Comment by 15457345234
9 months ago
Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet.
The people most likely to benefit and have the time to enjoy small-web content are inquisitive children who don't have good sources of information at their disposal, i.e. the smart kids of dumber parents who don't have library cards. Kids who have infinite free time but zero chance of persuading their parents to pay for anything academic or 'nerdy'. There's a lot of them out there.
The reason Kagi isn't like Google is because it is paid.
Contrary to popular belief: servers aren't free to run or buy or maintain. Software developers also don't work for charity therefore they require paychecks. Both of these things require money.
So if you have to pay the bills somehow then you either get users to pay for it (what Kagi currently does) or you get someone else to pay for it so it can be free to users (what Google currently does).
So if Kagi makes it "free" then they need to start advertising, which then breaks the model because their customers are no longer the search users, but the advertisers. Now motivations and incentives shift and before you know it, you rebuilt Google with a different name and we are back where we started.
The point is, that the fact that it is user-funded is exactly why its different. If you pick up the ad model then you will slowly evolve (devolve?) into what all the other search engines already are.
> Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet
That “true spirit of the internet” caused the ad-based cesspool we have today. Pretending for a free lunch doesn’t work. What you may be suggesting is school districts pay for Kagi, and in that I fully agree. But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work.
> But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work.
Free worked for much longer than it didn't work, and it will work again. There just needs to be a drastic adjustment in the amount of greed considered socially acceptable, and I can already see that pendulum swinging back.
It didn't work because it was free, it worked because you had to pay something more like dollars per page you published to host content than like pennies per thousands of pages.
For quite a long time, other than exceptions like geocities, you had to pay to publish your own content.
People who had an axe to grind or a hobby to share were "pamphleteering" and it was great.
"Free" only worked when there was little to no economic interest in the web.
So all we need to do is change our economic model, social norms, and human nature.
Easy peasy.
Those damned greedy servers needing electricity to run.