11

When searching for content with the forums lens I rarely get results that differ from simply appending reddit to the query. This is really a bummer because there are tons of high quality forums out there which are being missed.

An example, I happen to like writing with fountain pens. The forums lens doesn't include the largest forum i know https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/ when searching for fountain pens.

When searching for audio things I don't get any results from https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org (which would be great) or even www.head-fi.org/forums/ (it's a forum!).

It's nothing but reddit results here.

I think the value proposition of the forums lens should be to surface discussions from niche communities around the web. Organic content! I can't remember ever seeing a result that wasn't reddit on there.

    I can confirm this.

    Searching for "tall windscreen for klr 650" using the Forums Lens gives nothing but Reddit results. One would expect results from a forum like https://advrider.com/f/ first and foremost. ADV Rider is a motorcycle forum with hundreds of thousands of members and millions of threads.

    If I 'lower' Reddit from the results, I still get Reddit.

    If I 'block' Reddit from results. I get nothing.

    Searching for "best thermal paste" with Reddit blocked:

    With the Forums Lens off for this query, I do get a forum as the second result and plenty of other forums:

    I might even posit that by using a special Lens for forum results, one might actually want to not surface results from Reddit which dominate search results normally. I go out of my way to avoid Reddit and have actually lowered it in my general search.

    I don't mind Reddit appearing when using this lens (I miss Google's old 'discussions' option), but I would like to see many, many other forums appear so agree with basic sentiment. For example, I was searching the other day for discussion (rather than factual information) about a TV program, and https://forums.digitalspy.com should have appeared in results but didn't (and did only get Reddit results), until going back to main search and adding 'digital spy forum' to end of search (i.e. was in search results but failed to appear under forums lens.)

      I think a humanly curated list of forum domains could be a good solution. There are many huge national forums that are not included in the forum lens, making queries in those languages useless with Kagi. Maybe let users suggest forums to be included?

      The largest forums can not be found by any algorithm looking for certain technologies or frameworks, because when a forum gets large enough, they need to switch to hand coded solutions to be able to handle the load.

      a month later

      When I joined paid Kagi last year the forum button was a big part of why. It pulled up forums I didn't even know. The feature has gotten worse, way worse all of a sudden. As said above, if you remove Reddit from search results you get nothing or a few ycombinator results. This feels like a step toward the encrappified mainstream search engines.

      Edit: It's possible I'm confusing memories that the filter used to work now. All I know is that its a devoted Reddit button now.

      • Vlad replied to this.

        lowayne It is always more useful for us to just get an actionable reproducible example with a screenshot. I can confirm that results are lacking though, we will look into this.

            Here's an example, please note the region selected:


            The Flashback result is a decades old forum and one of the largest in Europe. It is never shown in the Kagi forum tab. The thread that is shown on web search has over 40 000 replies. In forum search we get five reddit results that are completely irrelevant.

            As I've mentioned before, one of the main selling points of Kagi is that it is the only alternative to Google that manages to do non-English queries well. This should include forums, so why not manually add some of the largest forums as a stop gap measure until the algorithm has been fixed?

            I agree with the sentiment here. It would be really valuable if the Forums lens was a way for me to surface discussions from niche communities like fountainpennetwork etc.

            That said, isn't this problem a variant of the reason a separate "Fediverse" lens was created? From this post @Vlad noted that if the Fediverse and Reddit lenses were combined, Reddit would just overshadow all the Fediverse results. I get the problem that no results show up when Reddit is blocked, but even with that fixed, wouldn't niche community results still tend to get massively overshadowed by Reddit?

            I would love if there were a way to just have a single "Forums" lens that was actually able to surface quality forum results from around the web in much the same way that Kagi search tends to do a better job surfacing results from the Small Web.

            • Vlad replied to this.

              Images of search example with the Forum lens for a standard car brand. When I 'remove results from this site' all that remains are completely irrelevant combinator posts.

              I see this may be a bug in another post. Good luck finding it!

              ![

                5 days later

                Hey everyone. We're still trying to nail down the root cause of the issue, but in the meantime we've implemented a temporary fix, so you can now resume enjoying the Forum lenses!
                Please note: query times may be slightly longer than usual until we fully resolve the problem

                  Luis Quick update: we found the problem. Issue will be fully resolved with today's release.

                    No one is typing