[HN Gopher] Kagi Assistant
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Kagi Assistant
        
       Author : darthShadow
       Score  : 255 points
       Date   : 2024-09-04 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.kagi.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.kagi.com)
        
       | jonathonlacher wrote:
       | I wonder what the limits are? Don't see any mention on the
       | announcement page.
        
         | freediver wrote:
         | The Assistant currently has no hard limits on usage. We would
         | like it to stay unlimited and will be monitoring this actively.
         | 
         | Just added to announcement FAQ
        
       | zzanz wrote:
       | "Integration with Kagi's legendary quality search results" I
       | don't disagree that this is useful, but I personally don't
       | consider an assistant to be a chatbot that can tell me the
       | weather. Assistants actively engage your daily life and do things
       | that are usually considered tedious for people with a lack of
       | time. Sure, that's a big ask for A.I in its current generation,
       | but now for example I can ask Google Assistant (Gemini?) to save
       | the shopping list I just gave it or even answer my calls in some
       | cases. It's also certainly not the standard of human assistants,
       | but it's closer than a chatbot.
        
       | cstuder wrote:
       | So for 25$ a month I get access to ChatGPT and Claude offerings
       | in addition to access to Kagi search. This sounds like a good
       | deal, compared to the 20$/month access to ChatGPT only. Or am I
       | missing something?
        
         | dvh wrote:
         | You can not spend the $25 and you will save $25.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | It's like Jensen said: The more you buy, the more you save!
           | /s
        
         | bangaladore wrote:
         | You can use something like OpenRouter, which lets you access
         | essentially all commercially available models. Including open-
         | source models. There are no rate limits.
         | 
         | You pay a different rate per model (OpenRouter shows the
         | pricing transparently). You load your account with credits. I
         | use it daily (undoubtedly far more than the average user) and
         | loaded 50$ with credits five months ago, but I still have over
         | 1/2 of it left.
         | 
         | I think it is hard to believe that Kagi would be any cheaper
         | and have no rate limits.
        
           | cstuder wrote:
           | Thanks for the hint, a usage based model looks way more
           | attractive to me right now.
        
             | exe34 wrote:
             | deepinfra is pretty easy to use too, for llamas and other
             | "open" ones.
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | Keep in mind that, while OpenRouter gives you the upstream
           | price for OpenAI/Anthropic models (so you pay the same per
           | token), there's a loading charge, so if you want to load $10
           | in credits you pay $12 or so.
           | 
           | This means that it's more expensive than calling OpenAI
           | directly, even though they have the same price per token.
        
             | bangaladore wrote:
             | Where the loading charge is amortized over all the calls
             | made.
             | 
             | If you want to use precisely one API, paying directly for
             | that API is cheaper. However, that's only true with closed-
             | source providers. Anyone can host a server running llama
             | 3.1 that OpenRouter could (in theory) use, bringing price
             | competition to model cost. Closed-source models have a
             | monopoly and can set their price wherever they want.
             | 
             | I'm okay with spending an extra 2$ every six months to
             | access the APIs of any model I want.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | Sure, but I only use the hosted APIs, so for me it
               | doesn't make much sense to pay the extra premium. Maybe
               | it doesn't for others either.
        
           | hn_user2 wrote:
           | Chatblade cli is also worth checking out. No loading fees and
           | you can pipe code results to files.
        
           | SirYandi wrote:
           | Just plug your API keys into a front end like
           | https://github.com/enricoros/big-AGI and pay as you go for
           | all commercially available models
        
             | freedomben wrote:
             | Have you tried open-webui?[1] I've been using that and
             | really loving it, but wondering if I should try out big-AGI
             | 
             | [1]: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
        
           | sergiotapia wrote:
           | There's also BigAgi (really a weird ass name - probably
           | hurting them) that is good for the same use case. Just paste
           | in your API key and you get a really nice UI to chat through
           | at-cost.
           | 
           | https://get.big-agi.com/
        
             | bangaladore wrote:
             | A nice thing about this as I'm reading it is you can hook
             | up OpenRouter to it. OpenRouter's interface leaves a lot to
             | be desired.
        
           | Havoc wrote:
           | OpenRouter absolutely does have rate limits:
           | 
           | https://openrouter.ai/docs/limits
           | 
           | ...haven't had issues with them, but they are there
        
         | eli wrote:
         | It was a little janky when I tested it in beta and you don't
         | get all the features of paying for ChatGPT directly (no
         | multimodal, no DALL-E, etc) but otherwise yeah it's a good
         | deal.
         | 
         | If you just want text chat with different models it's great.
        
         | lolinder wrote:
         | Also, if you're already a Kagi Pro subscriber it's really only
         | $15/mo more for access to both models. This is the first time
         | I've actually been tempted by one of these subscription LLMs.
        
         | blackeyeblitzar wrote:
         | What is the best paid service for private, anonymous,
         | censorship free access to an LLM chatbot? Are there any that
         | let you choose between multiple LLM backends to be able to
         | compare answers or avoid being subject to secret system
         | prompts, while still retaining privacy?
        
       | scblock wrote:
       | Cool, not a feature I personally want and behind a higher priced
       | tier than I pay for now. That seems entirely reasonable for both
       | Kagi and for me.
        
       | jazzyjackson wrote:
       | Hmmm
       | 
       | One feature here that I think competitors lack is that the LLM's
       | view of search results can be constrained by Kagi's search "lens"
       | [0] that let you exclude various categories of results.
       | 
       | I use Kagi but haven't dug into lenses, anyone have experience ?
       | 
       | I'm currently trying to write python script interfacing with
       | outlook's mailterm interface (win32com.client) and it's annoying.
       | I wonder if I can restrict search results to a particular domain
       | so it only pulls from microsoft docs...
       | 
       | [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html
        
         | abound wrote:
         | I use the Programming, Forums, PDFs, Recipes, and Small Webs
         | lenses pretty regularly, though I haven't tried making my own
         | lens yet. The 'Programming' lens is probably what you'd want
         | for your Python script.
         | 
         | Note: I work part-time at Kagi (was a Kagi user before that),
         | not doing search stuff.
        
         | PhilippGille wrote:
         | If you want to restrict results to a single page you can all to
         | use `site:example.com` in your search.
        
       | crowcroft wrote:
       | This is actually really exciting for Kagi. In a lot of situations
       | the underlying model (Claude, GPT4 etc.) isn't that exciting,
       | it's the connection to search to retrieve and summarize recent
       | information that's exciting.
       | 
       | By already having a traditional search engine this puts Kagi at a
       | big advantage compared to someone like Perplexity, or even Claude
       | and OpenAI who I think are all cobbling together solutions on top
       | of Bing's API.
        
         | throwup238 wrote:
         | The ability to use lenses with custom assistants is the killer
         | feature IMO.
         | 
         | Want to search for open source projects that implement some
         | algorithm? Create a Github/Gitlab lens. Want to ask it
         | questions only about some framework? Add it's domain to a lens.
        
           | crowcroft wrote:
           | Yea, it solves a lot of limitations with LLMs generally
           | struggling with 'niche' topics.
           | 
           | Being able to innovate on the search side while everyone else
           | loses a lot of many training LLMs feels like a good space to
           | be in at the moment.
        
       | stagalooo wrote:
       | I've been curious about Kagi as a search engine for a while now
       | and this seems like a good time to try, given that I already pay
       | $20/month for ChatGPT.
       | 
       | The thing stopping me currently from trying this or Claude is I
       | rely on the Opt+Space shortcut with the ChatGPT mac app.
       | 
       | Are there any other options for a native mac app with integration
       | as good as the ChatGPT app?
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | I don't know if they have shortcuts, but if not you could
         | likely add some automation to do it: there's Msty and ChatBox
         | that can use any model.
        
       | cube2222 wrote:
       | To repeat myself from a recent HN thread:
       | 
       | I've been using Kagi for a while (almost two years now!) and it's
       | been nothing but excellent!
       | 
       | Lenses are very useful (Reddit lens is on every second search),
       | and I personally really like the AI features they are working on.
       | 
       | The new more advanced assistant which is able to do searches,
       | which can also be constrained to lenses, and lets you pick an
       | arbitrary model, is excellent, and basically means I don't need a
       | chatgpt/claude subscription, as Kagi covers it very well.
       | 
       | All in all, great product which I'm happy to pay for.
        
         | eli wrote:
         | Unfortunately I think Kagi only has old Reddit content now that
         | Reddit only lets Google crawl them:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033
        
           | msmithstubbs wrote:
           | Kagi uses Google as one of its sources for search results so
           | should be able to return the same reddit results as Google.
        
             | eli wrote:
             | Doesn't seem like it. Can you get it to return a reddit
             | result from the last 6 weeks?
        
               | ezekg wrote:
               | I'm able to search a post I made a couple weeks ago: http
               | s://kagi.com/search?q=%22union_of%22+site%3Areddit.com
        
               | msmithstubbs wrote:
               | Try this:
               | 
               | https://kagi.com/search?q=remarkable+pro+site%3Areddit.co
               | m
               | 
               | It includes Reddit results from less than 24 hours ago.
        
               | eli wrote:
               | Ah hmm. Maybe they are doing something special with
               | "site:reddit.com" queries.
               | 
               | If I search for that exact Reddit post using the lens it
               | isn't there.
               | https://kagi.com/search?q=ReMarkable+Paper+Pro+hands-
               | on+revi...
        
               | darby_nine wrote:
               | Curiously this link seems to show the "Academic" lens.
               | Switching to the "Forums" lens pulls it right up for me.
        
               | atombender wrote:
               | The lens ID in the URL doesn't look to be globally
               | unique. It's just l=<number>, and the number seems to be
               | order in the lens list under your account.
        
               | littlecranky67 wrote:
               | Well, there never was any law that required robots.txt to
               | be honored. Big players like Google do, but I am not
               | aware of any consequences if they wouldnt (of course
               | UNTIL it is then regulated).
        
           | lotsofpulp wrote:
           | Old Reddit (and other website) content might actually be more
           | valuable given the higher likelihood of newer posts being
           | spam/AI bot posts.
        
             | DoughnutHole wrote:
             | That disregards the fact that facts change over time.
             | 
             | If you google "best DSLR camera reddit" it's much less
             | valuable if the results are 5 years old, even if they're
             | LLM free - the cameras on the market may very well have
             | changed in that timeframe.
        
       | aeturnum wrote:
       | I do think LLMs have their place in search and I think the Kagi
       | approach feels a lot better than Googles'. Kagi doesn't inject
       | LLM results anywhere, but they've been making LLMs accessible in
       | their search interface for a long while - this being the most
       | evolved version of that effort. I am not totally sold on
       | everything they are doing but I hate their integration of LLMs
       | the least.
        
         | lawn wrote:
         | Kagi's auto summary feature when you add a question mark after
         | your query is absolutely excellent.
         | 
         | It essentially summarizes the top search results for you,
         | leaning in on a strength of LLMs (summarizing) while reducing
         | its greatest weakness (hallucinations).
        
           | aeturnum wrote:
           | For me, search integration of LLMs also helps bring together
           | the value prop of paid search. It's not just privacy, it's
           | the skillful integration of a premium information processing
           | service (with built in privacy).
        
       | tinyhouse wrote:
       | It's not clear from the post how to access this new assistant.
       | The search page has no such option (not a paying user). When I
       | run a search, I only see an LLM based summary of the results
       | similar to Google's.
       | 
       | Update: I see now that they say it's not available for free
       | users. Need to pay $25/month. Not sure why, they can offer it for
       | free users with the cheaper models like they do now to generate a
       | "quick answer". I'm not going to pay to try it out.
        
         | jjmarr wrote:
         | Kagi search isn't free either.
        
       | rlad wrote:
       | For users of both, how does this compare to searchGPT, in terms
       | of results quality and quantity?
        
       | bun_terminator wrote:
       | c-f "ai"; c-w. and onto the pile they go!
       | 
       | Is it still legal do do something with a computer without
       | involving "ai"?
        
         | chankstein38 wrote:
         | agreed. I'm getting pretty sick of AI summaries that will fully
         | lie to me about things. Google's search summary AI is awful I'd
         | expect Kagi's to be similar.
        
           | exe34 wrote:
           | does Google ai summary lie? do you have examples?
        
             | Diti wrote:
             | https://old.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_sl
             | i...
        
           | KoolKat23 wrote:
           | I think you should try Kagi before passing judgement, really
           | clever design.
           | 
           | You only get the quick summary if you ask for it (i.e. you're
           | happy to take the risk). Another handy use, is web summarize,
           | which looks at the specific webpage, lowering the risk even
           | further.
           | 
           | If you don't call these features it's straight up clean
           | search with no ads and it's fast with good results.
        
         | exe34 wrote:
         | see roko's basilisk.
        
         | TNorthover wrote:
         | uncertAIn.
        
         | CatWChainsaw wrote:
         | No, Microsoft and Google and Apple need to know everything
         | you're doing, for the sake of the children.
        
       | daft_pink wrote:
       | I love Kagi and I'm a paid user, but I'm not willing to pay $25
       | per month for the assistants for the following reasons: * I
       | already pay these companies directly and wouldn't be able to
       | cancel these as I use the voice assistant on my phone from
       | ChatGPT and love using the artifacts from Claude on my computer *
       | I'm also paying raycast to access these at the touch of my
       | keyboard and prefer to quick access use it there
       | 
       | I love Kagi and can't recommend it enough. I wish I could just
       | give them my api key for this instead of paying several different
       | service providers for the same ai access to the same models. This
       | is getting expensive.
        
         | bossyTeacher wrote:
         | Can you explain to me why Kagi is so good? I don't use Google
         | Search so don't try the privacy card on me
        
           | teractiveodular wrote:
           | Search results are ranked by what's best, not which
           | advertiser pays the most. And unlike DDG, the quality of the
           | results is actually great.
        
             | ziddoap wrote:
             | > _And unlike DDG, the quality of the results is actually
             | great._
             | 
             | Any chance you can expand on this?
             | 
             | I've used DDG for years and find the results great, but
             | maybe we just query for different things. Is there any
             | specific topics that you find DDG is bad at but Kagi is
             | good at?
        
               | MostlyStable wrote:
               | I'm a paying Kagi user. I don't think that I can give a
               | clear example or explanation of why they are better,
               | partly because it's been a long time since I used DDG,
               | and I gave up pretty quickly. The one thing I can say is
               | that, for the short time I was using DDG, I found myself
               | doing a search, and then in most cases, immediately
               | redoing the search using the !g, because the DDG results
               | were bad, and even though I am also dissatisfied with
               | google results these days, they were better. Kagi has the
               | same functionality, but I find myself almost never using
               | it.
               | 
               | That being said, if you personally are happy with your
               | DDG results, then I'd say you should probably stick with
               | it. Kagi _might_ be better for you than DDG, but if you
               | aren't actively dissatisfied (the way I was with Google
               | and everything else), then the room for improvement is
               | smaller. Might be worth using their free tier (which is
               | 100 queries per month I think) just to test out some side
               | by side searches though.
        
               | lovemenot wrote:
               | >> Might be worth using their free tier (which is 100
               | queries per month I think)
               | 
               | 100 in total, it seems
        
               | dabbz wrote:
               | I personally switched away from DDG when they started
               | removing results that were errantly removed by Bing.
               | Since Bing is their upstream results provider, I didn't
               | feel like I was getting away from the overreach of big
               | tech, so I went to Kagi where they don't solely rely on
               | upstream providers as they have their own crawler and
               | such. The fact that they offer other great features like
               | filtering results, and integrated AI makes it worth
               | switching and paying for. Plus, I hate ads. Targeted or
               | not. So I'm willing to pay to make that go away for a
               | quality service.
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | I love being able to uprank, downrank, pin or blacklist
           | specific domains/sites for my personal results. That alone
           | makes it worth it. I also find the search results to be as
           | good or better than Google. Once my personal ranking kicks in
           | it's not even close.
        
             | everforward wrote:
             | It uses Google's index, among others.
             | 
             | Being able to personalize your own search is truly the
             | killer feature, though, in a couple of ways.
             | 
             | The first is as you point out: being able to "edit your own
             | algorithm" is really nice. I don't have to try to "train"
             | Google's algorithm to show the results I want, and it's
             | very easy to say "I never want to see this site in my
             | results again". I'm still shocked Google doesn't have that
             | feature even as some kind of client-side Javascript.
             | 
             | The second is Lenses. It's so obvious in hindsight that a
             | singular algorithm is insufficient for search. Nobody wants
             | or needs their searches for porn to impact their searches
             | for technical documentation, or vice versa. There are more
             | nuanced examples, but that's the most obvious (also, I
             | don't think Kagi indexes NSFW content or at least I haven't
             | seen any).
        
           | drdaeman wrote:
           | It does its job: provides web results relevant to the query.
           | At the moment it has acceptable signal-to-noise ratio
           | (quality varies per-query, but it has higher chances of
           | useful links than web spam), which is why people tend to say
           | it's good.
        
         | freedomben wrote:
         | IMHO if you pay for them directly already, then probably not
         | worth it. I cancelled Ultimate because it just wasn't feature
         | competitive to me over OpenWebUI, but if you want to be able to
         | try out several different models from different companies
         | without giving each of them a card and using a different
         | interface, Kagi Assistant could be a good solution.
        
           | jmaker wrote:
           | There's still a bit nuance to that - in most cases I've
           | experienced integrated via API in a third-party app, the
           | results have been mostly underwhelming, as opposed to being
           | used directly, preferably with the configurable contexts.
           | Including GitHub and Microsoft Copilot, various choose-your-
           | AI apps, even corporate chatbots, sentiment analyzers and
           | summarizers I've worked with. Asking via ChatGPT or Claude
           | directly has produced more acceptable results to me than via
           | an intermediary.
        
         | dcchambers wrote:
         | Maybe they'll offer a "bring your own API key" option some day.
         | 
         | I imagine the intersect between paid Kagi users and paid LLM
         | users is pretty high, and many people probably don't want to
         | double-dip on LLM spending.
        
       | chiefrubberduck wrote:
       | can you use the assistant to generate images as well?
        
       | NotYourLawyer wrote:
       | Oof, I wanted a better google, not a worse one.
        
         | recursive wrote:
         | So did I. But for me, it is.
        
       | traceroute66 wrote:
       | I recently tried Kagi and I struggled to see the value.
       | 
       | For many queries side-by-side with Startpage it delivered the
       | same results word-for-word (sure you get a few sponsored links
       | top-3 of Startpage but its no big deal to scroll past those).
       | 
       | For other things, it was just plain annoying, e.g. "newest $type
       | restaurants in $large_city" half the results on the first page
       | were from 10 years ago (e.g. dated 2014). I mean FFS I put the
       | word "newest" in there !
       | 
       | They seem to have a habit of interespersing very weird Facebook
       | links randomly in the middle of a list of results. For example I
       | was searching for something related to a specific Prometheus
       | function (which I explicitly named in the query, alongside the
       | word prometheus) and Kagi insisted on interspersing the technical
       | results with random links to Facebook pages of companies selling
       | "girlie dresses for proms".
       | 
       | I approached Kagi with an open mind, but having used up the 100
       | free searches nothing made me say "just shut up and take my
       | money".
        
         | recursive wrote:
         | > but its no big deal to scroll past those
         | 
         | For some of us it is. If your search engine's revenue model is
         | based on advertising to its users, their relationship is
         | fundamentally adversarial. This affects all of their decisions,
         | in ways that are sometimes hard to identify. Witness the slow
         | decline of google search result ads.
         | 
         | If users are the direct source of revenue, then everyone's
         | interests are aligned.
         | 
         | Also, I, and many like me, value a lack of ads much more highly
         | than you do. Which is fine.
        
           | rvnx wrote:
           | 40 to 60% of users get the free search results, and the
           | comfort of not having ads with a simple "Hide element"
           | extension.
           | 
           | It's hard to beat.
        
             | MostlyStable wrote:
             | Avoiding the ads doesn't fix the alignment issues. Even
             | without ads, modern google search is dramatically worse
             | than a decade ago, and I'm personally pretty confident it's
             | because their interests and user interests are not well
             | aligned. I don't have to worry about that with Kagi.
        
         | RoyalHenOil wrote:
         | Customizing your search results is a big part of it. When I
         | tried Kagi, I did not find it to be a huge improvement on
         | Google until I started adjusting the rankings of my search
         | results. Now I find it painful to go back to Google when I use
         | someone else's computer or device.
         | 
         | The other big part of it (for me at least) is seeing more
         | obscure websites in my results. I have had Kagi for a year now,
         | and it has saved me more money than I've spent on it by making
         | it easier to find specific products at lesser-known shops.
         | These lesser-known shops often have really great sales because
         | they are trying to compete against the big names, and Google
         | pretty much _only_ shows me the big names.
        
       | dubme1 wrote:
       | Paid Kagi user here. I REALLY wish Kagi would focus on it's core
       | selling point: search. Building a search engine is hard enough. I
       | use Kagi Search everyday and I am mostly happy with it but the
       | product has a lot of room for improvment.
       | 
       | Stop launching new products (browser, summarizer, gpt, assistant)
       | while your core product is still behind the competition in many
       | areas.
        
         | unshavedyak wrote:
         | Paid Kagi user here. I love the AI additions, because to me
         | it's an alternate interface to the core selling point: search.
         | 
         | Whether or not Kagi can achieve more than the "search alone is
         | hard enough" point however is fair - though i've been happy so
         | far.
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | Same. I love the AI additions and I think they've introduced
           | them very thoughtfully.
           | 
           | To me, the best part of the AI additions is that it can
           | (almost instantaneously) summarize information from the
           | several top hits of a search. This is subtly but importantly
           | different from having the LLM spit out an answer based on
           | it's knowledge base, and also is able to quickly and easily
           | cite it's sources! Extremely useful to me.
        
             | unshavedyak wrote:
             | Agreed! To me LLMs as they stand now are a natural
             | extension of the classic "Google". Which is to say a
             | Natural Language -> Search Results list. People (and
             | products lol) got hung up on LLMs returning the answers
             | directly.. and while they've been a definite disappointment
             | in that realm, they can be great for summarizing and
             | aggregating imo.
        
         | Apocryphon wrote:
         | I agree that they should focus on their core product, but
         | ironically while I use Kagi from time to time, I'm still mostly
         | on DDG- via Orion, a browser I'm willing to pay for.
        
         | Spivak wrote:
         | If you hear Vlad talk it's very clear that he considers these
         | things to be part of that core product. The summarizer powers
         | the ability to summarize articles / search results (even
         | video), the assistant and fastgpt power their answer to
         | Google's snippets and quick answers, small-web is the minimum-
         | useful thing to start their own index and not have to pay rent
         | to Bing/Google, and they view Orion to be a long-term bet on
         | the belief that this is the only way they'll get Kagi as a
         | default search engine.
        
           | jmaker wrote:
           | Great points. Though I think in order for any search to
           | become a default in some browser app would take a billion or
           | so in competing annual payment, or Google it will remain.
           | 
           | Also, AI aside, Searx has been around for many years as a
           | very promising metasearch, even self-hosted engine, alas
           | still little traction. Great to have all results, including
           | re-ranked Google and Reddit in one place.
        
         | barbazoo wrote:
         | To me it seems like that's what they're doing here. I don't see
         | right away how this is not their core business.
         | 
         | > Kagi Assistant has the ability to use Kagi Search to source
         | the highest quality information meaning that its responses are
         | grounded in the most up-to-date factual information while
         | disregarding most "spam" and "made for advertising" sites with
         | our unique ranking algorithm and user search personalizations
         | on top.
        
           | daveoc64 wrote:
           | You have to pay extra for it, so it can't be part of the core
           | business.
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | I think this is very much about search. They just took on what
         | Perplexity is doing with search. And I'm glad because I've been
         | using it occasionally and now I can just keep everything in
         | Kagi.
         | 
         | They're literally taking on competition here.
        
         | Terretta wrote:
         | > _core selling point: search_
         | 
         | The people I know who like to dictate into their phones and who
         | have OpenAI's iOS app tend to open ChatGPT to "search" before
         | they open Google or Ask Siri now.
         | 
         | They're going to go to one thing first, and this puts Kagi as
         | an option.
         | 
         | Apple's alleged integration with OpenAI is presumably rolling
         | in to Sherlock this though.
        
         | freedomben wrote:
         | The AI additions IMHO _are_ search. Historically search gave us
         | an ordered list of results, but there 's no reason it needs to.
         | The Kagi quick answer for example is phenomenal IMHO. Most of
         | the time I am searching is because I need information for
         | something. The "quick answer" and it's source citing can much
         | more quickly tell me whether the results are worth a click. At
         | this point I would hate to return to the old list of links
         | output.
        
           | dawnerd wrote:
           | I think the problem is we're blending two different
           | methodologies for finding information. When I search for
           | something I want to get to the source. Others just want the
           | answer. Ideally it should still be smart enough to figure
           | that out, kinda what it does already if you search with a
           | question.
        
         | jmaker wrote:
         | I think AI capabilities have been becoming an integral part of
         | modern search. On the flip side you have the SEO optimizations.
         | 
         | Brave Search has offered an AI summarizer and assistant for a
         | long time now. Bing with their OpenAI-powered Copilot. Google
         | with the improved Bard/Gemini more recently. Amazon with the
         | perhaps Anthropic-based Q for Business.
         | 
         | I think the end user is growing to expect the AI-augmented
         | experience from all knowledge lookups. Feedback loop queries
         | have become so natural to me, I've been finding it awkward to
         | ask only one search query without a narrowing follow-up query,
         | having the former discarded - kinda no longer adequate,
         | particularly given the SEO-optimized flip side full of junk.
        
         | darby_nine wrote:
         | > while your core product is still behind the competition in
         | many areas
         | 
         | IDK, I've been very happy with it. Just the ability to
         | consistently pin/block domains is a massive upgrade over
         | Google.
        
         | bastawhiz wrote:
         | I couldn't disagree any harder. When I can't find an answer, I
         | turn to LLMs. I don't want to read half the docs on an AWS
         | product, I want the snippet of code that I care about. Kagi, as
         | best as I can tell, is the only search service which can answer
         | these questions and also respects me as a customer.
         | 
         | I think of it this way: there's often not a single page (or
         | even small handful of pages) that answer a query. The LLM
         | features answer the question with text that links to the pages,
         | rather than answering my question with pages that might contain
         | pieces of answers.
        
         | mattl wrote:
         | The move to AI stuff is why I don't have a Kagi subscription. I
         | really liked the idea of paying for search. I don't want to
         | give any money to an AI product.
        
       | mirkodrummer wrote:
       | What's the incentive for websites to let Kagi and others indexing
       | content if llms in search show relevant informations right away?
       | Wouldn't something like perplexity ai making more sense then? Or
       | perhaps better application of llms to search
        
         | lilyball wrote:
         | I haven't used Kagi's Quick Answer very often yet, but when I
         | do, it always cites its sources and I often end up clicking
         | into at least one of the sources to look for more detail or
         | context.
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | Bingo. I nearly always use the quick answer, and then will
           | use the cited sources to click onto the page to either read
           | more or verify that the summary was accurate (and it always
           | has been in the 300+ times I've used it).
        
       | matsemann wrote:
       | Isn't the point of a corporate blog to drive users to your
       | product? Then why do the blogs never have an easy way of getting
       | there? Clicking the logo and things in the header all just take
       | me to the front page of the blog. Pet peeve of mine.
        
       | freedomben wrote:
       | Something I love about Kagi that isn't often known, is they will
       | pro-rate based on days. If you are on an existing plan, you can
       | upgrade to Ultimate, try it out for a few days, and then
       | downgrade and only pay for the days you used it. I despise the
       | subscription model generally, but if we're going to have it then
       | I wish more companies would do pro-rating! Anyway, you can try it
       | out for very low risk.
        
         | KoolKat23 wrote:
         | Now that's even better. I'm definitely going to try this by
         | upgrading temporarily who knows maybe it'll stick. Good
         | business practice by Kagi.
        
       | ewy1 wrote:
       | I appreciate that it's on a separate plan so that I don't have to
       | interface with it.
        
       | doublerabbit wrote:
       | I upgraded. Using the prompt: "something cool in html css"
       | 
       | Mistral and GPT - Create the same example of a flip card
       | 
       | Gemini - Creates glowing neon text
       | 
       | and Claude - Produces a pulsing dot, that enlarges and shrinks
       | and radiates a fading white shadow. That's cool.
        
       | throwing_away wrote:
       | I love Kagi and happily pay their $25/mo but I think it's a
       | mistake to think of their offerings as cutting-edge AI. It's
       | obviously limited compared to open source software (as mentioned
       | elsewhere in this thread already) and likely more expensive than
       | raw API calls. This isn't the "best" AI experience.
       | 
       | What it is though, is fast, available on all my devices,
       | constantly upgraded, and integrated with their already excellent
       | search engine.
       | 
       | When I see these sorts of announcements and read some of the
       | comments here, it makes me worry that bad customers cause
       | enshittification and I hope kagi stays true to their human-
       | friendly web search product.
        
       | mtrovo wrote:
       | > You can edit the question and add that you're working on a
       | binary classification problem to get a more specific answer.
       | 
       | This mid-thread editing feature sounds really useful, I'm curious
       | how does it work when you switch between models in the middle of
       | a conversation?
       | 
       | Like, say I start with a general search question, then halfway
       | through I want to switch to a coding model to ask something like,
       | "Can you create a Python dictionary of the top 10 longest city
       | names in the UK and their populations?"
       | 
       | Does the context carry over smoothly, or would I need to rephrase
       | things when switching models? Wondering how it handles tasks that
       | require different kinds of expertise without losing track of the
       | flow.
        
       | hyperbolablabla wrote:
       | I don't find Kagi as compelling as some other users seem to,
       | worked about as well (read, poorly) as most other modern search
       | engines
        
       | jacooper wrote:
       | Why would i use this over perplexity pro?
        
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