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Comment by ghushn3 | Hacker News Reader

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ghushn3

I subscribe to Kagi. It's been worth it to have no ads and the ability to uprank/downrank sites.

And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.

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You can opt-in to get an LLM response by phrasing your queries as a question.

Searching for “who is Roger rabbit” gives me Wikipedia, IMDb and film site as results.

Searching for “who is Roger rabbit?” gives me a “quick answer” LLM-generated response: “Roger Rabbit is a fictional animated anthropomorphic rabbit who first appeared in Gary K. Wolf's 1981 novel…” followed by a different set of results. It seems the results are influenced by the sources/references the LLM generated.

I don't think that you are right. It is the search result that influence the llm generated result and not the opposite.

In your case, I think that it is just the interrogation point in itself at the end that somehow has an impact on the results you see.

It’s a feature of Kagi. Putting the question mark does invoke AI summaries.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html

I know for the summary.

What I say is that the search results part of the page, with or without the summary should be the same in theory.

So if the other person saw a difference in the result returned it might be only because of the impact of the question mark character itself on the search index

Ahh thanks for the clarification, I misunderstood!

You don’t have to phrase it as a question; just append a ?, which is an operator telling it you want a generated answer.

Yes. That is exactly what my answer demonstrates.

Your answer is helpful, but "phrasing your queries as a question" might reasonably be interpreted as implying a full natural language question is required to trigger the LLM response -- especially since your example is a full sentence.

I'm trying to expand on your point by clarifying that "roger rabbit?" will also trigger the LLM response.

Even with a normal search there is a link to get Quick Answer which gives the LLM result

I'm more interested now than ever. A lot of my time spent searching is for obscure or hard-to-find stuff, and in the past smaller search engines were useless for this. But most of my searches are quick and the primary thing slowing me down are Google product managers. So maybe Kagi is worth a try?

I think you might be happily surprised for sure.

You can try it for free. I did my 300 searches on it and went, "Yep. This is better." and then converted to a paid user.

It's awesome - highly recommend trying it

I subscribe also, and prefer it for most things.

However, it's pretty bad for local results and shopping. I find that anytime I need to know a local stores hours or find the cheapest place to purchase an item I need to pivot back to google. Other than that it's become my default for most things.

Thanks for the suggestion. I try nonstandard search engines now and then and maybe this one will stick. Google certainly is trying their best to encourage me.

After about a year on Kagi my work browser randomly reverted to Google. I didn’t notice the page title, as my eyes go right to the results. I recoiled. 0 organic results without scrolling, just ads and sponsored links everywhere. It seems like Google boiled the frog one degree at a time. Everyone is in hell and just doesn’t know it, because it happened so gradually.

I’ve also tried various engines over the years. Kagi was the first one that didn’t have me needing to go back to Google. I regularly find things that people using Google seem to not find. The Assistant has solved enough of my AI needs that I don’t bother subscribing to any dedicated AI company. I don’t miss Google search at all.

I do still using Google Maps, as its business data still seems like the best out there, and second place isn’t even close. Kagi is working on their own maps, but that will be long road. I’m still waiting for Apple to really go all-in, instead of leaning on Yelp.

It’s useless. Worse than Google and no AI summary.

If you append a ? to your search it will prompt an AI query. And you can uprank/downrank results so I'm not sure in what universe it could be worse.

is there a way to make safari search bar on iOS show the kagi search term rather than the URL?

Maybe with Orion instead of Safari?

Apple really needs to update Safari to let people choose their search engine, instead of just having the list of blessed search engines to choose from.

Kagi has an extension to add itself. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default/s...

This is what I used, but it’s a bit of a hack. It has to hijack one of the other search engine, which then becomes unusable. It also doesn’t show the search term in the address bar, like the person was asking for.

You can thank Apple for that, presumably because they receive a ton of money from Google.

Google isn’t the only option in the list.

And of course it’s Apple’s fault, they wrote Safari. I submitted a feature request a while ago, but I’m guessing more people need to do the same.

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