I was a Neeva user. It was good, but no better than DDG. Google is so bad these days that it isn’t much better than DDG, aside from regional things
I’ve heard good things about Kagi, but I can’t justify the cost (especially as its USD)
I pay for it, it’s worth every penny.
If it were half the cost or if all the tiers had unlimited searches I’d probably subscribe, but I don’t want to ration the searches the way I used to have to ration dialup minutes.
This is what I felt about Neeva, too. Metered searches meant I only used it when I “needed” it… By which point I was mired in search results and focused on my Google Fu and completely forgot about Neeva.
I get that it costs money to run, but they needed a long free trial to get me hooked, then a reasonably priced unlimited tier. I was never going to use a site that restricts my search volume.
There was a limit to Neeva? I payed $55/year for unlimited searches, but maybe I was in some tier that became unavailable or something.
I think that has set my price expectations.
iirc, their trial tier was 100 searches total, or something like. I could never adequately test it so I never converted to a paid user.
They pay for every search you do, so they can’t really offer unlimited at a low price point. FWIW, I don’t ration my searches. I used my FF history to count DDG searches back in early beta of Kagi and it resulted in about 1k per month, with Kagi (which shows the count), I’m at 700-800 which fits comfortably into the 1k limit (technically I have 1.3k because I was an early adopter, but I didn’t hit over 1k even once).
FWIW, the unlimited plan would be too expensive for me as well, and that’s with me absolutely loving Kagi.
@irasponsible I am on month 2 of paying for Kagi, and I am not sure it’s worth it at the current price point. I enjoy the privacy and speed, but not 10 dollars a month enjoy.
even at US$5 a month, I don’t know. I feel like most searches I do are just to get to the website I already know the name of, and I’d blow through 300 pretty fast.
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Is https://www.qwant.com a good alternative?
I was one of Neeva’s die hard users. I was bummed but not surprised when they emailed out saying they were pivoting to AI.
what is your go to for search now?
I’ve been using Duck Duck Go, but I mainly use it because bangs make it easy to search elsewhere when DDG isn’t surfacing useful stuff. So I don’t entirely endorse it.
I used them for a while as well. Their search was good, and their auto-generated answers they provided was very decent. I loved the idea of non-ad supported search. For me, their problem was their value proposition. You could use search for free, but you have to pay them if you want them to index your github/dropbox/etc accounts, so they could be searchable from the same searchbox. I had no need to have any private accounts searched, so never needed those licensed features.
Google is still the GOAT for very specific questions. Like “docker network bridge partial packet loss” , throw it into bing/dfg/qwang and you just end up with “what is a network bridge in docker”
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Results from StackOverflow is easy mode, what makes Google special is that it digs deep into every niche forum out there, it’s search index is far bigger and more up to date than anything else.
Basically, when you don’t find something on Google, there is a good chance there is nothing out there to answer your question. Meanwhile if you don’t find something on Bing (which is behind most alternative search engines), there is a good chance you’ll find results on Google.
That’s really the crux of it, there isn’t really anything the alternatives are better at, they are just Google-clones that perform worse, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There is almost nothing that sets them apart.
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This is the second time I’ve seen Kagi referenced with their summariser. It looks super useful, and the fact their summary references their points is just spectacular.
My only concern is around running out of searches with their basic plan.
