This. What even is the point of blocking scapers if Google consumes your content anyway and serves it as an AI answer?
These are sad times we're living as far as openness of the web goes. People would have less of a scraping problem if their websites didn't ship with 20MB of JS.
>A fartlek (Swedish for "speed play") is an unstructured, continuous running workout that mixes fast bursts of intense running with slower, recovery jogging.
Alternative search engines are popular with the tech/HN bubble. Other than Bing, they have no palpable market share. Google does not care about said bubble because it mostly overlaps people who would use an adblocker anyway and who are capable of finding their way around other for-profit restrictions (i.e. downloading videos with yt-dlp instead of paying for YT Premium).
DDG has <1% market share, so +28%, while encouraging, means nothing for the monopoly. I use it. I use Brave Search as well. Paid for Kagi for a while.
But getting people to use anything other than Google (or the default Bing for on Windows) is nearly impossible at scale.
We can replace the primary and (formerly) indispensable product of a company with a $4T market cap for $5-10/month (less if annualized), and some people still gripe.
Have you ever looked at the browsing history of a non-technical, non-tech-addicted older person? I'm usually surprised by how little activity there typically is.
The $5 plan is great for gifting Kagi to non-tech friends and relatives who won't come close to exhausting that plan. I pay for it for older relatives I don't want to get burned by Google's decades-long unwillingness to police predatory tech support scam ads and organic listings. $54 annually for 3,600 searches is a bargain for the product they get.
I appreciate that Kagi doesn't try too hard to squeeze $10 out of people who would never need it.
> Have you ever looked at the browsing history of a non-technical, non-tech-addicted older person? I'm usually surprised by how little activity there typically is.
Non-technical, tech-addicted younger people too!
Internet usage is primarily via social media apps with infinite scrolling, so there aren't actually all that many web searches happening.
> The $5 plan is great for gifting Kagi to non-tech friends and relatives who won't come close to exhausting that plan. I pay for it for older relatives I don't want to get burned by Google's decades-long unwillingness to police predatory tech support scam ads and organic listings. $54 annually for 3,600 searches is a bargain for the product they get.
This is a good idea!
I've got a Team plan through work, but there's no way for me to cover family members with that.
> Have you ever looked at the browsing history of a non-technical, non-tech-addicted older person?
Search-wise, all they know is Google. I've seen people open Internet Explorer, search 'google' via a Bing search box, then click on google.com where they finally searched for a website they basically opened every day. IMO had they known Bing is also a search engine, they would've skipped searching for Google, so I'm a bit skeptical to people changing search habits. If anything, AI could be the replacement.
I'm a tech person and 300 searches per month sounds like quite a lot to me, certainly if it's used outside of work. That's 10 searches/day, every day.
Everything I access regularly is bookmarked. If I know the site I'm going to, such as wikipedia.org, I type it in the URL bar. I think 300 searches would be more than enough.
I've worked with a lot of people in tech over the years who weren't "tech people". Idk. The one thing I've always seen with "tech people" is a certain obsession for knowledge and learning.
With advances in AI you would've thought the priority would be on automating as much as possible of the non-human facing work and double-down on meaningful customer relationships - but no.
It is just to get hold of the process and make it impossible to go away from them. Then they will jack up the prices like we've never seen. Then it will be "people are actually cheaper why are we using them?" - can't move off the platform, they own our IP even though they said they wouldn't but they updated their ToS without us noticing last month and here we are.
Their secret is that they have hoards of fake AI Customers who will call into their client's AI Customer Support and respond to surveys saying they were extremely happy with the support, so the client has to pay for perfect simulated outcomes.
This isn’t specific to AI this is just the dark arts startup valuation playbook. AI extension of gaming the metric “what is the ratio of “active” accounts to validated human daus”
AI support generally sucks but I actually wouldn't mind if everyone used it for the initial call routing portion. Beats an IVR tree or waiting for someone to just redirect your call to the real queue.
I respectfully disagree with the initial routing point. I very strongly prefer a traditional tree to “I’m your voice assistant! In a few words, tell me how I can help!”.
The tree is structured and gives me an immediate sense of how to map my task to the support offering. If I’m calling, I probably have an issue that I can’t self-serve resolve via the customer portal or whatever, so walking the tree lets me get an idea of who can help.
The “voice assistant” gives me no sense of what the system is capable of or how to take advantage of those capabilities. So I’m left guessing at phrases or functions based off of the assumption that there’s still some kind of tree-like structure that’s been abstracted away. Same outcome, more cognitive overhead, plus I usually have to shout in my best William … Shatner … impression to get it to understand me.
If you're calling it an "AI assistant" then it's probably not the type of system I was talking about and I probably don't like it either. AI call routing is having an IVR tree's functionality where the call system does the work to map it to a number in the tree. Anything more than that is getting into something else AI.
E.g. instead of waiting for the IVR tree to be read out to find out you needed to press 4 for the shipping department the AI asks "Please state the department you wish to connect to or reason for calling" and you just say "shipping" (or however much of a life story you want to give it) and it's the call system's job to figure out where in the menu that is instead. For repeat calls once you know its AI call routing you can just say "shipping" right as the call starts, the same as you'd known press "4" before the 2nd time around an IVR tree, except you don't have to remember the random digits.
but even a simple impl to answer questions can knock out like 50% of callers who are tech-illiterate at 100x cheaper cost, it's just strictly better economics and better for those customers
I broadly agree though I have noticed that it seems to be getting a bit better. I hate how patronizing pretty much every LLM tends to be, but at least I've noticed now that the AI support is better at figuring out what it is I actually want.
That said, my life hack for these things to get escalated to a human is to just keep saying or typing curse words. Usually that triggers a "connect to human" flow. I can't promise it will always work, but I can say it has worked every time I have tried it.
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