Offer Kagi local search on user website

ploum

I use Kagi to search on my own static blog (www.ploum.net ) through a lens.

I find it so cool that I would like to offer it to the visitor of my website. They would click on the "search" link on my page and Kagi would open with a "forced lens", allowing them to search through my domain.

Benefit includes increased visibility for Kagi and one more valuable feature for paying users.

Technically, this would be a lens available also to not-logged in users. We can imagine a fancy url like : kagi.com/public/ploum.net/

In its "lens" list, an user could get an option to make it public trough a customizable URL.

To avoid abuse, one could imagine only allowing "verified-domains" in public lenses, where "verified-domains" are domain for which the user has proved ownership (through uploading a file or through a DNS record).

Vlad

ploum Problem with exposing Kagi for non-logged in users is that we would be hammered by bots as most of the web is hammered by them.

For us every search costs the same, including just searching one site. So the question is who will pay for this?

If we created a widget that you can use but you paid for cost (basically our search API cost, would that be useful? What is the maximum price you would pay to have superior site search?

ploum

That’s, of course, a problem I didn’t foresee. Public searches on a page could potentially be "billed" to the user and part of his/her account. I have no idea how much it would be abused by bots.

Alternatives I see:

restrict the offer to "small web" websites and use something less expensive (like marginalia ?)
build your own crawler. In the long term, this is a really interesting take as you have a very constrained problem (only a given domain). Those results could be potentially injected in normal results later and, gradually, build a kind of independence from providers.

In fact, it could be a way to fund that independence: bill as a separate product the "search on my domain".

It is of course obvious that I’m brainstorming here.

Vlad

ploum We are planning to start a service for crawling individual websites and presenting search results (with an AI summary) as a part of Kagi Labs. But this is likely to be paid too. The problem really is that these things have a cost and somebody needs to pay for it. Your proposal is that this should come out of our marketing budget but is a possibility but it is very hard to estimate the impact (both value wise and cost wise).

Google can absorb making this free (although it is aggressively fighting bots too) but we have much fewer resources than them obviously.

So an nteresting problem to solve, for sure.

KagiForMe

Vlad

We are planning to start a service for crawling individual websites and presenting search results (with an AI summary) as a part of Kagi Labs.

Hype! I think this is an important step into the right direction. Care to share more details? 🙂

KagiForMe

Vlad We are planning to start a service for crawling individual websites and presenting search results (with an AI summary) as a part of Kagi Labs

Vlad I this feature still in development or did it get dropped?

ploum

Regarding the cost, I don’t suggest marketing budget. Intuitively, I would now, after your comment, consider this as a separate, paid product: do you want kagi search on your website ? We offer that but it will cost you X€/month or per 1000 queries.

When I think about it, it makes sense: Kagi is about paying directly for a service (that we are used to receive for free because we pay it indirectly).

Now, of course, as every paid product in the world, the question is : is it worth it? is there a market for it? I have no idea. I also have no idea if it could be quickly developed with current Kagi infrastructure or if this should be a whole, separate project.

Vlad

KagiForMe Will share a demo when we have it, hopeffuly in few weeks.

Vlad

KagiForMe Did not get dropped we are almost ready.