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Comment by fallat | Hacker News Reader

It's actually so good I plan to pay when they start charging.

It's really good in some ways, and very lacking (for me) in others. The search is fine. Good enough that I would switch. However, if I was out and about and quickly needed directions to Walmart, my normal flow with Google is

Pull out phone -> Safari -> type "Walmart" -> click on the map -> Maps app opens and starts guiding me

When I switched to Kagi, the flow went like

Pull out phone -> Safari -> type "Walmart" -> top result is Walmart.com... no address to nearest Walmart to be found -> Close Safari -> Open Maps app -> search for Walmart

And it got so annoying to have those extra steps. I know I can change my workflow and get used to it. But it wasn't just directions. It was other basic searches. Like if I needed a phone number for a local business. It drove me crazy. I really hope Kagi gets better at those sort of things. I want them to succeed. But it was just too much friction for me.

We found similar issues at https://you.com a while back. We just had to be good for more query families. Now we have both the walmart locations in a map app, eg https://you.com/search?q=walmart and coding related useful results, eg. https://you.com/search?q=how%20do%20I%20find%20all%20files%2...

or https://you.com/search?q=pyspark%20filter%20array%20element

Too bad you.com does not work in Firefox with the "beacon" function disabled (beacon.enabled set to false in about:config).

I never even tried you.com because I see nothing (I don't enable JS for sites I don't trust).

Hi Ennea, Can you help me understand why you make this particular change in the config?

To be perfectly honest, I cannot even remember making that change, but also couldn't find any info on whether Firefox or some extension may have done this. I will leave it disabled, however, because its purpose seems to be analytics, and opting out of (at least some of) them this way seems like a good idea.

Since disabling it this way removes the `sendBeacon` function from existence, you should just be prepared to properly handle its absence.

Is it always about analytics? Or is it ocassionaly also a useful API for other tasks?

I know little about front end JS dev, but the docs say it’s just a way to send an asynchronous request (no response) with a guarantee that the the request will be sent out, even if the page starts unloading. That’s apparently not a guarantee with the two other to send requests - XmlHttpRequest and fetch api.

The beacon api was created specifically to be a lightweight method for telemetry/logging

I agree this disrupts my muscle memory, but if we're honest, that particular workflow isn't necessarily optimal. It's just what Google has trained us to do. If you're seeking directions to Walmart, the most efficient (and one might argue intuitive) method is to open your maps app directly, and type in "Walmart".

Kagi supports DDG bangs. So just type `Walmart !g` and you will get the google search output

I’ll do the same as well. Kagi has literally improved my life a significant degree.

Same. I switched to it for a day just to give it a try and I never switched back. Absolutely willing to pay if the quality stays the same.

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