Add a shopping widget

westervilleslim

I don't use widgets much, but what would be really useful to me would be a filter where I could get only small businesses online. Other shopping search engines are swarmed with the big retailers --- Amazon, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc. --- so it is hard to find small online retailers who might have the item.

I would say have a filter on size of business - $1B annual revenue and up versus below $1B. I don't mean a small business advertising on Amazon, because that retailer is still under the control of the big platform owner, who can copy them, deprioritize them or just take their access away. Give me a link to the small business' home page, Shopify page, etc.

Thoughts anyone?

Grooty

westervilleslim The problem with this is how do you find small businesses? And what about private companies where we don't know the revenue

westervilleslim

Grooty Good point. It is hard to find the small businesses but easy to find the big ones. Honestly, when I look at shopping results in Google I get a long list of Amazon, Walmart and Target choices but very little else. What if we just eliminate the biggest companies and focus on all the rest?

That is one possible solution. The second idea I have is if Kagi or another search engine can partner with RevLocal or similar, who provide services to thousands of small businesses. If you (a small business) are already working with RevLocal, your products will show up in the small business search.

Grooty

A thing Kagi could do is rely on third party price comparison websites (and have translators pick the top picks for the country). Some have an API (https://pricerunner.com for example for, they operate in the Nordic companies and others). I don't think this is a perfect solution, as many of the ones I know only show shops that have paid, but it could be a start

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!

Thibaultmol

Vlad https://www.barcodelookup.com/hydro-flask seems pretty ok on very very initial quick look.
it seems to be one of the services that offers an api for name lookup of products AND has both UPC and EAN numbers in their database for products.

Being able to do shopping via kagi would be amazing, because I feel like I search for products relatively frequently but I never used Google Shopping because

it misses A LOT of shops
I don't want to be mislead by google ad pushing in there

One of the things I would be really excited for with Kagi Shopping is being able to put Amazon and other giant stores like that and downrank them. So Anker products will probably still show amazon because they mostly sell via Amazon.
But for many things I search to buy i automatically add -amazon to my searches

douglasg1b

I don't use widgets much, but what would be really useful to me would be a filter where I could get only small businesses online

This seems solvable with a filter/lense that ignores the top 10/100/1000/10k websites from the results. I saw this suggestion in another thread and think it's brilliant and would provide a lot of organic utility to search results. Including ignoring the most popular shopping sites as you narrow down what you are trying to find.

douglasg1b

Vlad

Was this widget deprecated? Either it's not what I was expecting, or I'm not activating it 🤔

Vlad

douglasg1b Yes it has been removed

Jon

I would love to see a simple product search widget or lense. I'm trying to avoid being so dependent on Amazon, but I tend to find myself search and buy from Amazon anyway because it is so much easier to search for products.

mackid1993

One of the main things that I still go back to Google for is Google Shopping. It's extremely useful for price comparison and also finding items in retail stores near me. I think it would be great if Kagi had a full shopping mode that could compare prices from different retailers and when possible show availability of items in local big box stores. This is just another way for Google to harvest my data and to take this away from them, and to have the lack of bias Kagi provides would be excellent.

I think it would be great to be able to compare prices on items without bias. To find where something is in stock without being tracked or being pushed in a certain direction because a particular retailer is giving Google a kickback.

mackid1993

I also want to add, perhaps Kagi could just proxy Google Shopping if Google offers an API?
This way it's less work to stand up but still provides privacy and perhaps some way to reduce or eliminate bias related to advertising.

sefidel

Not marking as duplicate as this seems to suggest a 'mode' instead of a widget, though I think they can be merged.

mackid1993

Yeah, I'm suggesting a mode like Google Shopping. Not a shopping widget.

Vlad

mackid1993 The same basic problem needs to be solved first, so merged it here

Intet

I know it might be difficult to make it ethical and transparent, but I do like Google shopping as one place to search for and compare products and prices, and Kagi just does not offer that type of search yet.
I wanna be able to see where products I search for are available and compare prices with a quick glance. I also like suggestions of similar things that might be fulfill the same purpose better or cheaper.
While normal Kagi search also can help find some stuff I have to rummage a lot of unrelated results and don't see prices fast. It is one reason for me why I have to switch back to google temporarily right now.

Users have a dedicated more ethical search for products that not just highlight the companies products which pays most for advertising.
The user can save time by not having to look through unrelated results about the product they are searching for without an option to buy, as they would with just a regular Kagi search.
Easy price comparison is offered to the user. Being able to quickly compare the highlighted prices of the searched product offered by different shops.
The user can more easily find where a product is available for purchase, possibly in the same country or area.
Similar products which fulfill the same function better or cheaper are suggested in a clearly defined and dedicated area which doesn't interfere and clutter the main result searched for.
This will plug a gap in offering that Kagi does not offer right now, but competitor Google does.

Luis

Thanks for the suggestion, @Intet! I'll merge your post with the existing thread on this topic.

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