1044
Google has sent internet into ‘spiral of decline’, claims DeepMind co-founder
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
1044 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
6264 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Mmm, but what's their plan to resist enshittification? After all, Google started out as "fundamentally different, user-centric." What will Kagi do when their market penetration peaks and the business managers demand more growth?
You have to pay for kagi so they are not incentivized to serve ads. They are incentivized to give you a good set of search results so you keep paying.
Just curious, in the hypothetical situation that 100% of users on the web used Kagi how is it any different? They'll demand more growth at that point but how would they achieve it? I don't see how paying for the service avoids the issue of the product becoming worse as a result of peak market penetration and needing new methods of growth
Well, if your argument is: "any company that becomes a monopoly will abuse monopoly power", then sure I agree with you. You got me there!
My argument is: "given a reliable financial alternative to advertising, a company will be able to resist enshitification for a long time, as long as there is no absolute tyrannical monopoly."
I assumed the last part was implied and I'm sorry for the confusion!
Makes sense, but yea it didn't really answer the overall question of "if it hits peak market penetration how will it avoid going the Google route" since google also started with the same premise. I suppose the answer is hope it doesn't become a monopoly
It's also privately owned by one guy, so it doesn't have to submit to investor pressure.
Steam, for example, is basically a monopoly for PC game sales, but hasn't enshittified because it is privately owned.
While I agree that this does avoid enshitification, it's always possible for a privately owned company to IPO. That's why all of us are even here to begin with
It's also certainly possible for a privately owned company (even one owned by a single individual) to undergo enshitification, it is only (if anything) less likely.
It's probably as good as we are going to get.
The best options would be an open source, donation supported search engine, but the money required to host/develop that is immense.
We are all freeloading off of Lemmy right now, unless you are donating to the people who are running the servers. The cost to run a search engine is much higher though -- kagi pays (iirc) double digit cents for each search, even before development costs, with the average user doing 700 searches a month. The costs are way higher.
They can't be spending $70 per user per month, let alone more than that, their pricing won't make sense
I looked it up*
https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#kagisearch
It's $.0125, so 1.25 cents not double digits like I thought. They also average 27 searches per day per user. So an average of 821.25 searches per user per month, meaning a cost of $10.27 per month.
Yeah, the number just stood out as too high to me