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Kagi Assistant

blog.kagi.com

91–100 of 247 posts

Re: Kagi Assistant

#91
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.

> while your core product is still behind the competition in many areas

IDK, I've been very happy with it. Just the ability to consistently pin/block domains is a massive upgrade over Google.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#92
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.

To me it seems like that's what they're doing here. I don't see right away how this is not their core business. > Kagi Assistant has the ability to use Kagi Search to source the highest quality information meaning that its responses are grounded in the most up-to-date factual information while disregarding most “spam” and “made for advertising” sites with our unique ranking algorithm and user search personalizations…

You have to pay extra for it, so it can't be part of the core business.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#93
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The lens ID in the URL doesn't look to be globally unique. It's just l=, and the number seems to be order in the lens list under your account.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#94
post #5

So for 25$ a month I get access to ChatGPT and Claude offerings in addition to access to Kagi search. This sounds like a good deal, compared to the 20$/month access to ChatGPT only. Or am I missing something?

Also, if you're already a Kagi Pro subscriber it's really only $15/mo more for access to both models. This is the first time I've actually been tempted by one of these subscription LLMs.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#95
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?

I personally switched away from DDG when they started removing results that were errantly removed by Bing. Since Bing is their upstream results provider, I didn't feel like I was getting away from the overreach of big tech, so I went to Kagi where they don't solely rely on upstream providers as they have their own crawler and such. The fact that they offer other great features like filtering results, and integrated AI makes it worth switching and paying for. Plus, I hate ads. Targeted or not. So I'm willing to pay to make that go away for a quality service.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#96
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?

[dead]

Re: Kagi Assistant

#97

I recently tried Kagi and I struggled to see the value. For many queries side-by-side with Startpage it delivered the same results word-for-word (sure you get a few sponsored links top-3 of Startpage but its no big deal to scroll past those). For other things, it was just plain annoying, e.g. "newest $type restaurants in $large_city" half the results on the first page were from 10 years ago (e.g. dated 2014). I mean…

Customizing your search results is a big part of it. When I tried Kagi, I did not find it to be a huge improvement on Google until I started adjusting the rankings of my search results. Now I find it painful to go back to Google when I use someone else's computer or device.

The other big part of it (for me at least) is seeing more obscure websites in my results. I have had Kagi for a year now, and it has saved me more money than I've spent on it by making it easier to find specific products at lesser-known shops. These lesser-known shops often have really great sales because they are trying to compete against the big names, and Google pretty much only shows me the big names.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain to me why Kagi is so good? I don't use Google Search so don't try the privacy card on me

I love being able to uprank, downrank, pin or blacklist specific domains/sites for my personal results. That alone makes it worth it. I also find the search results to be as good or better than Google. Once my personal ranking kicks in it's not even close.

It uses Google's index, among others.

Being able to personalize your own search is truly the killer feature, though, in a couple of ways.

The first is as you point out: being able to "edit your own algorithm" is really nice. I don't have to try to "train" Google's algorithm to show the results I want, and it's very easy to say "I never want to see this site in my results again". I'm still shocked Google doesn't have that feature even as some kind of client-side Javascript.

The second is Lenses. It's so obvious in hindsight that a singular algorithm is insufficient for search. Nobody wants or needs their searches for porn to impact their searches for technical documentation, or vice versa. There are more nuanced examples, but that's the most obvious (also, I don't think Kagi indexes NSFW content or at least I haven't seen any).

Re: Kagi Assistant

#99

Something I love about Kagi that isn't often known, is they will pro-rate based on days. If you are on an existing plan, you can upgrade to Ultimate, try it out for a few days, and then downgrade and only pay for the days you used it. I despise the subscription model generally, but if we're going to have it then I wish more companies would do pro-rating! Anyway, you can try it out for very low risk.

Now that's even better. I'm definitely going to try this by upgrading temporarily who knows maybe it'll stick. Good business practice by Kagi.

Re: Kagi Assistant

#100

c-f "ai"; c-w. and onto the pile they go! Is it still legal do do something with a computer without involving "ai"?

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.

I think you should try Kagi before passing judgement, really clever design.

You only get the quick summary if you ask for it (i.e. you're happy to take the risk). Another handy use, is web summarize, which looks at the specific webpage, lowering the risk even further.

If you don't call these features it's straight up clean search with no ads and it's fast with good results.

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