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I really like how Neeva implements their shopping widget.

Query: https://neeva.com/search?q=best%20headphones

Items to note:

  • Brings up heading of "Top reviewed products"
  • Price range filters
  • "Products chosen by review websites, not advertisers"

After clicking on an item, you get a nice module on the right side detailing merchants to buy the item from, review sites, and customer reviews from Amazon.

Genius.

  • Vlad replied to this.

    • Vlad

    • Best Answerset by Vlad

    We'd love to consume an API that solves this problem for Kagi users.

    Few challanges:

    • Should be worldwide
    • Should work in different languages

    Looking for ideas!

    yokoffing There is one big problem with Neeva's implementation. The sites they use to show products from are all 100% affiliate websites, meaning you are not getting 'best headphone' recommendation but merely those that sell well. No headphone, no matter how good it is, will be reviewed on cnet.com for example, if cnet.com is not able to place an affiliate link for its purchase (usually Amazon).

    As such this feature is a total flop IMO from alignment of incentives perspective.

    Also there is no such thing as 'best headphone' and that depends greatly on what you are after - wireless? gaming with built in microphone? audiophile?

    So how do you approach this problem, when most sites reviewing products are "fake", doing it against your best interest but to maximize their own profit, and when even reviews on amazon are fake ?

    Basically everything is conspired against you as a shopper and this is one of things Kagi is looking to change on the web. We do not have an answer for it yet, but Neeva's approach certainly looks like being a part of the problem that we are trying to solve.

    How Kagi currently does it? The inclusion of noncommercial results in Kagi helps with this problem a bit.

    Here are results for 'best laptop' on Kagi.

    1. We include discussions between real people
    2. We include noncommercial articles (no affiliate links, no bias)
    3. We group low value listicles together (same site sites that are put in the first place on Neeva)

    Of course this does not have eye candy element, but what it offers is pure substance. We want to evolve this system further to help the shopper, a Kagi user, make the right decision.

      While it is a good idea convenience sake, I think it is a bad idea generally, due to every country having it's own local stores, and only supporting a few select stores for a few selected countries is a bad idea if you want to financially succeed as a small company.

      As a solution, I think you should be able to hand away the actual product search for the user, but make it so if you search for a specific product, for instance, headphones, you will see a "product page" listing the product's specifications.

      This should make it easy for the customer to make a final decision, and buy the right product they need, at the store they prefer.

        NS2555 you will see a "product page" listing the product's specifications

        Is there a search engine or other tool that does this already? Screenshots?

        Amazon does this (kind of) when you scroll down on a product's page. You see a table of a brand's product specifications and how they differ from each other. It would be cool to have that but with different brands. Not sure how feasible that is, though.

            I agree that this sort of review site is not useful. If I search "best headphones" kagi already blows google out of the water. Not sure what the solution is.

              19 days later
              10 months later

              I have heard that Bing has the better shopping site, but frankly, all sites in google or Bing tend to lead directly to Amazon. Amazon seems to own every single review site and all the top links. Some of the shopping add-ons only show amazon results. WTF? No wonder they are taking the world, and scaring me.

              What I would like to see:

              • A shopping button to remove all the fake comparisons, or sites irrelevant to shopping links.

              • A way to show any independent options (Consumerreports, although it is pay-to-play, they have been working towards product standards), reddit answers, nextdoor answers, quora answers...basically, what are our neighbors asking...on the right side of the results.
                ---Note there is nothing to the right of the Bing results, although I didn't screenshot the blank area.

              • Similar to millionshort.com, the ability to remove some types of results from the search, like Amazon, or anything used, etc.

              • Pictures! Your search is interesting all the way until I get no thumbnails, no pictures. Pictures are worth a thousand words!

                crazyshoplady So it looks like it would be some kind of lens with trusted shopping sites?

                Can you expand more on the details of implementation that you would like to see.

                    shopping.pdf
                    2MB

                    I am sending a PDF with a basic concept, but truly I don't know if I am being helpful.
                    As a shopper I want to have options to see the results privately but also have information on the right side that rates the businesses in terms of customer service (BBB reports?), or shows answers to basic questions like "which brand should I buy" .

                    • Vlad replied to this.

                      crazyshoplady That looks great. This is incredibly difficult to do though and to do so I do not see us doing it any time soon.

                      What you can do in the meantime is create a shopping lens, with up to ten sites you trust for shopping and kagi will at least return results only from these sites.

                      Do you know how to do that?

                          a month later

                          I am not techy at all but I also would love to see a shopping tab like you see when you do a google search. LIke for instance if I search pride flag the regular search just brings up information but if I click images you see images of course and if you click shopping you then see sites you can buy a pride flag.

                          3 months later

                          Yeah, shopping would be a great feature. It's something I've used fairly often on Google to get another perspective to compare to the websites I would usually use. Most of the time it is trash though.

                          It could also be an avenue to offset some of the cost of search. I think it's one of the few places where advertisements, if done tactfully, could be non-intrusive and improve user experience a little. Non-targeted, non-tracking, clearly marked and related to the search. Though I imagine most users would disagree on this point

                          • Vlad replied to this.

                            hitch How to make this non-trash? What does an MVP look like?

                                a year later

                                Hey, I would like to see something at least similar to this. I was thinking something more simple, just a shopping tab or lens that returns results of product pages. I posted on Discord, but basically this is what I think Kagi can do to help:

                                Searching on Amazon's website is a painful experience full of results that are "related" but obviously just sell well and are only tangentially related to your keywords. For instance, only searching for "z-wave" will include results that are smart devices that do not support the z-wave protocol. Kagi already supports advanced search functionality, such as omitting results with a keyword or only from a certain time period, that none of the retailers bother to implement. Obviously this doesn't have to be strictly Amazon, but could just return results from retail websites that you support and are formatted with a picture, description and price. Are there any plans on a feature to directly search retail sites like Amazon, Best Buy, REI, etc.? If so, it would also be nice to tweak it to include or exclude certain sites and give you filter options for price.

                                  13 days later
                                  Merged 10 posts from Add an option at the top (alongside images, web...) for shopping .

                                    I've found Kagi lacking when searching for online shopping, and have to turn back to google. Here I was looking for a book, "Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition", with a retailer that operates within Australia, Kagi returns relevant results about the book including reviews, the publishers site, and an amazon.com link for the query "Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition australia" [1]. However it doesn't return any results relevant to purchasing it in Australia specifically.

                                    Google [2] however returns an australian retailer (booktopia.com.au) with the book for sale as the first result, an amazon.com.au link, and plenty of other retailers (inc. dymocks). Which was exactly what I was looking for.

                                    While I wouldn't trust about 1/3 of googles results it does find the retailers I was looking for. Kagi requires additional prompting, Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition australia buy online [3] for it to return anything from booktopia.com.au, even though it is the 3rd last link and only links to the home page not even the book. It actually returns [4] as the top hit, which has no relevance other than they are a software engg firm...

                                    [1] https://kagi.com/search?q=Web+Development+with+Clojure%2C+Third+Edition+australia
                                    [2] https://www.google.com/search?channel=crow5&client=firefox-b-d&q=Web+Development+with+Clojure%2C+Third+Edition+australia#bsht=CgRmYnNtEgIIBA
                                    [3] https://kagi.com/search?q=Web+Development+with+Clojure%2C+Third+Edition+australia+buy+online
                                    [4] https://www.thoughtworks.com/