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Comment by CoffeeOnWrite | Hacker News Reader

My household is hooked on the AI Assistant. It’s heartwarming to be able to buy consumer software that just works.

If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.

You know now that I think of it me too. I absolutely never used the free google one because I never trusted it (you know what they say about free things).

If I'm paying for it through Kagi, I could at least trust their incentives are aligned with mine instead of whoever is paying them the most.

Google shopping is a great tool to use when you don't care if the items are truly in stock or are sold at the price listed.

Yeah, I’d like this too. It’s one of the only things I still miss from Google.

> If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.

Why?

i am not sure i understand your question.

presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop, and otherwise find Kagi has all of the features they want

> presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop

Right... why? Is it really too much after talking to the assistant and finding the item you want to purchase, to then click the provided link to the product page and click buy?

My assumption is something like the google shopping feature. This shows the product you're looking for at all available sites in your country so you can purchase the cheapest one.

I've been using Kagi assistant for this for quite a while. I just run a query with some variation of "Compile a list of online stores with shipping+price, sorted by the average user review score of the entire site, sub-sorted by price where I can buy $foobar?" sometimes I have to give it another push to tell it options or where to look, but this works pretty well for comparison shopping.

LLMs are not magic, nor are they gonna crawl some dozens of websites, they work with search results they are provided with, and thus they need good search results to work with. Maybe in the US or sth it is better, but where I live finding good shopping results from local shops/websites is not straightforward. Google shopping, that I just now checked, seems much better with querries that I struggled with kagi. Typically, in order to find things I need I usually run searches on local price aggregators than kagi, though it is not perfect because they do not include shops that don't want to pay them, and their search features are not great either. But running kagi for local search shopping results ime is not great, and similarly the assistant do not provide great results either.

I do not want a click-to-buy button, I want kind of lens that is specialised for shopping within specific regions (the current kagi lenses allow only 10 sites which is not really enough for shopping).

> nor are they gonna crawl some dozens of websites

That is quite literally what !research does.

But agreed on local search - I tend to use Google maps for anything local. Otherwise for something I'd buy online, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I meant, they are not gonna start from scratch by crawling websites, they are gonna rely on the search results to grab content of relevant results. I think this is what research does, in a higher quantity.

In contrast, I may start with a page in a website and start going around looking for related products etc. The assistant is not gonna start doing that (I think at least), it just gonna get the page provided by the search results. For this reason, what search results it is provided with is important.

I am also (mostly) buying online, but for certain reasons I want to buy from domestic websites rather than ones based in other countries, if possible. Kagi has not been great at providing great results for that.

I’m guessing because it’s valuable to have a trustworthy AI assistant that you can just explain what you want and it finds the best options

Keyword trustworthy, I think Kagi is one of the only companies that would be in a position to do this without pushback.

But, regular models and harnesses work okay for this too. You just have to specify “web search”, very important.

Care to share your setup?

I use pi and librechat and I am really limited by the lack of proper web connector. Testing Tavily right now, Kagi is next.

I wonder why I see so few comments about it on HN, does everybody have this figured out already? Am I a dummy? Am I severely overstating how important of a frature web access and search is for LLM use?

I use Claude code for basically everything, since the harness is pretty complete. The online chat interface works fine too. For basic research I downgrade the model and effort. Smarter models are good at knowing when to web search rather than guess, but you should always specify “do a web search”.

The one caveat is opus has an absolutely awful voice. The way it writes is annoying and verbose. Sonnet actually works better for this type of thing.

That's already possible, so I thought they were asking for more.

Find a product/vendor with known quality, at lowest price. Like Amazon ~15 years ago

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