You really use Netflix and Spotify more frequently than a search engine? I'm the other way round, and by like an order of magnitude at least. (Well, I don't use Spotify at all, but still.)
There might be a debate about the use of the word "frequency" but I average ~20 hours a week between Spotify and Netflix. My search engine time is far below one hour. Kagi would need to successfully argue that that hour is more "valuable" than the 20. For me, Kagi would need to be 2,000% better than Google to justify the price.
Not sure there's a reasonable way of measuring my "search engine time" (time actually viewing results? time reading the sites found?) but the vast majority of the time I do spend using them is work time, and the quality of results affects my ability to do my job. It's nigh on impossible to measure, of course, but I suspect even a modest improvement would easily pay for itself at that price point, in my case.
That's a good point: should we include the amount of time viewing the content found by the search engine? I'm not sure but this would certainly bump the time estimate up. It's even more complex, because if I find the right information fast, I spend less time viewing the results, but I actually have a better experience, meaning that there is an argument for an inverse relationship with the time spent on a search engine and the value derived.
Interestingly, I just don't think about it in that way.
For starters, search is just critical to me (and I think pretty much anyone who does anything around development / design / content / ...actually any modern day desk-based work...) - so in time terms, no, I probably listen to Spotify more but in touchpoint terms I can't imagine how many searches I do in a week. I would imagine it's thousands.
Two things then follow: firstly, the quality of those results is totally critical. If (as is starting to happen with Google) I'm really struggling to get past the endless ad-based SEO'd b/s to get to the site or nugget of information I need, and each of those searches is taking me much longer and longer, then this really does become a genuine value / cost proposition. With a tool like Kagi I can say "just don't show me site X" or "boost Stack Overflow" - then this plus there are no ads taking up screen real estate becomes a viable value proposition.
Secondly: there's something to be said about supporting a viable non-ad based model for services on the web. I would argue that basing everything around clicks in an advertising way has degraded basically everything about the modern internet. It's lowered content quality, drowned out real voices in favour of bots and algorithms and causes major large scale issues with "truth". Where organisations / companies / individuals can afford to pay X and get a bigger platform with their made up b/s about vaccines / war / the opposition / guns / whatever), then this drowns out the viable, real, truthful alternatives from people who actually know what they're talking about.
Plus, of course preaching to the converted, but the tracking model being used by Google is pretty terrifying, too.
Plus... I mean, $120 a year is $0.3 a day... I think I can manage that ok...
I agree with your points. I just think my demand curve for search looks different to yours. Might be my income band, or my use cases, or many other factors.
