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a month later

Vlad I have a suggestion: an option to differentiate between searches made from the browser location bar, or from the Kagi search page.

I was thinking about the fact the before Google launched Chrome, we had two text entry fields on the browser shortcut bar: a location bar and a search field. Google started the trend to merge these (obviously to their own benefit, as it made Google the default way of navigating the web).

If we think about breaking out these two functions again: the location bar is for finding and visiting a specific website, the Kagi search box is for text searching/research.

So the differentiation is not "searching big sites" vs "searching all the other sites", it's "getting to one specific site that I don't know the URL of" vs "searching web content".

I feel I often waste a Kagi search when I know what site I want but I've forgotten or don't know the URL. In these cases I don't need more than the most basic and shallow index of the website content: probably just the headers and footer. Often just the URL without any content at all would have been sufficient.

So Kagi would need a broad but extremely shallow internal index of the whole web, as opposed to a narrow but deep index of the major sites. (This whole suggestion hinges on the idea that such a shallow index would be feasible for Kagi to maintain, I have no idea whether this is true...)

A couple of real-life examples: I haven't looked at Kagi feedback for a few months, and I couldn't remember the name of the website. Was it kagisupport, kagifeatures? It wasn't coming up in my history drop-down in the location bar, so I did a search for it.

After I've posted this, I need to visit my local council website. It's called something like "inner west council". But I don't know the exact URL, so I have to search for it. (I just searched on Kagi, it's www.innerwest.nsw.gov.au).

In your example, someone typing "twitter" in the location bar wants to go to twitter.com, but if they type "twitter" in the Kagi search field they want to research news about twitter.

So my suggestion is: in the Kagi search plugins, have a user-selectable option to make location bar searches go to the "basic results" page, which has Kagi's top 10 guesses for the site the user was looking for, and a big "continue your search on Kagi" button. These results are free.

If the user wants to make a regular Kagi search, they can do it in one of three ways: launch the search from the location bar and then click on the "continue" button; navigate to kagi.com and start the search there; use a bang.

Users who are on metered plans and are price sensitive, like me, can turn on that feature. Everyone else can ignore it. You could pro-actively promote it to users who use up their quota.

      21 days later

      riddley Thinking about this a bit more, something else I frequently do from the browser bar is unit and currency conversions

        2 months later

        A variation of this - if you look at SEO traffic reports, people have gotten really lazy with typing and bookmarking domains and there is a huge amount of 'navigational search' traffic. You type 'Amazon' instead of 'Amazon.com', etc. etc.

        In some case there really is no full search results page required if there is an obvious domain name resolution.

        It could be a light search page, that just shows 'Did you mean Amazon.com or something else' - that page would automatically redirect after 5s (configurable) to amazon.com, unless you clicked 'something else' in which case it goes to a full SERP.

        This light weight could help with cost, and could also maybe accounted for as a light query.

        I know I can type the .com, but after years of not having to think about it, navigational search is now an expected convenience.

        And ideally the solve should be automatic, not another bang, since we're trying to retain trained behavior, not change it.

          a month later

          We are going towards the future where we can again offer unlimited searches for ~$10/mo.

          Still there can be ways to achieve savings that this thread highlights. Would love if someone could summarize or add the main improvements we can make that would improve the producitivity of users while achieving savings on our end.

          9 months later

          I can only assume the $10/m for unlimited searches is a result of lowering the cost/search, which makes arguments for specific user-reported search patters which may be trivial in cost somewhat dates/inconsequential?

          Is it worth discussing habits that would normally be search-wasteful where I use search to go to websites instead of going to them directly (ie, typing in stackoverflow in search instead of going there directly)? If these are search trends you (Kagi) can already identify and pick ways to lower costs, I'm guessing that this discussion may be worth closing then.

            What about preview suggestions? A lot of people probably (ab)use search because they only half remember an URL they would easily recognize if they'd be given the option to click on it in a dropdown.

            Also, Google has recently expanded their preview suggestions. If you type "Orlando Bloom" you will see the name with a small pic in the preview options. While with Google, this initiates a Google search, Kagi could take a different approach and send users directly to a popular information source (like Wikipeda). As long as it's clear where you will be heading, this could be a cool feature and a cost-saver all in one.

            EDIT: Preview suggestions could also be configurable or simply based on what is set up under "search with..."

              Kagibeh Cna you share more information about this? Do you mean this feature?

                  Kagibeh What about preview suggestions? A lot of people probably (ab)use search because they only half remember an URL they would easily recognize if they'd be given the option to click on it in a dropdown.

                  This is built into every browser. For example on Safari you will always get the most common website as a suggestion when typing into the URL bar, even if you don't have the site in your bookmarks or history.

                      Vlad Ok, I realize I didn't do my homework properly - my apologies.

                      I wasn't even aware that Kagi could do this, because I do 95% of my searches from the browser search bar. In Edge, there are no preview suggestions when you search from the search bar. Just installed Kagi search in Firefox to confirm this: no preview suggestions in the search bar. When I switch to Google as the default search, I am getting those.

                      In response to carl's post: None of the browsers I mentioned gives me URL suggestions. I type "twitter" and Kagi suggests searching "twitter video downloader". Nobody - neither the browser nor Kagi - suggests visiting twitter.com directly.

                          Which browsers did you mention? Safari will suggest the most likely web page always, while Chrome and Firefox will suggest from your bookmarks and history. That covers most people, unless the user deliberately configures their browser to disable suggestions.

                            carl Carl, you seem to mean well, but your replies to my posts are typically a mix of denying, ignoring and twisting what I wrote. Please don't do this. Unless Vlad needs more info, I honestly don't have more to say about this.

                                That's an aggressive and rude response. If there's something I've misunderstood I apologise, but in my experience most mainstream browsers will suggest any domain you have in your history or in your bookmarks when you start typing – unless you turn off history and also do not bookmark any page you frequently visit.

                                For example if you have visited Twitter once, next time you write "tw" in the URL bar, the browser will suggest twitter.com

                                  5 months later
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