Support of rich / search suggestions

Thomas

When typing a query, such as math or currency conversion, in the browser's omnibox, the result is not shown in the suggestions dropdown (i.e., the /autosuggest Open Search API).

It is necessary to press Enter, which navigates away the currently opened page to Kagi, wait until Kagi loads, and only then see the result. This adds a huge amount of friction for performing simple queries which do not depend on actual search results.

Kagi:

Google:

Vlad

Thanks for the suggestion. Note that this is browser implementation specific. There is no standard for "auto complete" and what you see there is hard coded implementation in your browser parsing google auto suggest.

But this is aligned with the direction we want to take autocomplete further. At least we wil be able to do this in Orion, I would not expect Safari/Firefox/Chrome would be able to show this any time soon.

Thomas

I only tested Chromium, but I've noticed that Kagi does autocomplete suggests math completion, but it seems to offer it only sometimes.

Adding = to the end often helps, but again, sometimes has no effect.

The Kagi searchbox on the website seems more reliable.

Having a similar UX for the omnibox suggestions as Google Search has in Chromium-based browsers would definitely improve my productivity with Kagi a lot, primarily for queries for which there is no need to perform a page navigation (math/currency examples from above).

Niraj

I use Vivaldi as my browser (due to primarily being a Windows/Android user), and would also love to see this feature! @Vlad As I understand it, it's the Kagi autosuggest API that would need to be updated to support this in more cases, right? For instance, in Vivaldi's search engine settings, my Kagi "Suggest URL" is set to https://kagi.com/api/autosuggest?q=%s and an example of a request and current response looks like this:

Request:
https://kagi.com/api/autosuggest?q=50*3

Response:
[ "50*3", [ "50*3", "50*30", "50*365", "50*35", "50*300", "50*32", "50*31", "50*33", "50*38", "50*37" ] ]

Browsing6853

Quoting from https://kagifeedback.org/d/3092-add-image-and-description-to-search-suggestions/11

I took some time reverse engineering the search bar requests from Brave browser and Firefox. Apparently "www.google.com/complete/search" is called differently depending on the client

google.com: it returns a piece of javascript, it's very easy to inspect but doesn't return calculations (see https://kagifeedback.org/d/2763-results-for-conversions-in-open-search-suggestions) and isn't suitable for a search bar autosuggestions.

firefox: The desktop search bar on Firefox supports calculator and images/descriptions. It's a very simple and clean endpoint (https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=firefox&q=%s&channel=fen).

Chrome based: They have more complex features on the search bar, which they call "omnibox". It includes all that is included on Firefox plus additional features such as currency conversion (extremely useful) and translations (it doesn't work so well).
These advanced features are probably more expensive to chrome and are not triggered directly using a single api call. Kagi shouldn't take these complex calls from google, but I can get some sample of the result for currency conversion if needed.

curl https://www.google.com/complete/search\?client\=firefox\&q\=1%2B1%29%2F3\&channel\=fen
returns just
["1+1)/3",["\u003d 0.666666667"]]
So yes, there is an API for calculator on search suggestions, but there isn't any standard.

Browsing6853

Firefox just added image preview to the search bar

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/122.0/releasenotes/

Kagi should support it too

Vlad

Browsing6853 Any information on the format they require?

Browsing6853

Vlad

You can easily look at that on google.com

curl https://www.google.com/complete/search\?q\=beyon\&client\=gws-wiz

Grooty

In the Firefox 122.0 (Changelog), they added support for search suggestion images:

This works for Google, but not for kagi:

I expected the images to show up, like they do for Google. I don't know if this is a Firefox issue or a Kagi issue as Google seems to be the only search provider where it works (tested DDG and Bing, both didn't work)

Vlad

Grooty There is no standard for this. Firefox just decided to support Google's auto suggestion format without publishing any guidelines for other search engines.

Grooty

Vlad oh okay, that's annoying. Is there a standard for it and/or is this something that could be added through the extension

Vlad

Grooty There is no standard, we'd (or our community) have to do some reverse engineering how Firefox does it and then it would still probably not work in other browsers.

Browsing6853

@Vlad

I took some time reverse engineering the search bar requests from Brave browser and Firefox. Apparently "www.google.com/complete/search" is called differently depending on the client:

google.com: it returns a piece of javascript, it's very easy to inspect but doesn't return calculations (see https://kagifeedback.org/d/2763-results-for-conversions-in-open-search-suggestions) and isn't suitable for a search bar autosuggestions.
firefox: The desktop search bar on Firefox supports calculator and images/descriptions. It's a very simple and clean endpoint (https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=firefox&q=%s&channel=fen).
Chrome based: They have more complex features on the search bar, which they call "omnibox". It includes all that is included on Firefox plus additional features such as currency conversion (extremely useful) and translations (it doesn't work so well).
These advanced features are probably more expensive to chrome and are not triggered directly using a single api call. Kagi shouldn't take these complex calls from google, but I can get some sample of the result for currency conversion if needed.

So to fix/improve Kagi's autocomplete and get both calculator and images working, you can focus on the following examples:

Firefox, calculator, should work for more math formulas, like "1+1)/3": curl https://www.google.com/complete/search\?client\=firefox\&q\=1%2B1%29%2F3\&channel\=fen
Firefox, "beyonce", should show images: curl https://www.google.com/complete/search\?client\=firefox\&q\=beyonce\&channel\=fen
Chrome, calculator: curl -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' 'https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=chrome-omni&gs_ri=chrome-ext-ansg&q=1%2B1%29%2F3'
Chrome, images: curl -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' 'https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=chrome-omni&gs_ri=chrome-ext-ansg&q=beyonce'. The image urls format are encoded in some format that I haven't tried to decode.

btw, I'm open to work and would love be paid to dive deeper and implement such features

DonReba

Firefox 122.0 introduced a feature, where the search box displays images and descriptions for results in engines that support this. Google is the only engine that does, AFAIK. It would be good, if Kagi supported this, as well.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/122.0/releasenotes/

DonReba

I posted a request for guidance on Mozilla Connect.

wooigak

Kagi should support the new Firefox 122 feature displaying images and descriptions for search suggestions - https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/122.0/releasenotes/

Problem, it seems that it's not standardized and only supporting Google as today - https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/f60bb10a5fe6936f9e9f9e8a90d52c18a0ffd818/toolkit/components/search/SearchSuggestionController.sys.mjs

Here the Mozilla Connect Idea "publish a standard for search engine suggestions": https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/publish-a-standard-for-search-engine-suggestions/idi-p/52059

Use your fingers to type words for a new search, boom, it displays some suggestions when images and descriptions.

On Microsoft Edge, the same feature is available with Bing, but not Google. On Firefox, there are no suggestions displayed with Bing. I didn't try with Google Chrome, cause I don't have it installed.

Vlad

wooigak This is a duplicate issue as far as I can recall, care to find the original so that we can merge?