Lately, I can't really search normally with Kagi, When I really need results, I mostly use an AI search assistant. Normal search just completely ignores keywords, similar to how Google does that, but, confusingly, even worse.
For example, I searched using these keywords:
"teratron Stanislaw Lem".
It's obvious that I'm not just looking for Stanislaw Lem the writer, I'm looking for pages that have this first word related to this writer. I'm looking for mentions of teratron, not for Stanislaw Lem in general.
Still, Kagi exclusively gives me pages about Stanislaw Lem: Wikipedia, Ru.wiki, official site, Britannica article on Lem, German Wikipedia, EBSCO biography, a Fandom wikipedia on Lem, a Reddit topic saying "What about Stanislaw Lem", and so on.
NONE of these pages have the search operator I'm interested in (the one put in the search box).
It's perfectly reasonable that some search keywords can't be found. But Kagi very routinely shows the "nothing found" page. It doesn't shy away from null results. Yet every time I look for some VERY SPECIFIC word or quote next to a very popular request, I get completely useless results for my money. Notably, when specifying exact match for teratron, Kagi DOES show me a handful of actual results — pages that contain both Lem and teratron.
So the normal result is a BUG, an ERROR.
Considering Kagi only gives me two pages of results and boasts very high-quality results, this is unacceptable. Everything that is input into the search box must be relevant, especially with a request so short and simple. It's like searching for Chicago deep dish pizza and only getting results for Chicago the city and ceramic dishes.
Expected behavior: I want Kagi to be consistent. If you ambitiously limit search results to 2 pages and often show nothing (i.e. boasting that your results are really precise), you can't give me such low-quality results to such a straightforward query.
TEST AND REPRODUCTION:
I tried using Google and introduced an exact match with "teratron" and non-exact match with sidereal. I found a perfect match at the first page: https://fiascofiles.org/timeline.html — a page that contains both sidereal and teratron and is closely related to Stanislaw Lem (it's a website dedicated to his novel), and answers my question.
Importantly, Kagi REFUSES to find this page using the query
"teratron" sidereal stanislaw lem
There are no relevant results at all, just a few pages for German products called Teratron, with no mention of writer Lem. Meanwhile, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, Kagi WILL find this page if I REMOVE Stanislaw Lem from the query:
"teratron" sidereal
Then Kagi shows me the page Google found for me — a very specific match for "teratron" in context of Stanislaw Lem. So Kagi will find the required page, but only if I remove the most relevant part of the query. This is clearly a technical issue with search functionality.
