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Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

sidekick.kagi.com

131–140 of 172 posts

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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)

You can block the site in kagi if you don't like it, that's 50% of the entire moat of the search engine.

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#132

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 qua…

It sounds good, except I don't want AI on my site. Any way to not have the AI part?

AI is optional and is turned off by default.

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#133

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 qua…

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.

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#134
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

You can also force its appearance by sticking a ? at the end of a query, either space separated or otherwise.

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#135
post #117
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to make. You cannot prove any sentence was created by an LLM and you can't prove it wasn't.

Unless you design the LLM yourself and purposefully watermark the output. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04634.pdf

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".

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#136
post #66
post #14

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…

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.

Just tested this out, you can add "in decimal" to get it as a decimal.

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#137
post #8

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.

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.

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 :)

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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 c…

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.

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#139
post #76
post #6

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".

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.

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.

Re: Kagi Sidekick (alpha)

#140
post #14

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…

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.
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