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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 ye
by freediver 3y ago
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 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 agoRE 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoKagi 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 3y agoYes, summary mode is completely optional (and turned off by default as you can see in our demo).
- spenczar5 3y agoI 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 3y agoHi 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 3y agoThat 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).
- daco 3y agoIs there any reliable AI generated content detector today ? I've tried many free and paying ones online, but they're aren't reliable
- kazinator 3y agoKagi is Japanese for key, right? We search with a search key. If I'm getting it right. Do you know that "sidekick" is aibó in Japanese (相棒)? Notice the "AI" in it?
- neilv 3y agoSony AIBO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIBO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIBO
- kazinator 3y agoYeah, what are the odds that the Japanese would use up the obvious Japanese words for tech stuff.
- freediver 3y agoDidn't know that and thanks for giving us the idea. Aibó sounds much better than Sidekick, we may need to rename :)
- solardev 3y agoIsn't that already the name of Sony's robot dog?
- adiabatty 3y agoIt is.
- kazinator 3y agoEven though Sony has taken the sidekick word, there are lots. The characters 愛(love), 相(together) have "ai" readings and are productive. The verb あう goes to an あい noun form that is productive for forming words like aizuchi. Plus various others. aite 愛犬 aiken: beloved dog 相手 aite: companion, other party, opponent. 藍色 aiiro: indigo blue; 濃藍 koai: deep indigo. ... https://jisho.org/search/あい%3F https://jisho.org/search/あい%3F
- nicoburns 3y agoIs 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 3y agoYes, glad to see the skepticism towards AI, this is why it is turned off by default even in our demo.
- Repulsion9513 3y agoAh 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 3y agoYou should launch a crypto project for that
- crooked-v 3y agoWhat 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 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 https://bg3.wiki/wiki/D%26D_5e_rule_changes for an example) and is funded entirely off donations.
- esperent 3y agoIt 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 3y agoIt sounds good, except I don't want AI on my site. Any way to not have the AI part?
- Kbelicius 3y agoAI is optional and is turned off by default.
- davidthewatson 3y agoI'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 3y agothis is a great idea and should have happened long ago.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19713604#19714732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19713604#19714732
- goplayoutside 3y agoSatisfied 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 3y ago> Why does this exist? Because "AI" increases the shareholder's chances of winning the lottery.
- __rito__ 3y agoHi Vlad, would you consider providing subscription via never expiring model to Kagi search? No need to lower prices, but, say, X searches in Y dollars? But the search quota never expires? Like the OpenAI API model. If you offered such subscription, it would motivate me very highly to buy a subscription. With the monthly price, can't really afford it.