Take inspiration from Stract’s “Optics” to improve Kagi Lenses.

quinncom

I just discovered the open source Stract search engine, which looks great (GitHub, homepage, HN discussion). It has a feature it calls “Optics” that are very similar to Kagi Lenses, except more powerful because they use a programmable configuration language to define the rule lists, and because they can handle many more rules than Kagi's limit of 10 domains per filter. Stract comes with some interesting built-in Optics:

Copycats removal: Remove common copycat websites from search results.
Hacker News: Only return results from websites that are popular on Hacker News.
Discussions: Only return results from forums or similar types of QA pages.
Fediverse: Only search in fediverse sites.
Indieweb & blogroll: Search only in the indieweb + a list of blogs from blogroll.org and some hand-picked blogs from hackernews.
10K Short: Remove the top 10,000 most popular websites from search results.
Devdocs: Only return results from some of the developer documentation sites listed on devdocs.io. This is a non-exhaustive list.
Academic: Search exclusively in academic sites (.edu, .ac.uk, arxiv.org etc.). This is a non-exhaustive list.
Tilde: Only search in urls that contain a tilde (~).

Kagi already has filters similar to some of these, but the others would fit perfectly with Kagi’s ethos.

So, this feature request is:

Allow configuring Kagi lenses using a programmable configuration language.
Allow supporting more than 10 domains per lens.
Add more default lenses.

Edit: a better title for this issue would be: “Use a programmable configuration language for lenses, similar to Stract’s Optics.”

Vlad

quinncom

Allow supporting more than 10 domains per lens.

See https://kagifeedback.org/d/1940-lenses-should-allow-a-higher-number-of-domains-ultimate-plan

Add more default lenses.

We feel we have plenty of default lenses already. Stract obviously took inspiration from us as they match almost one to one. Which ones from this list do you miss in Kagi?

quinncom

Optics did clearly copy Lenses but improved on it by using a programmable configuration language. I like the Hacker News and 10K Sort Optics, but the key here is having the ability to build my own more sophisticated lenses, using code.

I understand from issue #1940 that there is a cost limitation with including more than 10 domains per lens, and it's good to hear you're exploring solutions to that. I guess Stracts gets around that because they have direct access to their own index rather than paying for searches to API providers.