[HN Gopher] Kagi Sidekick (alpha)
___________________________________________________________________
Kagi Sidekick (alpha)
Author : jviide
Score : 710 points
Date : 2024-02-20 21:18 UTC (1 days 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.
| atestu wrote:
| Yes! It tells them what people search for on that
| particular website... all very valuable data.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Because their main business is taking content ranking it and
| charging you for it. This allows them to discover sites cheaper
| in a more targeted way. It increases awareness of kagi. It's a
| win/win idea.
|
| Don't mistake Kagi for something it's not. You are still the
| product. All of your data is feed into the system (what you
| search for, what you rank, what you filter etc) and used to
| sell others.
| dewey wrote:
| I would not really count using a paid, relatively expensive
| service as "you are the product" which is usually used if a
| free service is subsidized by selling access to the users to
| a third party.
| 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.
| nicce wrote:
| The parent context was:
|
| > Ie user activity on embedded sites helps indicate
| interest in Kagi index updates.
|
| Doesn't this mean anyone? And once someone fakes user
| activity, that make it useless measure in the end.
| al_borland wrote:
| If that becomes a problem, they can alter the plan. Kagi
| doesn't have the same conflict as pretty much every other
| search engine when evaluating this stuff. If it starts
| making things worse, stop factoring it in, or reduce the
| influence in the ranking.
| 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's greater
| resources were also focused on quality.
|
| Kagi already dodges the SEO bullet.
|
| Disclaimer: I pay for Kagi. You should too!
| nicce wrote:
| > the same SEO site gaming/structuring.
|
| This isn't totally true. They can dodge a lot of stuff,
| because optimisations target Google's algorithms, not
| Kagis. And Google also has conflicting intrests on same
| cases to let them just be.
|
| I have paid for long time as well. But this brings new
| "attack vector", which is important to consider.
| janfoeh wrote:
| Paying Kagi customer here as well.
|
| Kagi is leagues better than now-Google. It is about on
| par, slightly worse than the Google of yore -- not by
| their own fault, but because they operate in a much more
| professionalized, difficult, hostile web.
|
| They didn't dodge the SEO bullet -- nobody has aimed at
| them yet.
| laserbeam wrote:
| If the userbase grows enough (let's say 100x that of
| today), they could become an SEO target. As happy as I am
| with the current results I am aware that SEO gaming is
| only a problem once scale is relevant. Once there are
| teams of people reverse engineering kagi's ranking
| explicitly wanting to beat it.
|
| There's a good chance not enough people are willing to
| pay for search and this never becomes a problem.
|
| Disclaimer: happy paying customer.
| 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.
| nicce wrote:
| That is true. But you can still try to learn from others
| mistakes to make it as hard as possible?
| ipaddr wrote:
| No one would want to target developers with their warez.
| tananaev wrote:
| I suspect their core business is unsustainable as is. From what
| I understand, they use search APIs, which are expensive. So
| they need to get their own index, at least partial, to have a
| sustainable business.
| jjice wrote:
| Duck Duck Go uses the Bing API and they've been around for a
| long while. I'd imagine there's a heavy 80/20 rule of data
| that needs to be indexed frequently that people also search
| for, so those same cached results from API calls get the most
| use.
|
| Just speculation though.
| laserbeam wrote:
| I don't think it's a fair comparison. Every single other
| search engine sells ads including ddg. Sure, they don't
| track you, but will still serve ads for your quesries.
|
| Kagi is explicitly an ad free subscription. Comparing
| profitability is not straightforward.
| jjice wrote:
| Right, but the majority of Kagi users pay $10 a month. I
| doubt DDG is getting $10 per user per month in revenue.
| smcleod wrote:
| DDG search results are dreadful compared to Kagi, not even
| slightly compatible.
| TisButMe wrote:
| Kagi employee here. The search business is sustainable, we
| don't need a push in AI things to make it work. We're looking
| at these features/ideas because we think they complement
| search well, not because we need them from a cashflow
| perspective :)
| 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.
| jcul wrote:
| This feature isn't specifically to do with AI though is it?
| Unless I missed something (likely).
|
| My understanding was that it was about adding a "search with
| Kagi" thing to your site and triggering Kagi's indexer to index
| your site as a side effect.
| Shadowmist wrote:
| I pay for search, and would also pay for email (currently
| paying Google). Speaking of Google, I hate the Kagi "g" logo.
| stefandesu wrote:
| Same, it sometimes confuses me and I think I'm on Google. But
| maybe that's exactly the point.
| reddalo wrote:
| How do you get confused? It's orange and black, completely
| different from Google's.
|
| _But_... it reminds me of old-school Google logo, before
| they changed it to the simple sans-serif new one.
| 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.
| ubutler wrote:
| RE your edit, I'm assuming you're already aware that Kagi
| lets you create custom bangs, but just in case you're not,
| you can create your own shortcuts that when preceded by an
| exclamation mark like !so can redirect to or search other
| websites. I use this to append 'site:reddit.com' when I add
| !r to a query, for example.
| 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?
| freediver wrote:
| Yes, summary mode is completely optional (and turned off by
| default as you can see in our demo).
| 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:
| Hi Vlad,
|
| How will you prevent someone from connecting Sidekick to a
| website that appears at first to be a small website but
| eventually fills with LLM-generated SEO keywords and ads? You
| might be able to manually review sites when they first sign up
| for Sidekick, but once the channel is open for them to inject
| content into Kagi's index, what's to stop them from abusing
| their privileged position?
| freediver wrote:
| That is a great question. Well we first have to ask what
| would be the purpose of someone going through the trouble to
| create such (LLM generated) spammy SEO content? The answer
| (for the majority of web at least now) is to monetize it with
| ads/affiliate links. If that is the case then the answer is
| easy as we already penalize sites with ads/trackers on them
| for our general web search, and completely boot them out of
| our own index.
|
| In parallel, we are developing LLM-content detector
| technology to be more efficient at detecting such content
| regardless of how it is monetised (and we will offer this as
| an API once developed).
| hackeruse wrote:
| This is a naive take. SEO schemes are attractive for
| companies that sell products themselves (e.g. try searching
| anything related to ETL tools). The content itself is the
| ad and you won't find any ad serving scripts or affiliate
| links in there.
|
| (Source: have created such schemes, although would
| generally not recommend them to my customers nowadays)
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| They _want_ to index companies that sell products. I don
| 't see a big problem here if a company that sells a
| product I'm searching for, who happens to also have low-
| quality SEO content, shows up in that search.
|
| In fact, I would rather they _not_ get penalized for it,
| since low-quality SEO content is a good way to show up in
| certain other search engines (Google), and every business
| wants to show up in Google, making that content quite
| common even from reputable businesses making a quality
| product.
| thrownaway163 wrote:
| As someone who in a past life spent loads of time doing
| of SEO I cannot help but find this argument flawed.
|
| So, we shouldn't penalize low quality, SEO, spam because
| of people's wants? I do want them to penalize those sites
| because they are a disservice and more often than not
| crappy, unsecured WordPress that drowns out those that
| are not spam.
|
| Thank you Kagi team! A shame how far Google's results
| have fallen.
|
| Edit: also SEO is one of the more seedier parts of the
| software industry. Tons of unaware small businesses
| conned into these awful, low quality sites. I literally
| quit because it was so morally bankrupt.
| freediver wrote:
| Underestimate the average Kagi user at your own peril. I
| do not think many would fall prey to an LLM generated
| content marketing page and end up buying a product from
| such site. Much likelier scenario is the page gets
| instantly blocked/reported.
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| not really underestimating Kagi users, just the
| inexorable push to colonize every last useful network.
|
| This could also be an attack vector for adversaries
| looking to pollute Kagi's search results and/or force you
| to divert resources to policing it.
| Aeolun wrote:
| That is, until eternal september.
| bootsmann wrote:
| You can block the site in kagi if you don't like it,
| that's 50% of the entire moat of the search engine.
| daco wrote:
| Is there any reliable AI generated content detector today ?
| I've tried many free and paying ones online, but they're
| aren't reliable
| vasco wrote:
| It's impossible to make. You cannot prove any sentence
| was created by an LLM and you can't prove it wasn't.
| yunwal wrote:
| Unless you design the LLM yourself and purposefully
| watermark the output.
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04634.pdf
| vasco wrote:
| That's a digital signature, same as sending an email with
| GPG to prove you sent it. You wouldn't say that because
| some people use GPG you can somehow detect who wrote
| every email on earth, it's a push model vs pull. This is
| why I wrote "any sentence" vs "some sentences".
| dns_snek wrote:
| Watermarking is not at all like a digital signature and a
| lot like steganography. I only have a surface level
| understanding of the process, but it works by biasing
| token selection to encode information into the resulting
| text in a way that's resistant to later modifications and
| rephrasing.
|
| I have my doubts about the effectiveness of this method
| and realistically, it won't make any difference because
| the bad actors will just use an LLM that doesn't snitch
| on them, so you're technically correct.
| vasco wrote:
| The only way to make that stenography robust is to have
| the encoded message be generated with some secret key
| that can be verified. Otherwise anyone could manually
| fake the stenography into human typed messages assisted
| by some encoder and you'd have no way of telling if it
| was really typed by an LLM. That line of thinking is what
| makes it have to be like a signature to work like you
| said for "any sentence". I also think these methods only
| work above certain character limits. Short messages are
| impossible to tell.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| If you look here : GitHub.com/HNx1/IdentityLM you can see
| that it's relatively easy to sign LLM output with a
| private key using an adaptation of the watermarking
| method.
| vasco wrote:
| This application is exactly what I was describing. I'll
| look it over to see how it scales the encryption strength
| based on token length or how it deals with short
| messages, which is the only thing I'd think it'd be very
| hard to do. If you print 2 paragraphs it's easy to change
| some tokens with a secret key mask but if you print
| "Yes", it's not so easy. Thanks for the great share.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| you can always ask it to include a '!' after every word
| and then sed it away. Poof, there goes your watermark
| nottorp wrote:
| SEO pages pushing some product are SEO pages pushing some
| product. You should ignore them no matter what the source
| is, so what does it matter if they're LLM generated or
| hand written?
|
| The problem is that people keep consuming the samey low
| quality content instead of skipping it (think superhero
| movies and Netflix series that are all indistinguishable
| from each other). As long as they're satisfied with that,
| they'll fall for fake product reviews too.
| solardev wrote:
| Maybe you can't determine that with certainty, but there
| may be statistical tools you can use to estimate the
| probably that some content came from one of the LLMs we
| know about based on their known writing styles?
|
| Someone did something like that to identify HN authors
| (as in correlating similar writing styles between
| pseudonyms) a few years back, for example:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
|
| Or a study applying similar analysis to LLMs:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.07305
|
| Of course, LLM output can be tweaked to evade these, just
| like humans can alter their writing style or handwriting
| to better evade detection. But it's one approach.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Problem is that many webites used to hire writers which
| wrote tangentially related posts to get their main product
| higher ranked. Like LogRocket and Partition Minitool do.
|
| Combine that with that guy who boasted about his 'SEO
| heist', I think it's a very valid concern.
| adiabatty wrote:
| My general impression of the LogRocket site is that they
| have decent articles on how to do frontend development.
| At least that what I remember from the times I've been
| directed there by a search engine.
|
| And we...want to discourage writing useful web pages,
| even though articles on understanding TypeScript's type
| system aren't all that closely related to their main
| product...? What am I missing?
| BadHumans wrote:
| I have solved many problems because of a blog post
| created by company that wanted to get their product name
| out there and I don't think they should be looked at
| negatively for doing that. Are upset whenever a companies
| tech blog lands on HN? Because it is virtually the same
| thing. If you use Kagi and come across a site that you
| find is low quality and spammy then just block it. That's
| the cool thing about using Kagi.
| pests wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I've also found that type of developer marketing valuable
| many times in the past. It's sometimes obvious its going
| to end in a pitch for the product, but often it does a
| good job summarizing the key problems in the space,
| mentioning or showing other solutions / offerings, and
| pitching which tradeoffs they made for their own product
| and how they solved issues.
|
| Even if you don't go with the ad, you can quickly pivot
| to other named players or get a better understanding of
| the terminology or jargon to start searching more.
| thereticent wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what 37signals and even joelonsoftware
| were? Isn't HN essentially a free conduit to YCombinator
| awareness?
|
| I don't see the problem with what you're describing. It
| seems like one of the most contributory ways to market
| well.
| nottorp wrote:
| You're right, but those are the good examples.
|
| Another decent one would be linux sysadmin info from
| Digital Ocean and the likes.
|
| But for every joelonsoftware there are 99999 sites that
| have all copy/pasted the same tutorial about something
| basic and try to push some random product or just ads.
| kazinator wrote:
| Kagi is Japanese for key, right? We search with a search key.
| If I'm getting it right.
|
| Do you know that "sidekick" is aibo in Japanese (Xiang Bang )?
|
| Notice the "AI" in it?
| neilv wrote:
| Sony AIBO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIBO
| kazinator wrote:
| Yeah, what are the odds that the Japanese would use up the
| obvious Japanese words for tech stuff.
| freediver wrote:
| Didn't know that and thanks for giving us the idea. Aibo
| sounds much better than Sidekick, we may need to rename :)
| solardev wrote:
| Isn't that already the name of Sony's robot dog?
| adiabatty wrote:
| It is.
| kazinator wrote:
| Even though Sony has taken the sidekick word, there are
| lots. The characters Ai (love), Xiang (together) have "ai"
| readings and are productive. The verb au goes to an ai noun
| form that is productive for forming words like aizuchi.
| Plus various others.
|
| aite
|
| Ai Quan aiken: beloved dog
|
| Xiang Shou aite: companion, other party, opponent.
|
| Lan Se aiiro: indigo blue; Nong Lan koai: deep indigo.
|
| ...
|
| https://jisho.org/search/ai%3F
| aledalgrande wrote:
| and "jisho" means "dictionary" haha! loved the
| explanation, although I can only read the hiragana and
| love jisho too! have to get on with those wanikani
| exercises...
| niederman wrote:
| Please don't write it Aibo, though. The proper romanization
| is Aibo or Aibou. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepbu
| rn_romanization#Long_vo...
| helboi4 wrote:
| Fr what sort of romanisation system uses an acute accent
| for that. It's much more akin to the latin flat accent.
| But in reality just leaving off an accent or using the u
| is more convenient for typing.
| kazinator wrote:
| A number of European languages use o for indicating the
| long vowel o, rather than stress: Czech, Slovak, Polish,
| Icelandic, Irish, ...
|
| According to Wiktionary, o is used as a long vowel in two
| Latvian languages, and in Swedish as a hand-written form
| of o (not always a long vowel). Also in Silesian, a
| language in a region of what is now Poland.
| kazinator wrote:
| Unfortunately, neither English nor Japanese IME's on
| desktops provide any way to type Hepburn that isn't
| extremely awkward. E.g. on Windows if you want to type
| Tokyo, you have to be in Hiragana mode, go letter by
| letter and pick from a list.
|
| Since I'm originally from Slovakia, I used my Slovak IME,
| which is convenient for me.
|
| Incidentally, Slovak has its own romanization of
| Japanese, which uses almost nothing but Slovak letters
| and diacritics (plus "w").
|
| Wikipedia pages about Jiu Zhou and Si Guo :
|
| https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjusu
|
| https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikoku
|
| The Hepburn system is an Americanism. Americans don't own
| the Roman alphabet or the way it should be applied to
| Japanese. Though Hepburn has official status in that it
| is taught in Japan, and used for the benefit of visitors.
| E.g. signs giving names of train stations or government
| buildings or what have you.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Is it possible to use the search functionality without the "AI
| smarts"? I can see a good site search service being a great
| addition to some websites I run, but I would absolutely not
| want to push an AI chatbot on my users.
| freediver wrote:
| Yes, glad to see the skepticism towards AI, this is why it is
| turned off by default even in our demo.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| Ah yes, "The 16 Companies" - except it's actually five
| hundred...
|
| Seems like the problem in [2] is a few entities controlling the
| majority of spaces other than search, to me. Shame we don't
| have any real laws against anti-competitive behavior (just the
| way YC likes it).
|
| inb4 flagged
| tangmonk wrote:
| You should launch a crypto project for that
| kbumsik wrote:
| Great work! How it would be different from Algolia DocSearch?
|
| https://docsearch.algolia.com
| crooked-v wrote:
| What would your approach be for pricing for wiki-type sites
| that are nonprofit but may have hundreds or thousands of pages
| with assorted media? I know that decent search beyond just name
| matching is a recurring issue for independent fandom wikis,
| which rarely have the funding or coordination to do anything
| fancier than just a Mediawiki site.
|
| For a random example, there's the Baldur's Gate 3 wiki
| (https://bg3.wiki), which has upwards of 8,000 pages often with
| pretty dense text (see
| https://bg3.wiki/wiki/D%26D_5e_rule_changes for an example) and
| is funded entirely off donations.
| esperent wrote:
| It would be great if there was a free version for charity/non
| profit/open source. I don't know if this is feasible for
| Kagi. But I do know that many of these types of
| wiki/forum/blog are run on a shoestring.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| It sounds good, except I don't want AI on my site. Any way to
| _not_ have the AI part?
| Kbelicius wrote:
| AI is optional and is turned off by default.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| I'd use this tomorrow...
|
| If it worked in a shell script or similar old-school unix
| architectural style on my bespoke static site generator, which
| is a slow-motion train wreck of a weekend hack-fest being
| ported from python/staticjinja to rust/minijinja.
|
| Is kagi competing with whoogle?
|
| Whoogle gives me the old-school, seemingly linear algebra of
| pagerank, hauntology that I expect.
| aheilbut wrote:
| this is a great idea and should have happened long ago..
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19713604#19714732
| goplayoutside wrote:
| Satisfied Kagi early adopter here. Can you make a Mediawiki
| extension also? MW search leaves something to be desired, and
| I'd love to have Kagi on my wiki site.
|
| Keep up the great work, you have an incredible product.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > Why does this exist?
|
| Because "AI" increases the shareholder's chances of winning the
| lottery.
| 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
| samatman wrote:
| That's.... good, though?
|
| What happens if you ask for 23000.0/10500?
| mayneack wrote:
| It's not wrong, I suppose, but a break from the behavior
| I've learned for this sort of instant answer across
| google, ddg, and kagi as long as I can remember.
|
| I can't actually think of a situation where I want to
| simplify a fraction like that.
| jon_richards wrote:
| As someone who has used wolfram alpha for a long time, I
| wish they'd just put both. They do on queries like
| 23000/105000, but not on queries like 23000 = x*105000
| 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.
| bbor wrote:
| Strongly held belief that I think is backed up by academic
| consensus: we should not treat LLMs as stores of knowledge.
| As my mantra goes, "language models, not knowledge models".
| So the future of search might involve LLMs at a very
| fundamental level (and I think it will!), but they'll never
| be the central component. Humans will never ever ever invent
| a better knowledge system than a database / a piece of paper,
| I guarantee.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Agreed but there's nothing about this discussion that
| requires LLMs are the store for anything. That's an
| implementation detail. One that's not that controversial
| imo. The current tech is clearly too destructive to "store"
| anything.
| 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.
| mastercheif wrote:
| You can click the "Quick Answer" button on the search
| results page to trigger the same feature. I think it
| appears whenever there is more than one word in the search
| query.
| paradox460 wrote:
| You can also force its appearance by sticking a ? at the
| end of a query, either space separated or otherwise.
| almyk wrote:
| Thanks for linking to the docs. I really like this feature,
| but as you said, it felt like it showed up at random
| ashenke wrote:
| Since last week, it will trigger whenever your search query
| ends with a ? or starts with How or Why or other
| interrogative words https://kagi.com/changelog#3179
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| They disabled the interrogative words trigger because
| people found it too intrusive. ? still works
| OJFord wrote:
| If anyone from DDG is here, please sort out your calendar one?
| I reported it in early January that it was (understandably)
| erroneously assuming 'jan calendar' still meant current_year+1;
| still doing it for February.
|
| March is ok though, so I think actually the implementation was
| always buggy, not just now it's 2024, but it's checking if
| month is <= current month where it should just do <.
| nicce wrote:
| I have personally started to avoid Google's and others
| immediate answers, because they are often very wrong because
| they are picked out of the contex.
|
| They try to show what you want to see, but it often means
| something else.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I have used Kagi for several months now, and I find that the
| ability to decide which searches I want quick answers for to
| be useful. There are certain searches where I feel
| comfortable with accepting a quick answer, and others where I
| don't think it would be useful. Being able to avoid the
| clutter unless I want it is nice.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| Sports scores and stocks. If kagi inlined those results I
| would be very happy to not need to use the Google bang.
|
| Additionally, the google bang destroys suggested terms and
| with no kagi history I'm typing the whole query.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I don't really web search for those things but I can see
| why that would be useful. There is a feedback site that
| they are very responsive on; you should post there if it
| hasn't been posted yet.
|
| Re: bangs ruining suggestions: you can put the bang at
| the end of the query instead of at the beginning.
| tiltowait wrote:
| I just tried two searches in Kagi: "aapl" and "super bowl
| 2024". Both gave me inline "quick answer" things. Maybe
| it's new or inconsistent?
| kosmozaut wrote:
| This is so true! While planning a trip abroad last year we
| were unsure about whether $thing is legal in $country. Google
| proclaimed in bold letters that, yes, $thing is legal in
| $country, but this line was taken from a site with the title
| "common misconceptions about traveling in $country" an in
| fact $thing was _not_ legal.
|
| Such a basic mistake, I haven't trusted the instant results
| ever since.
| sodaplayer wrote:
| I remember there was another story here about Google
| returning bad results for what to do for a particular
| medical emergency. The page had a list of "Do"s and
| "Don't"s, but Google had grabbed the list of the "Don't"s
| and displayed it as the immediate results.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Sometimes they're wrong period. The source was clearly a bad
| one and every other source disagrees.
| lutoma wrote:
| One thing I miss from Google is a reliable built-in calculator.
| I know I could just use some other calculator app but the habit
| of just typing stuff into my address bar is hard to shake.
|
| Kagi also has a calculator, but for a lot of queries it gives
| questionable results, for example for `210/8` it returns
| `105/4`. Technically correct, sure, but almost never what I
| want.
| freedomben wrote:
| FWIW I think this has improved radically in the past few
| weeks thanks to their integration with Wolfram. I haven't
| tried it yet though but was pleased to see that in the
| changelog
| sedatk wrote:
| It's apparently the Wolfram|Alpha integration that returns
| 105/4.
| sedatk wrote:
| I agree. I've also found out that "210/8.0" returns the
| desired result.
| paradox460 wrote:
| Just tested this out, you can add "in decimal" to get it as a
| decimal.
| column wrote:
| just "decimal" works too
| j7ake wrote:
| chatgpt is on the extreme side: you only get immediate answers
| without the webpage
| makach wrote:
| I am also a paying customer providing my 2c; only rarely do I
| use google, and then mostly for maps and image search. I enjoy
| not seeing ads and the power functionality within the engine.
| 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.
| Onawa wrote:
| On top of that, the top comment from the Kagi CEO says this
| was developed by a single developer in a couple of weeks...
| Yes they will have to finish building up infrastructure
| behind it, but as a paying Kagi user I'm more than happy to
| support any side ventures that ultimately end up making
| search better in the long run.
| nabogh wrote:
| Yeah like it's fine. I just felt the value wasn't quite there
| for me personally and I found a few too many projects coming
| out that didn't benefit me. So I cancelled. No harm done in
| the end, just a little sad nothing is filling my personal
| niche of the market.
| samatman wrote:
| They don't spend your money, fella.
|
| They spend their money, some of which you paid them in exchange
| for services. Which you've stopped doing.
| nabogh wrote:
| Of course I understand that it's not my money. Weirdly
| hostile comment.
|
| I'm just expressing that the value wasn't quite there for
| myself. And these projects kept coming out so I wondered if
| they were the reason for the higher prices.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Questions as a technical writer who maintains docs sites:
|
| * What pages would get included in the index? Everything on the
| same domain? Or only pages where the search widget is included?
| Your demo looks like it's pulling in answers from kagi.com
| whereas if I were maintaining those docs I might want it to only
| look at help.kagi.com
|
| * Do I get logs of the things that people type into the box? How?
| Also the generated summaries, do I get logs of those? I would
| need to know what these LLMs are saying to my readers...
|
| * Do I get access to the embeddings that you've generated for my
| site? (Probably not but I have some use cases where it'd be
| really cool if there are embeddings for my site "just out there"
| with no further work on my part needed.) Edit: assuming that
| embeddings are involved which I realized later might not be
| true...
|
| * How frequently will you index my site? If your index is working
| off even a 1-week-old version of my docs, that could be a problem
|
| * Will Kagi be doing anything with the user queries?
| syntaxing wrote:
| I love this. Llamaindex has (had?) a discord bot that did
| something similar. I forgot who the exact provider was but it
| solved my problem. Sometimes small projects just doesn't have the
| people power for support and features like this go a long way.
| BeetleB wrote:
| OK - I must be dumb.
|
| > Just integrate with two lines of code using our lightweight Web
| Components (20kB min+gzip) or our Docusaurus, Hugo, or VitePress
| plugins. See demo in Kagi's own documentation at help.kagi.com
|
| How do I do this on my site? I couldn't find the code anywhere.
| justusthane wrote:
| Maybe you didn't read to the end, or maybe the page was updated
| after you commented?
|
| > We are currently in the process of gauging demand for this
| service. Please register your interest and we'll notify you
| when it launches.
| metabagel wrote:
| I am a paid subscriber. I love Kagi search. I love that I can
| lower my personal ranking of a website which doesn't provide
| value for me - SEO spam, AI nonsense, etc.
| lauriewired wrote:
| Any chance you'd consider making a version of this as a browser
| extension for paid subscribers?
|
| What I really want is this functionality on _unsupported_
| websites /documentation. It would be killer to "ask" kagi a fact
| about the article or docs I'm already reading, even if it only
| traverses/parses the single page.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| i think this would do what you want:
| https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
|
| now just need to build an extension :)
| jackson1442 wrote:
| It's already a feature in the Kagi browser extensions! Just
| summarization (and their FastGPT), not the website Q&A part.
|
| chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kagi-search-
| for-chr...
|
| firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kagi-
| search-f...
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Light fast response, fuzzy search, low-difficulty include. If
| this was available and free, I'd be working hard to use this to
| search all my note/docs. If it were cheap, I'd use it for simple
| search @ dayjob on a regular basis. What a great little feature!
| I am not a paying customer for Kagi, though I keep thinking about
| it. Maybe this'll turn me into a paying customer ahead of
| schedule.
| RagnarD wrote:
| Paying Kagi search customer here. Thanks for letting me dump
| Google and providing better features as well.
| Springtime wrote:
| The demo docs site says the feature is only available to
| 'Ultimate' members, while the linked page is ambiguous. Is it the
| case that Sidekick is only available for such Kagi members?
| freediver wrote:
| > The demo docs site says the feature is only available to
| 'Ultimate' members
|
| Can you share a link to the page that says so (not correctly).
| qwertox wrote:
| I didn't learn anything from that screencast. It's not clear what
| action causes which reaction.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Free for small/personal websites is great.
| stpe wrote:
| Funny. Kagi was the payment solution I used to sell shareware in
| the late 90'ies. I believe the company later disappeared due a
| fraud case that made it bankrupt.
|
| Seems like both domain and company name is recycled into this
| now.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I think everyone has some point where they determined that Google
| "went bad" (or at least everyone who thought they were good at
| some point). Mine is Google Plus, because they decided to make
| it, like Facebook, a destination. Before it was unveiled, I
| assumed it was going to be, like AdWords, a thing you could add
| to your website: adding a social layer to the Web would have
| increased its usefulness, allowed Google to do its usual thing of
| providing a feature that informed it of where the interesting
| stuff was, and undermined Facebook's main advantage over the rest
| of the web.
|
| I'm cheered that Kagi gets what Google forgot.
| t00 wrote:
| In Kagi example search results I found some results being
| considerably not relevant to the search query. Is it like an
| option "discover" which can be disabled? Headphones search
| returned a MacOS app when searching on a phone. Does actual
| search vary reaults based on device user-agent class or platform?
| helboi4 wrote:
| Sounds sick
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