Finer control of bang usage in search

JSiuDev

Currently following syntax are supported:

!g query
query !g
g! query
query g!

I would like to turn off the later 2. It is picking up words like "ah", "oh" ... 🤣

Can we have following options:

enable/disable bang syntax individually
- In setting
- 1. !g query, query !g
  1. g! query, query g!
    Let user enable 1, 2 individually
Enable/disable bang
- In setting
- In search page (maybe a check box)
Enable/disable the default bang list
- In setting
- Let user enable/disable the default list as a whole or individually

nobodywasishere

The best option will probably just be to remove the "ah" / "oh" bangs

JSiuDev

@nobodywasishere I think we need finner control of bang.
The bang config file is already so big that github refuse to show it:
https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs/blob/main/data/bangs.json

magiruuvelvet

I always was annoyed by the fact that it is not possible to disable the built-in bangs. Especially for services/websites I never plan to use and just cause conflicts on my end. Quoting the bang does allow searching for the term literally, but this also gets annoying real quick. I voice my support for an option to disable the built-in bangs. I think this is more of an accessibility concern than a preference since the list changes over time in unexpected ways, and users can't control it on their end.

(Besides the fact that I prefer a colon (:) for this instead instead of an exclamation mark (!), but thats a different issue I'm solving with a PHP script on my end.)

dreifach

The LinkedIn and YouTube bangs don't seem to be working for me when the bang is at the end of the query and the exclamation mark is at the end of the bang (i.e. "test li!" doesn't work, whereas "test !li", "li! test", and "!li test" do). The same goes for YouTube. See a demonstration of this issue below.

LinkedIn

YouTube

Wikipedia's bang seems to work in all cases, as does a custom bang of mine.

Wikipedia

Realtime Trains

I haven't tested other stock bangs, nor other custom bangs of mine.

doskagi

I can replicate this!

nobodywasishere

This change was intentional to try and mitigate false-positive bang triggers like go!

dreifach

nobodywasishere Is this only the case for two-letter stock bangs?

nobodywasishere

dreifach Trailing suffix bangs have been decreased from two characters to only one character allowed. Edit: This is only for stock bangs. Bangs you define don't have this limitation.

dreifach

nobodywasishere Got it, explains the above behaviour. I would really appreciate the ability to change this behaviour back to how it was. I intuitively add bangs at the end of search queries, and intuitively add punctuation (i.e. an exclamation mark) at the end of the query as a whole, so at the end of the bang. All I can say is please! If that means burying it in settings I wouldn't mind.

doskagi

dreifach @nobodywasishere Yes, I agree with @dreifach. I prefer this too.

nobodywasishere

dreifach I would recommend adding a custom bang for the ones you want to utilize this behaviour

avocadotoast

Is it possible to update the docs to make this new limit and workaround clear?

MustafaD

Not a recommendation or anything but just a thought.

🤔💭 How tolerant should search engine be to messy and out-of-order term queries?

The more tolerant, the more multifaceted and general the results have to be.
The less tolerant (requiring user to follow certain 'grammar' rules), the more focused and predictable the results.

This is a general question but an interesting one.

Personally I'd prefer the latter (more focused and predictable results). But Google has spoiled me (see #10212).

justinsteven

This has been bothering me for what feels like months now, but granted, I can't remember exactly when it started. If it's a new change, it's been bothering me so much that it feels like it's been months.

I know at some point, gi! stopped working. I assumed the google images bang had stopped working entirely, and that it would be fixed at some point.

I took the time today to narrow it down to "trailing bangs with two characters (or just more than one character?) with a trailing bang" being what's broken.

g! test - works
!g test - works
test g! - works
test !g - works

gi! test - works
!gi test - works
test gi! - does not work
test !gi - works

This seemed like a bug. I came here to report it, then I found this thread.

I understand now that it is intended, but this is a change that I wasn't aware of that frustrated me for a long time, and which I had been assuming would be fixed "any day now."

I'm going to need to add custom bangs to restore this behaviour, which is a nuisance.

+1 to the request to have the behaviour able to be disabled via configuration.

I would also suggest that Kagi detect when a user falls for this trap (or falls for this trap consistently) and add a notice to the search results saying that "postfixed bangs with more than two characters and a trailing bang" is deprecated. Which, now that I say it, sounds like an obtuse and annoying exception to the rule. Maybe Kagi can know that the old behaviour was breaking more people or more searches than the new behaviour, but this is a surprising change to me, it frustrated me for a long time, and it will continue to frustrate me as I hit more edge cases and am forced to populate and maintain custom bangs.

nobodywasishere

justinsteven We've received a lot of reports of users accidentally triggering trailing postfix bangs like go!. DuckDuckGo fixes this issue by having a secret list of bangs that are allowed anywhere in a query to work, like foo!g bar, and we felt this was too esoteric. We've gone back and forth a little over the years on how trailing postfix bangs work, as if we lean too much one way, people who don't know what bangs are and have no interest in using them are redirected to a random website. Too much in the other way, technical users like y'alls habits get interrupted. A setting is one solution, but I'm not sure it's the best one, as only a handful of users will use it, and it's another debt we have to carry forward.

justinsteven

nobodywasishere I understand. Count me as one of the people who this change frustrates and would appreciate a setting. You’ll probably know better the size of the respective audiences one way or another who are going to be frustrated no matter what Kagi chooses to do.

I would have appreciated a notice somewhere, such as in a blog post (I checked and there wasn’t one), in the changelog (I hadn’t checked, but looks like there isn’t an entry) or via a notice somewhere on the search results before the hundredth time I did a broken postfixed bang search and had to go to the search box at the top of the page and backspace the ! and re-add the ! and choose to search on google images from the drop down.

Thanks for your consideration on a toggle, or on making this change more obvious to people who are currently falling for the trap.

nobodywasishere

justinsteven That is fair. We'll give notice in the future for these sorts of changes, apologies for not doing so in this instance.