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Kagi Sidekick (alpha)
- ggoo 3y agoI just want good search results. This feels like a distraction.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoAgree, 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 3y agoAgreed. 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 3y agoGiven 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 3y agoHm, I may have judged too quickly then - I do hope this translates to better quality. Will wait and see.
- mostlysimilar 3y agoI 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.
- sumedh 3y ago> core offering of a web search engine. They will get replaced by someone else if they dont focus on AI.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kelvie 3y agoDisclaimer: 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 3y agoMaybe 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 3y agoMy 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 https://kagi.com/smallweb
- psytrx 3y agoI'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 3y agoYes! It tells them what people search for on that particular website… all very valuable data.
- pbronez 3y agoHmm I’d like to hear more from Kagi on this. They make a point of not logging searches by their subscribers. If this widget is available to non-subscribers outside of Kagi.com, do the same privacy-first principles apply?
- smcleod 3y agoEarly 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 3y agoIt 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 3y agoThe problem is that it can go also terribly wrong. (New way for SEO optimisation)
- BadHumans 3y agoKagi 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 3y agoYet. If you want to be better than Google, you need to avoid Google's mistakes.
- al_borland 3y agoWith 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 3y agoThe 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.
- MostlyStable 3y agoAs 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jcul 3y agoThis 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 3y agoI pay for search, and would also pay for email (currently paying Google). Speaking of Google, I hate the Kagi “g” logo.
- stefandesu 3y agoSame, it sometimes confuses me and I think I'm on Google. But maybe that's exactly the point.
- reddalo 3y agoHow 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 3y agoKagi 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 https://kagi.com/smallweb [2] https://detailed.com/google-control/ https://detailed.com/google-control/
- kbumsik 3y agoGreat work! How it would be different from Algolia DocSearch? https://docsearch.algolia.com https://docsearch.algolia.com
- paranoidxprod 3y agoThank 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 3y ago
- numbers 3y agoThis 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 3y agoI'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 3y agoThey 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 3y agoOh, 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 https://i.imgur.com/ghmUcAh.png
- samatman 3y agoThat's.... good, though? What happens if you ask for 23000.0/10500?
- 3y ago
- runamuck 3y agoI pay for Kagi. I also have a small hobby site and would love to try this out.
- nabogh 3y agoI 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 3y agoAll companies allocate some fraction of their resources towards innovation outside of what is currently their core feature-set.
- Onawa 3y agoOn 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 3y agoYeah 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 3y agoThey 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 3y agoOf 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 3y agoQuestions 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoOK - 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 3y agoMaybe 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoAny 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 3y agoi think this would do what you want: https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html now just need to build an extension :)
- jackson1442 3y agoIt'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-chrome/cdglnehniifkbagbbombnjghhcihifij https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kagi-search-for-chr... firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kagi-search-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kagi-search-f...
- pbronez 3y agoHere’s an iOS shortcut that adds a “Summarize with Kagi” option to the share menu https://www.routinehub.co/shortcut/16912/ https://www.routinehub.co/shortcut/16912/
- lelandbatey 3y agoLight 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 3y agoPaying Kagi search customer here. Thanks for letting me dump Google and providing better features as well.
- Springtime 3y agoThe 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 3y ago> 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).
- Springtime 3y agoSure. I clicked the docs demo URL[1] linked from the Sidekick page, then typed in the search box `what is Sidekick`, which returned the following: > Kagi Sidekick is a helpful and cheerful assistant that assists users in finding the information they want on the Kagi website. It is a product feature backed by Kagi Search and large language models. Kagi Sidekick is currently in open beta and is only available to Ultimate plan members. <link to Kagi Assistant page> The page it linked to was this[2], which stated similarly to the latter line above, except 'Sidekick' swapped to 'Assistant'. I had assumed from this that Sidekick had been renamed sometime recently or something. > Kagi Assistant is currently in open beta only available to Ultimate plan members. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ [2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
- pbronez 3y agoThis is their standard roll out strategy. The feature is in Alpha. They use the Ultimate tier as an early testing group. One thing you’re paying for at that tier is access to stuff like this fresh out of the lab.
- hansonpeter 3y ago[dead]
- wetpaws 3y ago[dead]
- Sovann102 3y ago[dead]
- qwertox 3y agoI didn't learn anything from that screencast. It's not clear what action causes which reaction.
- dcchambers 3y agoFree for small/personal websites is great.
- stpe 3y agoFunny. 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoIn 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 3y agoSounds sick