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Kagi Assistant

blog.kagi.com

161–170 of 247 posts

Re: Kagi Assistant

#161

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

If you publish to make information known, then your incentive is that it helps spread that information to people who may not otherwise visit your site. If you are trying to make money off of search engine traffic then you might not like this much at all. I think most people would rather not be pointed to those sites in the first place, so it’s a win-win if they block crawlers.

This is a bad take. I don't make money off search engine traffic (beyond the occasional donated dollar), and yet I would quite rather[0] that AI doesn't visit my site.

Imagine for a second a world where instead of publishing directly to your own website (home), you publish into the LLM's knowledge base. Nobody comes to you for information, they come to the LLM. Nobody cares about you, or the work you put in. Your labour is just a means to their end. To some extent, you could argue that Wikipedia works in this way, but it really doesn't. The work you put in is reproduced verbatim, and the work is collaborative. You get the joy of seeing your writing being used to help other people in a very direct sort of way, as opposed to being aggregated, misinterpreted and generally warped by a non-intelligent LLM.

In other words, you cannot possibly expect others to want to work in a sweat shop, toiling away to provide you with instant gratification. We must leave room for human expression.

[0]: https://boehs.org/llms.txt

Re: Kagi Assistant

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old Reddit (and other website) content might actually be more valuable given the higher likelihood of newer posts being spam/AI bot posts.

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.

What? Old reddit isn't using old facts.

I skimmed down and if this was about Kagu indexing being out of date then sorry I just realized that

Re: Kagi Assistant

#164
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Highly unlikely, that would undermine their business model. For the same reason they don't offer pay as you go plan. Vlad explicitly stated somewhere that they are able to make money only because many people do not use their plans to the fullest.

There will certainly be a level where this is viable, if not sensible. Rather than having “casual” users cover the cost of “extreme” users, letting them specify an API key will likely be beneficial (albeit for a small number of users).

Re: Kagi Assistant

#165

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,…

I really wanted to like Kagi, I'm onboard with paying for search, but I've had had a big issue with its speed when doing the trial to be honest, am I the only one bothered by this? Perhaps this is because I'm in Europe and it's faster in the US? A search request to Kagi seems to take around two seconds for me (shows as ~1s in the Kagi UI), it just feels really unpleasant compared to Google, I'm used to firing of a co…

Hrmm, I've noticed the same thing on the US west coast over the last year or so. Maybe I'll finally bother Kagi support about it.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#166
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I’d wager this is something more to do with the system prompts when using ChatGPT or Claude from their respective app. Claude system prompts are publicly available. You “should” get the same quality from their API if you set the same system prompt they use for their app. I haven’t tested this but I think this is the right approach if you want to achieve parity between the two.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting!! I'm not slamming you, or your experience or preferences. That said, I find very little difference between 2 seconds and one second or less than that. Search taking a small fragment of time just isn't a big deal and I search sometimes many times per day. What is the gain for you that makes 2 seconds an exception to using the product? Just curious. Peace, live well.

I feel like search is probably one of the most common things I do with a computer, I would say I often search many times per minute if I’m actively looking into some topic or issue. Because it’s such a common action for me, it feels like such a strong regression to go 2/3 times slower than before.

But do you seriously think you should get serious results in one second? I would understand the complaints about slowness if searches were taking like ten seconds, but a few seconds, I really must be getting old.

I still remember when google was giving relevant results in page 2. Now it's pretty much useless for me, and the fast search makes me think they are throwing away tons of potentially good stuff just to make it fast (and place more ads and rubbish scam/ai sites).

Re: Kagi Assistant

#168
I have been using Kagi for a while now. Something I have noticed recently is that it ignores a lot more of the words in my search queries, I felt the same thing with google over time, it shows results it thinks I want not the things I want.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#169
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

> Any chance you can expand on this?

Why do you ask people instead of trying it and finding out if you like it or not? They have a trial of 100 free searches.

This is a little bit like asking a coffee drinker "explain why I should drink coffee". It's better to try for yourself and see if you like it.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#170

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.

> Kagi doesn't inject LLM results anywhere

Kagi has AI generated stubs for some of the search results, probably originating from some of the search indexes they pay for.

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