Allow using lower cost query for Lens

danny

The idea that some queries aren't valuable enough to warrant full quality isn't new: https://kagifeedback.org/d/148-simple-mode-for-low-cost-searches

While the proposed lower cost pricing model might include enough searches for the non-heavy users, there still needs to be a solution for the heavy users. Developers who are heavy users will have a category of search dominated by searching for technical documentation. One way to make this category cheaper for them is to allow lower quality search in certain situations.

For JavaScript developers, maybe sites like MDN, nodejs.org, reactjs.org, etc might be bundled into a JavaScript Lens. This kind of site-specific search should be serviceable by lower cost search query provider. So by allowing Lens to be configured to be lower cost, JavaScript developers can have a way to do site-specific technical documentation search for cheaper.

Eventually when there is enough signal from Kagi users on what sites are more frequently used, then a targeted indexing effort on those sites can bring down the cost for developer users even more.

Jett

As mentioned in the original message on this post and the linked thread, some queries could allow reduced costs for both Kagi and the user.

The problem is that Kagi needs to be aware of these specific programming sites by having them crawled and indexed in an internal index and letting the user choose to use the internal index. Otherwise, this would likely trigger a search on external indexes and defeat the whole idea, which is not much different from the actual implementation of lenses.

The user needs a way to explicitly specify that the search should be done with "reduced quality" for a guaranteed reduced search cost. On the other hand, if the user only wants results from the MDN or other official documentation sources, then "reduced quality" is acceptable, and full index results are not necessary.

I posted the pros and cons of different approaches in a reply to the aforementioned thread.