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 quality? personal websites, hobby projects, startups, documentation websites, etc., also helping to surface them in our results (where relevant, like we already do with Kagi Small Web initiative [1]). It is a win-win for both our users and Kagi.
It would also be a way for Kagi to get some exposure outside of kagi.com (provided the search widget has some branding on it).
This is why it makes sense to offer it for free for smaller sites/projects.
And crowdsourcing index is completely opposite direction of one that causes deterioration of web search results in ad-supported search where few entities control the majority of space [2], so we like it.
That is the plan - and since this is a "Labs" project, we are open to it crashing and burning. Know we do not, until we try. Try and try again, we must.
How will you prevent someone from connecting Sidekick to a website that appears at first to be a small website but eventually fills with LLM-generated SEO keywords and ads? You might be able to manually review sites when they first sign up for Sidekick, but once the channel is open for them to inject content into Kagi's index, what's to stop them from abusing their privileged position?
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 our own index.
In parallel, we are developing LLM-content detector technology to be more efficient at detecting such content regardless of how it is monetised (and we will offer this as an API once developed).
While I agree with others that AI can take away from a products core vision, I’ve been very happy with Kagi’s path and roadmap. I feel like the AI products that you guys have released have served well as complements to search, and hope the trend continues.
Hopefully this helps with indexing while offering a cool service to small creators!
Edit: I forgot to say, the change where a `?` appended to a search triggering the quick answers was an amazing change. I would love to see more features that can be invoked by appending or prepending to the search query.
RE your edit, I’m assuming you’re already aware that Kagi lets you create custom bangs, but just in case you’re not, you can create your own shortcuts that when preceded by an exclamation mark like !so can redirect to or search other websites. I use this to append ‘site:reddit.com’ when I add !r to a query, for example.
I love your transparency. Saying how it benefits Kagi, not just how it is a cool feature for users, is refreshing. It makes me trust more of what you say, and builds some sense of what the product’s direction could be. Thanks.
What would your approach be for pricing for wiki-type sites that are nonprofit but may have hundreds or thousands of pages with assorted media? I know that decent search beyond just name matching is a recurring issue for independent fandom wikis, which rarely have the funding or coordination to do anything fancier than just a Mediawiki site.
For a random example, there's the Baldur's Gate 3 wiki (https://bg3.wiki), which has upwards of 8,000 pages often with pretty dense text (see https://bg3.wiki/wiki/D%26D_5e_rule_changes for an example) and is funded entirely off donations.
It would be great if there was a free version for charity/non profit/open source. I don't know if this is feasible for Kagi. But I do know that many of these types of wiki/forum/blog are run on a shoestring.
I think kagi sidekick would be very well received in the bioinformatics space. Lots of complex docs that require end users to digest large complex data.
Can it be tuned to only point users to the docs and not answer questions?
Is it possible to use the search functionality without the "AI smarts"? I can see a good site search service being a great addition to some websites I run, but I would absolutely not want to push an AI chatbot on my users.
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.
I think it would be interesting if like the website ranking that is done on Kagi there was a way to rate the search results to lower or higher it's ranking in search results. It would be a little different though since the website ranking on Kagi is for users but ranking the search results might just improve the intended search result that many people are looking for.
I guess this assumes that you aren't already doing that when they click one option over another for a certain search term.
Just thinking about searching through some documentation sites and you get a dumb result you weren't looking for at the top, and would want to deprioritize that result.
Hi Vlad, would you consider providing subscription via never expiring model to Kagi search? No need to lower prices, but, say, X searches in Y dollars? But the search quota never expires? Like the OpenAI API model.
If you offered such subscription, it would motivate me very highly to buy a subscription.
If it worked in a shell script or similar old-school unix architectural style on my bespoke static site generator, which is a slow-motion train wreck of a weekend hack-fest being ported from python/staticjinja to rust/minijinja.
Is kagi competing with whoogle?
Whoogle gives me the old-school, seemingly linear algebra of pagerank, hauntology that I expect.
Ah yes, "The 16 Companies" - except it's actually five hundred...
Seems like the problem in [2] is a few entities controlling the majority of spaces other than search, to me. Shame we don't have any real laws against anti-competitive behavior (just the way YC likes it).
Questions as a technical writer who maintains docs sites:
* What pages would get included in the index? Everything on the same domain? Or only pages where the search widget is included? Your demo looks like it's pulling in answers from kagi.com whereas if I were maintaining those docs I might want it to only look at help.kagi.com
* Do I get logs of the things that people type into the box? How? Also the generated summaries, do I get logs of those? I would need to know what these LLMs are saying to my readers...
* Do I get access to the embeddings that you've generated for my site? (Probably not but I have some use cases where it'd be really cool if there are embeddings for my site "just out there" with no further work on my part needed.) Edit: assuming that embeddings are involved which I realized later might not be true...
* How frequently will you index my site? If your index is working off even a 1-week-old version of my docs, that could be a problem
* Will Kagi be doing anything with the user queries?
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 providing answers directly, saving us from clicks.
Their search results are already very good. Can't wait to see Kagi flourish.
This is so true! While planning a trip abroad last year we were unsure about whether $thing is legal in $country. Google proclaimed in bold letters that, yes, $thing is legal in $country, but this line was taken from a site with the title "common misconceptions about traveling in $country" an in fact $thing was not legal.
Such a basic mistake, I haven't trusted the instant results ever since.
I have used Kagi for several months now, and I find that the ability to decide which searches I want quick answers for to be useful. There are certain searches where I feel comfortable with accepting a quick answer, and others where I don't think it would be useful. Being able to avoid the clutter unless I want it is nice.
They just released a major improvement to these, actually :). So keep trying it! At the risk of sounding like a shill: kagi is by far the best money I spent last year. The “programming” “academia” “small web” and (especially!) “PDF” buttons are worth their weight in GOLD.
These are the main two improvements from last week:
We added Wolfram|Alpha to enhance our capabilities in calculations, unit conversions, and time queries for better results. This solves a huge number of issues reported for these kind of queries as the results now come from a computational knowledge authorithy.
In the same spirit of getting answers faster, now simply starting your query with an interrogative word (what, where, who, which, when, how) or just ending it with a question mark (?) will automatically trigger Quick Answer.
Oh, interesting. I was actually wondering what had changed. That wolfram integration needs some work. Right now it's consistently just simplifying fractions. I keep having to "!g" in brave to get google to do simple math for me.
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.
FWIW I think this has improved radically in the past few weeks thanks to their integration with Wolfram. I haven't tried it yet though but was pleased to see that in the changelog
Ultimate/normal customer, and i agree. Personally i think AI _is_ Search, and while we don't need to force them together in some massive behemoth now - laying foundation for being familiar, comfortable and well integrated in the future seems foundational to today. In my eyes at least.
Strongly held belief that I think is backed up by academic consensus: we should not treat LLMs as stores of knowledge. As my mantra goes, “language models, not knowledge models”. So the future of search might involve LLMs at a very fundamental level (and I think it will!), but they’ll never be the central component. Humans will never ever ever invent a better knowledge system than a database / a piece of paper, I guarantee.
If anyone from DDG is here, please sort out your calendar one? I reported it in early January that it was (understandably) erroneously assuming 'jan calendar' still meant current_year+1; still doing it for February.
March is ok though, so I think actually the implementation was always buggy, not just now it's 2024, but it's checking if month is <= current month where it should just do <.
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.
I love Kagi and I'm a happy customer. I hope their endeavors in AI features don't distract too much from the core offering of a web search engine. That's the only thing I want from them.
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 :)
Duck Duck Go uses the Bing API and they've been around for a long while. I'd imagine there's a heavy 80/20 rule of data that needs to be indexed frequently that people also search for, so those same cached results from API calls get the most use.
Given that their motivation for this is to find more sites and pages to index, it seems like it should improve the quality (or at least quantity) of results thanks to a larger index.
Agree, I thought I was paying for search so they could focus on building search. Anything that feels like a money-raising or God-forbid acquisition play is concerning.
Agreed. Seems like web search implementation (both from Kagi and all its competitors!) could be almost endlessly improved upon, and any non-search feature is at odds with that.
Maybe there’s an argument that people who might use this, might also be people with sites that’d be valuable to index, and thus it’d both be nice for them and improve search for all users? :)
As a paying customer, I agree that the only thing I care about from Kagi is search, but...I think that there is a very non-trivial chance that in the near future, search almost entirely gets eaten by AI. It makes sense to me that a search company would be exploring AI and its interaction with search. While I hope this doesn't become the main focus (until and unless it has to be), the history of companies like Kodak (who was a "film" company and therefore chose to ignore digital cameras) should be instructive. If they completely ignore the potential replacement to search, they might get good at search just in time for that to become irrelevant.
This feature isn't specifically to do with AI though is it? Unless I missed something (likely).
My understanding was that it was about adding a "search with Kagi" thing to your site and triggering Kagi's indexer to index your site as a side effect.
Any chance you'd consider making a version of this as a browser extension for paid subscribers?
What I really want is this functionality on unsupported websites/documentation. It would be killer to "ask" kagi a fact about the article or docs I'm already reading, even if it only traverses/parses the single page.
Readit News
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 quality? personal websites, hobby projects, startups, documentation websites, etc., also helping to surface them in our results (where relevant, like we already do with Kagi Small Web initiative [1]). It is a win-win for both our users and Kagi.
It would also be a way for Kagi to get some exposure outside of kagi.com (provided the search widget has some branding on it).
This is why it makes sense to offer it for free for smaller sites/projects.
And crowdsourcing index is completely opposite direction of one that causes deterioration of web search results in ad-supported search where few entities control the majority of space [2], so we like it.
That is the plan - and since this is a "Labs" project, we are open to it crashing and burning. Know we do not, until we try. Try and try again, we must.
[1] https://kagi.com/smallweb
[2] https://detailed.com/google-control/
How will you prevent someone from connecting Sidekick to a website that appears at first to be a small website but eventually fills with LLM-generated SEO keywords and ads? You might be able to manually review sites when they first sign up for Sidekick, but once the channel is open for them to inject content into Kagi's index, what's to stop them from abusing their privileged position?
In parallel, we are developing LLM-content detector technology to be more efficient at detecting such content regardless of how it is monetised (and we will offer this as an API once developed).
While I agree with others that AI can take away from a products core vision, I’ve been very happy with Kagi’s path and roadmap. I feel like the AI products that you guys have released have served well as complements to search, and hope the trend continues.
Hopefully this helps with indexing while offering a cool service to small creators!
Edit: I forgot to say, the change where a `?` appended to a search triggering the quick answers was an amazing change. I would love to see more features that can be invoked by appending or prepending to the search query.
For a random example, there's the Baldur's Gate 3 wiki (https://bg3.wiki), which has upwards of 8,000 pages often with pretty dense text (see https://bg3.wiki/wiki/D%26D_5e_rule_changes for an example) and is funded entirely off donations.
I think kagi sidekick would be very well received in the bioinformatics space. Lots of complex docs that require end users to digest large complex data.
Can it be tuned to only point users to the docs and not answer questions?
Do you know that "sidekick" is aibó in Japanese (相棒)?
Notice the "AI" in it?
Keep up the great work, you have an incredible product.
I guess this assumes that you aren't already doing that when they click one option over another for a certain search term.
Just thinking about searching through some documentation sites and you get a dumb result you weren't looking for at the top, and would want to deprioritize that result.
https://docsearch.algolia.com
If you offered such subscription, it would motivate me very highly to buy a subscription.
With the monthly price, can't really afford it.
If it worked in a shell script or similar old-school unix architectural style on my bespoke static site generator, which is a slow-motion train wreck of a weekend hack-fest being ported from python/staticjinja to rust/minijinja.
Is kagi competing with whoogle?
Whoogle gives me the old-school, seemingly linear algebra of pagerank, hauntology that I expect.
Because "AI" increases the shareholder's chances of winning the lottery.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19713604#19714732
Seems like the problem in [2] is a few entities controlling the majority of spaces other than search, to me. Shame we don't have any real laws against anti-competitive behavior (just the way YC likes it).
inb4 flagged
* What pages would get included in the index? Everything on the same domain? Or only pages where the search widget is included? Your demo looks like it's pulling in answers from kagi.com whereas if I were maintaining those docs I might want it to only look at help.kagi.com
* Do I get logs of the things that people type into the box? How? Also the generated summaries, do I get logs of those? I would need to know what these LLMs are saying to my readers...
* Do I get access to the embeddings that you've generated for my site? (Probably not but I have some use cases where it'd be really cool if there are embeddings for my site "just out there" with no further work on my part needed.) Edit: assuming that embeddings are involved which I realized later might not be true...
* How frequently will you index my site? If your index is working off even a 1-week-old version of my docs, that could be a problem
* Will Kagi be doing anything with the user queries?
So, contrary to the most of the comments here, I support their AI endeavors for the sake of providing answers directly, saving us from clicks.
Their search results are already very good. Can't wait to see Kagi flourish.
They try to show what you want to see, but it often means something else.
Such a basic mistake, I haven't trusted the instant results ever since.
These are the main two improvements from last week:
https://i.imgur.com/ghmUcAh.png
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
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.
March is ok though, so I think actually the implementation was always buggy, not just now it's 2024, but it's checking if month is <= current month where it should just do <.
As an example: https://kagi.com/search?q=most+deadly+battle+in+world+war+1&...
wildly varying in accuracy :)
They will get replaced by someone else if they dont focus on AI.
Just speculation though.
Isn't this entirely in-line with your desires? Better quality search results by way of having up to date indexes?
Maybe there’s an argument that people who might use this, might also be people with sites that’d be valuable to index, and thus it’d both be nice for them and improve search for all users? :)
My understanding was that it was about adding a "search with Kagi" thing to your site and triggering Kagi's indexer to index your site as a side effect.
Deleted Comment
What I really want is this functionality on unsupported websites/documentation. It would be killer to "ask" kagi a fact about the article or docs I'm already reading, even if it only traverses/parses the single page.
now just need to build an extension :)
chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kagi-search-for-chr...
firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kagi-search-f...
https://www.routinehub.co/shortcut/16912/