sway people’s views on if it’s worth it.
yea a lot of my searches are technical in nature so I need to reword them in order to have the right critera show. Like looking for a linux virtual display will require 3 different types of searches depending on how its phrased, and will try to show queries about vGPU setups or KVM which are not related to that type of virtual driver (but it technically could be). and sometimes it needs to be narrowed down to specifically your setup as well which adds more searches to it. Specific error codes such as CRTC errors require multiple searches until you can find the right code, gaming wikis and questions can be similar especially if its about more secretive parts of it such as easter eggs or secret endings.
Like, it’s only 10$ for something as fundamental as a search engine. It gives me way better results than any other engine I tried, and so far they kept their promise of making it better for me and not for some advertiser or data collector.
And then a streaming service wants more than that, is not as important in my daily life and chances are that the one thing I’d like to watch right now is on another service anyway.
Although I have to say, that recently I find the results not so good anymore. But I suspect that’s more to do with LLMs, because people just don’t communicate their troubleshooting anymore. So if I search “how do I get xy to work”, there’s just no quality content about it anymore, as people ask their LLM.
The $5 a month tier is more than enough for me; I don’t think I’ve gone over the 300 queries a month in almost a year, and I feel like I search a lot. Those couple of times I have, all it means is starting a new 30 day period a little early. It’s painless.
300 searches is ten per day, they aren’t that many. Most days I think I’d do less than that but then there are days that I’m looking for something specific and might do many times that.
It is definitely not something to use instead of bookmarks like most people use google.
Yeah, if you’re hitting the search engine to bring up YouTube instead of going to the site or something, probably the $10 a month tier makes more sense.
I Kagi’s case they are paying per search to connect to APIs to search other search engines and aggregate the results. They have a very real cost per search that isn’t only maintaining software.
Technically yes I guess, but I would expect “maintenance” to refer to the cost of keeping the ice cream cart working and looking good, I wouldn’t expect the wholesale cost of ice cream to be in the “maintenance” column of my cart finances.
Good thing I stopped there instead of also getting into the difference between repair maintenance (your car’s broken O2 sensor) and regular maintenance (fix an identified security vulnerability) then.
Ahh. So you’re fine with all the ads on YouTube? Two and a half minutes of commercials every 8 minutes on streaming services? Unblockable ads on websites?
I pay money to the fediverse hosting foundation because hosting software costs money. I pay creators to create content because creating content costs them time and if they are going to do that thing, they need money.
No, that’s why I pay for YouTube too. If I wouldn’t use it as much that the price is worth it, I would likely not use it at all (besides the irregular link thrown over my fence ever once in a while).
I think your first sentence is a valid opinion to hold, but I disagree that they’re just as bad when they’re very upfront about what you’re paying for. Google et all meanwhile don’t make it clear that they monitize user data unless you’re paying attention
tl;dr: you’re paying for search either way. A reliable and secure open-source non-profit would be better but I’d rather be paying directly than use a “free” service which extracts an opaque and invariably sinister cost in perpetuity.
No one should have to pay for anything. We have enough excess that a gift economy is entirely feasible. Convincing folks of that, creating new systems to realize the possibility, and shifting from our existing systems, are all separate and difficult tasks.
In the current system I do think an independently run organization funded by the public (likely via taxes but possibly via private donation) does make sense though. In lieu of that, or something better, there is no useful internet search without payment. Using free search engines means either someone else eats the cost (which may work for small/local communities but isn’t scalable without massive public funding and/or taxes) or the cost is subsidized a la surveillance capitalism and advertising.
Using free services run for profit extracts a cost that may be difficult to measure but there is no doubt it exists. When for-profit companies obscure that cost I am compelled to assume it is because they estimate I would not be willing to pay the asking price for their services.
Adjust this relationship to the magnitude of entire societies enveloped within, and seemingly dependent on, those services and the choice to personally decouple from that paradigm is an incredibly attractive option. I think, if one has the means, it may be ethically compelling as well (but that’s a different conversation).
I’d pay for it if their $5 a month tier wasn’t so limited
Same tbf. 5$ for 300 searches is so limited. I just checked my DDG history for the month and I average between 2500 and 3500 searches a month. I don’t even use it professionally, its just general consumer use.
Honestly I likely would pay for it if it was 5$ for 3k-4k searches. I would just swap to another engine for the remainder but, 1$/1k searches up to 10$ which moves to unlimited would be more than fine, even if they decided to remove the bloat like lens, and translation from the package. but they are likely hoping more people are not like me and will just pay the 10$ a month to have unlimited rather than just not use the service at all.
Especially considering how many other services that I get way more value of are not much more than the unlimited plan… I can have internet browsing for 10$ which i already have for free, or I can pay a couple $'s more and get a streaming service or a news site which contains content that I don’t already have access to.
I like the mentality but, it’s just not worth it for me for a non-essential service that adds nothing of value to me outside one less site harvesting my data.
Ok sorry ignoring the rest of your comment but how do you do 2500-3500 searches a month? That’s 100 a day, and you explicitly excluded work related searching.
You’re doing a search every 10 minutes of every waking hour of every day, not including searches done for work. You barely have time to read what you are searching.
Why so many searches?
I hit about 1,250 searches per month on average. I once did 2K in a month.
Probably a good number of those are refinements on an initial search query. Like if I search for a movie title, but there are multiple that go by the same name, I’ll append the year the one I care about came out. Doing that it’s easy to get like 3–6 searches in a single minute.
Yeah at times I’ll do 1000 a month, but 3500 excluding work related seemed pretty big.
And if you’re doing that many searches and refinements, it seems the $10 a month should be more worth it.
But $10USD can be anything from a coffee to a week’s wages depending on where you are in the world, so I can understand different opinions on whether it’s worth it.
is it really that much? I search a lot about my current desktop, and some about my proxmox server. I also like to search about ongoing tech trends like currently ive done a lot of research on the current ps5 jailbreak.
I just went and checked my current month usage at the moment and You are right though with the average. For this month so far I’m sitting at 2209 searches, my daily range is 28-308 queries (if I search “duckduckgo” as the keyword) the majority of them are in the 40-90 query range. A good chunk of them falls into gaming questions and linux questions.
for fun I just checked septembers, page total is 2627 queries and ranges between 40 and 167 pages a day with an average of 87.56 a day
august is 2445 with range of 29-189 and an average 78.87
The average searches per user on Google is something like 30 a month lol. But I’m a 500-1000 kind of guy.
Depending on what I’m doing it can get higher, especially if I’m doing dev stuff.
I guess I’m just surprised that you do that many searches and think paying for search is a waste of money. Being able to customise search results (block Pinterest, have MDN ranked higher, rewrite reddit.com to old.reddit.com, etc) is easily worth $10 a month to me.
But as I said to someone else, $10USD can be a coffee or a weeks wages depending on where you are in the world, so it’s probably going to hugely sway people’s views on if it’s worth it.
Are you rephrasing searches often?
Not getting what you wanted the first time?
Because that’s a ton of queries.
DDG gets to show more ads that way.
It might not be you, but part of the plan to make you run more queries.
yea a lot of my searches are technical in nature so I need to reword them in order to have the right critera show. Like looking for a linux virtual display will require 3 different types of searches depending on how its phrased, and will try to show queries about vGPU setups or KVM which are not related to that type of virtual driver (but it technically could be). and sometimes it needs to be narrowed down to specifically your setup as well which adds more searches to it. Specific error codes such as CRTC errors require multiple searches until you can find the right code, gaming wikis and questions can be similar especially if its about more secretive parts of it such as easter eggs or secret endings.
Funnily I feel just the other way around ^^
Like, it’s only 10$ for something as fundamental as a search engine. It gives me way better results than any other engine I tried, and so far they kept their promise of making it better for me and not for some advertiser or data collector.
And then a streaming service wants more than that, is not as important in my daily life and chances are that the one thing I’d like to watch right now is on another service anyway.
Although I have to say, that recently I find the results not so good anymore. But I suspect that’s more to do with LLMs, because people just don’t communicate their troubleshooting anymore. So if I search “how do I get xy to work”, there’s just no quality content about it anymore, as people ask their LLM.
The $5 a month tier is more than enough for me; I don’t think I’ve gone over the 300 queries a month in almost a year, and I feel like I search a lot. Those couple of times I have, all it means is starting a new 30 day period a little early. It’s painless.
Does this mean it’s effectively $0.0167 per search, and you have to buy batches of 300 searches, but they have an expiration date?
Basically, yeah
I always go well over 300. I search everything
I definitley search a lot in that case; I tried it for a few months and I think I hit the 300 cap after three weeks each month.
300 searches is ten per day, they aren’t that many. Most days I think I’d do less than that but then there are days that I’m looking for something specific and might do many times that.
It is definitely not something to use instead of bookmarks like most people use google.
Yeah, if you’re hitting the search engine to bring up YouTube instead of going to the site or something, probably the $10 a month tier makes more sense.
No one should have to pay to search the web. They’re as bad as all the other monetized bullshit.
It costs money to maintain software?
I Kagi’s case they are paying per search to connect to APIs to search other search engines and aggregate the results. They have a very real cost per search that isn’t only maintaining software.
Wouldn’t that be part of the “maintenance” cost? If I run an ice cream cart, I need to keep purchasing supplies to keep selling ice cream.
Technically yes I guess, but I would expect “maintenance” to refer to the cost of keeping the ice cream cart working and looking good, I wouldn’t expect the wholesale cost of ice cream to be in the “maintenance” column of my cart finances.
Sure! I mean, my point was this stuff costs money. Wasn’t meant to be as technically correct as possibly.
No, usually materials cost is tracked separately from equipment maintenance.
God dang people, maintenance is in quotes for a reason.
Wasn’t supposed to be as technically correct as possible. Meant to express to the original person that things cost money, that’s it.
Good thing I stopped there instead of also getting into the difference between repair maintenance (your car’s broken O2 sensor) and regular maintenance (fix an identified security vulnerability) then.
I’m dying hahahahah! Yeah, depending on where you work that word carries a lot of baggage
Ahh. So you’re fine with all the ads on YouTube? Two and a half minutes of commercials every 8 minutes on streaming services? Unblockable ads on websites?
I block all ads from all sites on the internet.
I pay money to the fediverse hosting foundation because hosting software costs money. I pay creators to create content because creating content costs them time and if they are going to do that thing, they need money.
No, but if you DON’T want ads then they need to get money from somewhere?
I RARELY use YouTube
No, that’s why I pay for YouTube too. If I wouldn’t use it as much that the price is worth it, I would likely not use it at all (besides the irregular link thrown over my fence ever once in a while).
You’re why there are ads.
I thinks it’s all the people and companies uploading thousands of hours of video every second. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason for the ads.
Im okay with it tbh. The everything must be free on the internet mindset is what led ads working its way in everywhere.
I think your first sentence is a valid opinion to hold, but I disagree that they’re just as bad when they’re very upfront about what you’re paying for. Google et all meanwhile don’t make it clear that they monitize user data unless you’re paying attention
tl;dr: you’re paying for search either way. A reliable and secure open-source non-profit would be better but I’d rather be paying directly than use a “free” service which extracts an opaque and invariably sinister cost in perpetuity.
No one should have to pay for anything. We have enough excess that a gift economy is entirely feasible. Convincing folks of that, creating new systems to realize the possibility, and shifting from our existing systems, are all separate and difficult tasks.
In the current system I do think an independently run organization funded by the public (likely via taxes but possibly via private donation) does make sense though. In lieu of that, or something better, there is no useful internet search without payment. Using free search engines means either someone else eats the cost (which may work for small/local communities but isn’t scalable without massive public funding and/or taxes) or the cost is subsidized a la surveillance capitalism and advertising.
Using free services run for profit extracts a cost that may be difficult to measure but there is no doubt it exists. When for-profit companies obscure that cost I am compelled to assume it is because they estimate I would not be willing to pay the asking price for their services.
Adjust this relationship to the magnitude of entire societies enveloped within, and seemingly dependent on, those services and the choice to personally decouple from that paradigm is an incredibly attractive option. I think, if one has the means, it may be ethically compelling as well (but that’s a different conversation).