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Kagi Small Web

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Re: Kagi Small Web

#121

Post by gjm11 »

olejorgenb wrote: post #108
vel0city wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only some operating system incorporated a way to make everything you've seen on your computer locally searchable, wouldn't that be a neat feature?

I believe there some projects trying this now using OCR IIRC. Did even Microsoft try something like this? It's of course something you'd only want running locally

I think the joke is that Microsoft did do something very like this -- they call it Windows Recall -- and it got a lot of angry pushback. (Partly, IIRC, because the specific way they did it initially was very bad in terms of security and privacy, but I think a lot of people quite understandably don't trust them to implement it (a) the way they claim they do or (b) competently, so even after they made a bunch of changes aimed at making it less scary it's still viewed with a lot of hostility.)

Re: Kagi Small Web

#122

Post by steve_adams_86 »

rusakov-field wrote: post #67

My blog was getting traffic from that domain! So that is what that is.

Same. I got an influx of bots from Singapore (around 50 visits per day) and in figuring out what's up with traffic, I noticed kagi as a reference for the first time.

Weird times. People are training their LLMs on my content yet people are still interested in technical content written by a human being. So I guess you just keep writing, right? I find it disheartening to know I'm training LLMs but I think I'm more encouraged knowing there are still humans reading it.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#123

Post by idop »

hamdingers wrote: post #92

I'm a Kagi search/assistant user and advocate but the "small web" product is a frustrating misnomer. To me the small web is any little website that was created to be interesting rather than to sell me something. That includes stuff like neocities, "shrine" type sites, single purpose sites, fandom portals, web experiments, etc. Unfortunately Kagi's definition of "small web" is: blog or webcomic. You must have an RSS f…

Not only that, I just clicked "Next Post" more than a hundred times, and over 90% of posts I got were about LLMs and coding agents.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#124

Post by mpalmer »

dotancohen wrote: post #97
mpalmer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the responses are backed by searches.

So some guy does hard work developing some technique or solving some problem. He documents his experience, puts up a tutorial on DO or AWS or somewhere else, and the ads on that document help offset the cost of hosting. Now comes along Kagi, scrapes that data, and presents it to you, their paying customer. I see a problem with this.

Do you pay LLM providers for agentic features? From your past submissions, you certainly seem to. Do those features make web searches and curl the results?

Were the models underlying those features trained on all available web content, or are they unlike any other enterprise models out there?

At any rate, you should see a bigger problem in what Google does, which you don't seem to.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#125

Post by twiclo »

flexagoon wrote: post #83
olejorgenb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic, but ref "I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article you were looking for" It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... (Could even be restricted based on viewport - I don't think it's that crazy of an idea) I kn…

There are things like Mymind (SaaS) or Karakeep (selfhosted) that do this, though they require you to explicitly save the pages instead of indexing everything by default

I haven't used this but looks someone created a self hosted version of Microsoft's Recall

https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall

Re: Kagi Small Web

#126

Post by rusakov-field »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #122
rusakov-field wrote: post #67

My blog was getting traffic from that domain! So that is what that is.

Same. I got an influx of bots from Singapore (around 50 visits per day) and in figuring out what's up with traffic, I noticed kagi as a reference for the first time. Weird times. People are training their LLMs on my content yet people are still interested in technical content written by a human being. So I guess you just keep writing, right? I find it disheartening to know I'm training LLMs but I think I'm more encou…

My attitude with writing has been : "Write to the void". There is nothing else to do.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#127

Post by windowliker »

evanjrowley wrote: post #98
olejorgenb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic, but ref "I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article you were looking for" It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... (Could even be restricted based on viewport - I don't think it's that crazy of an idea) I kn…

>It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... The answer to this is complicated. Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet captures. It's implemented in the browser for the…

>Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. [...] both will upload your browser history to the cloud.

I'm fairly certain I've caught Firefox doing something similar (regularly sending multiple tens of MB to Google servers in the background.)

Re: Kagi Small Web

#128

Post by mock-possum »

ArtificeAccount wrote: post #31

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites. I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google,…

Yep that was my experience to. It wasn’t bad necessarily, but certainly not as reliable / dependable as google, and not worth paying for.

Could just be that I’m familiar enough with google to always be able to make it work for me, could be a frog in boiling water type situation, but… as much as Kagi gets talked up on HN, I was pretty disappointed when I tried it. I was ready to get blown away, and instead I was underwhelmed.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#129

Post by scuppernong »

ArtificeAccount wrote: post #31

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites. I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google,…

it probably doesn't help that they're constantly bifurcating their tiny team into new projects. their browser is essentially nonfunctional for daily use but they've already moved on to porting it to Linux

Re: Kagi Small Web

#130

Post by monkey_monkey »

ArtificeAccount wrote: post #41
the_pwner224 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched about a year ago. At the time it did seem like a step up from Google results. But there's been an increasing prevalence of low quality results. Blogspam, AI websites, etc. Obviously not blaming Kagi here, web search has gotten hard recently. Is Kagi still better than Google? Probably, I don't really know because I don't use Google anymore. But at this point I feel like I'm with them out of inertia more tha…

I feel the same way. I'm probably going to end my subscription at some point, but right now the effort involved is what's keeping me with Kagi.

"the effort involved"

Feels like your comment saying it was too much effort to cancel Kagi took more effort than cancelling Kagi.

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