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Kagi and Wolfram

blog.kagi.com

251–260 of 346 posts

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi just happens to be pretty popular here, it's how I found out about it.

> Kagi just happens to be pretty popular here _Pretty_ popular? Outside of Rust, Kagi might have the most fanatic following of any topic on HN. Which, while I'm sure Kagi is very happy with, is really rather annoying as a someone who doesn't care for it. Every conversation search-adjacent is just comments of "I pay for Kagi and it was the best dollars I've ever spent".

Is every other search tool's complete failure to come close to Kagi in being useful, and marginalia in being interesting, a particular pain point for you for some reason?

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#253
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I configured Reddit as a "Lense" (similar to what Kagi uses for things like searching across Forums, or news). With that, now I have a simple toggle at the top of Kagi which allows me to immediately turn a search into a Reddit search.

It took me way too long to start using Lenses. I've been a Kagi user for a while now, but lenses never really seemed that useful. The unlock for me is that I'm often looking for 3D models, so I added one for all the usual 3D model suspects (Thangs, Printables, etc).

Do you find that works better than using Thangs directly? It’s a meta-search engine itself.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#254
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re a commercial client No, I'm broke and have no income. But about a year ago I wrote some 20 line Python programs that use GPT (feed it text from web searches) and was surprised to find they worked significantly better than Bing's AI search... I used it at a small scale with Python's (unofficial?) DuckDuckGo API, but I was looking for a way to scale up (ideally for free or very cheap). At the time, Bing's API…

You say you're broke witbout income, but from reading your comments you have at least some skills to pay the bills. And I bet that if you put your back into it you can do it without misusing the only good search we've got. Or anything else for that matter. Keep it up!

Thanks. And I'm sure you can succeed without implying your prospects are crooks.

Edit: from your tone I assumed you worked for Kagi, but now I'm not sure

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#255
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who uses Mathematica, in this age of python/Julia etc? The Grad student world seems to be captured by Matlab

Also, if you don't need to run Mathematica offline, their cloud version of it is completely free (with some storage limits that you're unlikely to exceed). It's actually a pretty cool product, but the pricing model is a mess.

If you are doing anything serious then your problem will be the free cloud cpu limits. This is why most peoplr would prefer offline version. Also many universities and institutions will have policies against doing this work on the cloud (data policies... etc)

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#256

Tangentially related: does anyone have a recommendation for adding a Kagi search widget to Android home screen? I have read some related documentation [1] but it's not super clear if what I am looking for is supported. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

Set kagi as the default search engine in edge on android (you need to install edge) and add the edge search widget to your home screen. I also switched to the MS launcher so I could get rid of the Google search bar.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#257

> To ensure result quality, we automatically downrank pages with advertising and tracking, which are often associated with low-quality or machine-generated content. That is one of the most compelling things I've ever heard about a search engine. How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?

I never realized before that sentence, but the presence of ads and tracking on a webpage is correlated really well with me never wanting to read its content. I might sign up to Kagi just for that.

Please do try it, it’s great. I’m just a happy user, no affiliation.

My favourite feature is the customised down ranking I can do. No Pinterest etc for me.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#258
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematica is a commercial product: https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/

Who uses Mathematica, in this age of python/Julia etc? The Grad student world seems to be captured by Matlab

You know how Python is described as "batteries included" because it has a lot of things in its standard library that in most other languages would require downloading and installing third party libraries?

Mathematica is "nuclear power plant" included. It includes not only a very wide range of functions but also a huge amount of data.

For example several years ago they started adding data on biological organisms. They now have data on over a million species of animals, with hundreds of properties for most of them. You could for example with one simple command get a scatter plot showing bird weight vs bird lifespan. Or for mammals lifespan vs number of teeth. It's just a ridiculous amount of data and it is all easily accessible for computing and graphing.

Same for astronomy. It has a ton of data about the solar system. It's got physical properties of numerous bodies, and orbital data too, and it has functions for various astronomical computations. So if you wanted to see how the distance between Mars and Earth varies over time it is a simply command to get a plot of that over say the last 50 years.

Want a list of all geological formations where T. rex have been found? It can make that list for you, because it has a bunch of geological formation data and it has a bunch of dinosaur data.

They've got data on countries, and cities, and geography, and demographics, and economics, and more.

Other systems can beat Mathematica in specific areas, but nothing else comes near its breadth, and in those specific areas where something else beats it it is still usually decent in those areas.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#259

> To ensure result quality, we automatically downrank pages with advertising and tracking, which are often associated with low-quality or machine-generated content. That is one of the most compelling things I've ever heard about a search engine. How well does kagi work for niche "reddit queries" like "best waterproof midi synthesizers reddit"?

I never realized before that sentence, but the presence of ads and tracking on a webpage is correlated really well with me never wanting to read its content. I might sign up to Kagi just for that.

To me Kagi is as much a life changer on the web as ad-blockers are: Whenever I use a computer without them, I realize how poor the user experience is and how much time and energy is wasted just to filter noise from ads and poor content.

Re: Kagi and Wolfram

#260

Kagi has tried a few different AI solutions, and now this integration with a different search engine. I think what I want is just a redoubled focus on improving search results (not quick answers) while maintaining or improving confidentiality. If they announce that my monthly payments are going up, and I suspect it's because they're paying for partnerships with services I don't view as core to the product value that…

I believe cutting out the whole GPT craze would be best. OpenAI bills are always anything but negligible and I think most users would agree lowering the subscription cost or using it for things like Wolfram integration may be best for the core product.
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