[HN Gopher] Kagi Sidekick (alpha)
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Kagi Sidekick (alpha)
Author : jviide
Score : 133 points
Date : 2024-02-20 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sidekick.kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sidekick.kagi.com)
| ggoo wrote:
| I just want good search results. This feels like a distraction.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Agree, I thought I was paying for search so they could focus on
| building search. Anything that feels like a money-raising or
| God-forbid acquisition play is concerning.
| evanharwin wrote:
| Agreed. Seems like web search implementation (both from Kagi
| and all its competitors!) could be almost endlessly improved
| upon, and any non-search feature is at odds with that.
|
| Maybe there's an argument that people who might use this, might
| also be people with sites that'd be valuable to index, and thus
| it'd both be nice for them and improve search for all users? :)
| Kerrick wrote:
| Given that their motivation for this is to find more sites and
| pages to index, it seems like it should improve the quality (or
| at least quantity) of results thanks to a larger index.
| ggoo wrote:
| Hm, I may have judged too quickly then - I do hope this
| translates to better quality. Will wait and see.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| I love Kagi and I'm a happy customer. I hope their endeavors in
| AI features don't distract too much from the core offering of a
| web search engine. That's the only thing I want from them.
| kelvie wrote:
| Disclaimer: Happy paid kagi user for over a year now.
|
| Why would they offer this for free for small websites? This isn't
| some VC-backed company getting ready to data-mine us and collect
| users for enshittification purposes, and in general, Kagi is the
| site people recommend when they say "if you're not the customer,
| you're the product".
| hungariantoast wrote:
| Maybe because they can comfortably afford to? Maybe because
| some people who operate businesses are actually kind and
| generous? Maybe because this service doesn't cost them much to
| operate for "small/personal websites"? Maybe because it's a
| clever way to get more people to pay for the service in the
| long run, after they initially try it out for free?
| atestu wrote:
| My take is this helps them index the web, and they're
| particularly interested in small website with great, niche,
| organic content.
|
| See also: https://kagi.com/smallweb
| psytrx wrote:
| I've had the same thoughts on those. Maybe it also allows
| them to gather data on whether/how people interact with a
| webpage itself, which may be an indicator for its quality.
| smcleod wrote:
| Early Kagi adopter here. I love Kagi search and their
| summarisation features, but I'd rather they just focus on high
| quality and configurable search and summarisation results rather
| than new products.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| It seems like a feature which is mutually beneficial. Ie user
| activity on embedded sites helps indicate interest in Kagi
| index updates.
|
| Isn't this entirely in-line with your desires? Better quality
| search results by way of having up to date indexes?
| nicce wrote:
| The problem is that it can go also terribly wrong. (New way
| for SEO optimisation)
| BadHumans wrote:
| Kagi users are in such a minority that I don't see how it
| is worth it for anyone to optimize for Kagi search results.
| nicce wrote:
| Yet. If you want to be better than Google, you need to
| avoid Google's mistakes.
| al_borland wrote:
| With Kagi's customers being users, not advertisers, they
| can put in features to mitigate against problems caused
| by SEO, like how Kagi bundles up all the "Top X abcdefg"
| lists that turned Google into trash.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Tiny Kagi has already shown an ability to produce better
| results than massive Google, despite them both dealing
| with the same SEO site gaming/structuring. Which is the
| reverse of what would be expected, if Google was also
| focused on quality.
|
| Kagi has already dodged the SEO bullet.
|
| Disclaimer: I pay for Kagi. You should too!
| dvaun wrote:
| This seems like a problem of the search space rather than
| solely Google's. How are you supposed to guard a system
| which, by its nature, provides financial incentive to
| others to game it?
|
| No matter what weights and checks are put in place, some
| observers will notice how their rankings change and make
| appropriate modifications.
|
| This isn't solved by Kagi's product, either. I'm a happy
| user and use it as my daily driver. That doesn't mean
| that, if it increases in popularity, the results will
| remain unskewed.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| As a paying customer, I agree that the only thing I care about
| from Kagi is search, _but_...I think that there is a very non-
| trivial chance that in the near future, search almost entirely
| gets eaten by AI. It makes sense to me that a search company
| would be exploring AI and its interaction with search. While I
| hope this doesn 't become the main focus (until and unless it
| _has_ to be), the history of companies like Kodak (who was a
| "film" company and therefore chose to ignore digital cameras)
| should be instructive. If they completely ignore the potential
| replacement to search, they might get good at search just in time
| for that to become irrelevant.
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi founder here. This is very early (alpha) concept built by a
| single Kagi Labs developer in a few weeks. The proper
| infrastruture and product is not built yet. We are launching a
| prototype to get feedback and gauge demand.
|
| Why does this exist?
|
| It would be an efficient way for us to build and expand our own
| index. Assuming users of this would be Kagi users, we would
| expand our index by tens of thousands of high quality? personal
| websites, hobby projects, startups, documentation websites, etc.,
| also helping to surface them in our results (where relevant, like
| we already do with Kagi Small Web initiative [1]). It is a win-
| win for both our users and Kagi.
|
| It would also be a way for Kagi to get some exposure outside of
| kagi.com (provided the search widget has some branding on it).
|
| This is why it makes sense to offer it for free for smaller
| sites/projects.
|
| And crowdsourcing index is completely opposite direction of one
| that causes deterioration of web search results in ad-supported
| search where few entities control the majority of space [2], so
| we like it.
|
| That is the plan - and since this is a "Labs" project, we are
| open to it crashing and burning. Know we do not, until we try.
| Try and try again, we must.
|
| [1] https://kagi.com/smallweb
|
| [2] https://detailed.com/google-control/
| paranoidxprod wrote:
| Thank you for the explanation!
|
| While I agree with others that AI can take away from a products
| core vision, I've been very happy with Kagi's path and roadmap.
| I feel like the AI products that you guys have released have
| served well as complements to search, and hope the trend
| continues.
|
| Hopefully this helps with indexing while offering a cool
| service to small creators!
|
| Edit: I forgot to say, the change where a `?` appended to a
| search triggering the quick answers was an amazing change. I
| would love to see more features that can be invoked by
| appending or prepending to the search query.
| meantub wrote:
| I think it would be interesting if like the website ranking
| that is done on Kagi there was a way to rate the search results
| to lower or higher it's ranking in search results. It would be
| a little different though since the website ranking on Kagi is
| for users but ranking the search results might just improve the
| intended search result that many people are looking for.
|
| I guess this assumes that you aren't already doing that when
| they click one option over another for a certain search term.
|
| Just thinking about searching through some documentation sites
| and you get a dumb result you weren't looking for at the top,
| and would want to deprioritize that result.
| greazy wrote:
| Kagi user here and scientist.
|
| I think kagi sidekick would be very well received in the
| bioinformatics space. Lots of complex docs that require end
| users to digest large complex data.
|
| Can it be tuned to only point users to the docs and not answer
| questions?
| spenczar5 wrote:
| I love your transparency. Saying how it benefits Kagi, not just
| how it is a cool feature for users, is refreshing. It makes me
| trust more of what you say, and builds some sense of what the
| product's direction could be. Thanks.
| quinncom wrote:
| [delayed]
| numbers wrote:
| This is tangential to search but I wonder if this is a way to
| push more indexing info into the kagi index or if it's just
| another fun little project?
| sedatk wrote:
| I've been a paying Kagi user for a few months now. The only thing
| that made me miss Google results was immediate answers: the
| answers that are extracted from a prominent web page and shown
| directly, so you don't have to click the link. Actually, Kagi has
| some of that for certain queries, but it's not as extensive as
| Google's.
|
| So, contrary to the most of the comments here, I support their AI
| endeavors for the sake of providing answers directly, saving us
| from clicks.
|
| Their search results are already very good. Can't wait to see
| Kagi flourish.
| bbor wrote:
| They just released a major improvement to these, actually :).
| So keep trying it! At the risk of sounding like a shill: kagi
| is by far the best money I spent last year. The "programming"
| "academia" "small web" and (especially!) "PDF" buttons are
| worth their weight in GOLD.
|
| These are the main two improvements from last week:
| We added Wolfram|Alpha to enhance our capabilities in
| calculations, unit conversions, and time queries for better
| results. This solves a huge number of issues reported for these
| kind of queries as the results now come from a computational
| knowledge authorithy. In the same spirit of getting
| answers faster, now simply starting your query with an
| interrogative word (what, where, who, which, when, how) or just
| ending it with a question mark (?) will automatically trigger
| Quick Answer.
| mayneack wrote:
| Oh, interesting. I was actually wondering what had changed.
| That wolfram integration needs some work. Right now it's
| consistently just simplifying fractions. I keep having to
| "!g" in brave to get google to do simple math for me.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/ghmUcAh.png
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Ultimate/normal customer, and i agree. Personally i think AI
| _is_ Search, and while we don't need to force them together in
| some massive behemoth now - laying foundation for being
| familiar, comfortable and well integrated in the future seems
| foundational to today. In my eyes at least.
| al_borland wrote:
| I've been really liking the quick answers[1] that Kagi added.
| The doc gives some info as to what triggers it so it seems less
| random.
|
| [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
| sedatk wrote:
| Oh that's awesome. I think I bumped into it once, but my
| search flow is usually always in a rush that I haven't had
| time to stop and think about it.
| runamuck wrote:
| I pay for Kagi. I also have a small hobby site and would love to
| try this out.
| nabogh wrote:
| I cancelled my Kagi subscription because it's a little too
| expensive for me in the unlimited search tier. And I search too
| much for the limited search tier.
|
| I can't help but wonder if my money was being spent on pet
| projects like this instead of improving/maintaining the search.
| chias wrote:
| All companies allocate some fraction of their resources towards
| innovation outside of what is currently their core feature-set.
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