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Kagi Assistant

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Kagi Assistant

#81

Post by jmaker »

dubme1 wrote: post #45

Paid Kagi user here. I REALLY wish Kagi would focus on it's core selling point: search. Building a search engine is hard enough. I use Kagi Search everyday and I am mostly happy with it but the product has a lot of room for improvment. Stop launching new products (browser, summarizer, gpt, assistant) while your core product is still behind the competition in many areas.

I think AI capabilities have been becoming an integral part of modern search. On the flip side you have the SEO optimizations.

Brave Search has offered an AI summarizer and assistant for a long time now. Bing with their OpenAI-powered Copilot. Google with the improved Bard/Gemini more recently. Amazon with the perhaps Anthropic-based Q for Business.

I think the end user is growing to expect the AI-augmented experience from all knowledge lookups. Feedback loop queries have become so natural to me, I’ve been finding it awkward to ask only one search query without a narrowing follow-up query, having the former discarded - kinda no longer adequate, particularly given the SEO-optimized flip side full of junk.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#82

Post by MostlyStable »

ziddoap wrote: post #68
teractiveodular wrote: post #63

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?

I'm a paying Kagi user. I don't think that I can give a clear example or explanation of why they are better, partly because it's been a long time since I used DDG, and I gave up pretty quickly. The one thing I can say is that, for the short time I was using DDG, I found myself doing a search, and then in most cases, immediately redoing the search using the !g, because the DDG results were bad, and even though I am also dissatisfied with google results these days, they were better. Kagi has the same functionality, but I find myself almost never using it.

That being said, if you personally are happy with your DDG results, then I'd say you should probably stick with it. Kagi _might_ be better for you than DDG, but if you aren't actively dissatisfied (the way I was with Google and everything else), then the room for improvement is smaller. Might be worth using their free tier (which is 100 queries per month I think) just to test out some side by side searches though.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#83

Post by eli »

msmithstubbs wrote: post #56
eli wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem like it. Can you get it to return a reddit result from the last 6 weeks?

Try this: https://kagi.com/search?q=remarkable+pro+site%3Areddit.com It includes Reddit results from less than 24 hours ago.

Ah hmm. Maybe they are doing something special with "site:reddit.com" queries.

If I search for that exact Reddit post using the lens it isn't there. https://kagi.com/search?q=ReMarkable+Paper+Pro+hands-on+revi...

Re: Kagi Assistant

#84

Post by jmaker »

Spivak wrote: post #57
dubme1 wrote: post #45

Paid Kagi user here. I REALLY wish Kagi would focus on it's core selling point: search. Building a search engine is hard enough. I use Kagi Search everyday and I am mostly happy with it but the product has a lot of room for improvment. Stop launching new products (browser, summarizer, gpt, assistant) while your core product is still behind the competition in many areas.

If you hear Vlad talk it's very clear that he considers these things to be part of that core product. The summarizer powers the ability to summarize articles / search results (even video), the assistant and fastgpt power their answer to Google's snippets and quick answers, small-web is the minimum-useful thing to start their own index and not have to pay rent to Bing/Google, and they view Orion to be a long-term bet…

Great points. Though I think in order for any search to become a default in some browser app would take a billion or so in competing annual payment, or Google it will remain.

Also, AI aside, Searx has been around for many years as a very promising metasearch, even self-hosted engine, alas still little traction. Great to have all results, including re-ranked Google and Reddit in one place.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#85

Post by dcchambers »

daft_pink wrote: post #31

I love Kagi and I’m a paid user, but I’m not willing to pay $25 per month for the assistants for the following reasons: * I already pay these companies directly and wouldn’t be able to cancel these as I use the voice assistant on my phone from ChatGPT and love using the artifacts from Claude on my computer * I’m also paying raycast to access these at the touch of my keyboard and prefer to quick access use it there I…

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.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#86

Post by MostlyStable »

rvnx wrote: post #51
recursive wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but its no big deal to scroll past those For some of us it is. If your search engine's revenue model is based on advertising to its users, their relationship is fundamentally adversarial. This affects all of their decisions, in ways that are sometimes hard to identify. Witness the slow decline of google search result ads. If users are the direct source of revenue, then everyone's interests are aligned. Also, I, and…

40 to 60% of users get the free search results, and the comfort of not having ads with a simple "Hide element" extension. It's hard to beat.

Avoiding the ads doesn't fix the alignment issues. Even without ads, modern google search is dramatically worse than a decade ago, and I'm personally pretty confident it's because their interests and user interests are not well aligned. I don't have to worry about that with Kagi.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#87

Post by Diti »

exe34 wrote: post #69
chankstein38 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed. I'm getting pretty sick of AI summaries that will fully lie to me about things. Google's search summary AI is awful I'd expect Kagi's to be similar.

does Google ai summary lie? do you have examples?

https://old.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_sli...

Re: Kagi Assistant

#88

Post by DoughnutHole »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #35
eli wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I think Kagi only has old Reddit content now that Reddit only lets Google crawl them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033

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.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#89

Post by jmaker »

freedomben wrote: post #64
daft_pink wrote: post #31

I love Kagi and I’m a paid user, but I’m not willing to pay $25 per month for the assistants for the following reasons: * I already pay these companies directly and wouldn’t be able to cancel these as I use the voice assistant on my phone from ChatGPT and love using the artifacts from Claude on my computer * I’m also paying raycast to access these at the touch of my keyboard and prefer to quick access use it there I…

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 produced more acceptable results to me than via an intermediary.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#90

Post by darby_nine »

eli wrote: post #83
msmithstubbs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try this: https://kagi.com/search?q=remarkable+pro+site%3Areddit.com It includes Reddit results from less than 24 hours ago.

Ah hmm. Maybe they are doing something special with "site:reddit.com" queries. If I search for that exact Reddit post using the lens it isn't there. https://kagi.com/search?q=ReMarkable+Paper+Pro+hands-on+revi...

Curiously this link seems to show the "Academic" lens. Switching to the "Forums" lens pulls it right up for me.
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