hugh_kagi

Question is the same as it ever was, can you locate your data and your compute close to your users.

Issue with search is there's a lot of data, and a lot of compute to run over it, so you end up replicating PBs just to reduce latency.

It took a few weeks for our developers to learn basic sewing techniques, but once we did that we were able to move onto automating the looms fairly easily.

Looms were the original computers so it was easier than you'd think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine

We're working on something that should separate the concept of 'have you paid us' from 'who are you', at which point you'd be free to use (the existing) bitcoin payment method and have a pretty private experience.

Hopefully out in the next few weeks but no promises.

We're definitely keeping the extensions going, just need to prioritise a few parts internally.

You can just git clone the new chrome extension and 'load unpacked' if that's of any use. It's extremely simple.

https://github.com/kagisearch/chrome_extension_basic

We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine:

1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to.

2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box.

3. On Chrome for Linux, the default search engine API is not available, so Linux users have to configure it manually through a series of silly steps [2]. This is at least in keeping with most Linux experiences.

There are other issues, but I say all this to highlight how surprisingly difficult it is to change this setting in a practical, consumer friendly way. It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41028924

2: https://github.com/kagisearch/chrome_extension_basic?tab=rea...

Not yet but it's something we want to look into.

> Are they finally applying filters and operands to image searches?

That was a bug, apologies. It should be fixed now.

Hello, there's a Chrome policy around extensions that change the default search engine, which the Kagi extension does.

Our additional features, e.g. the Summarizer seem to require their own separate extension for this.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/troubleshooting/#...

Unfortunately during a routine bugfix update it appears they noticed that our extension did not meet this policy, and rejected the update. It was a surprise to us that the existing extension was then later removed. This does not appear to have been communicated.

We will refactor the extensions shortly and move past this.

I remember the IE6 Google Toolbar being a Smörgåsbord of features so this is a little curious.