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Take a peek over here: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5766-kagi-user-analytics
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Opt-in collaborative shared result ranking
awefdev Absolutely. The things you could do with this feature....
I think this collaborative approach to seach could result in some really amazing things with a little creativity.
I'm also 100% in agreement that this sort of thing is possible if done intentionally and with the Kagi principles in mind. I see a lot of sentiments here that read to me as fear and disdain of user data and collaboration. I understand; we've been traumatized. It's never been done properly before. I personally would like to give Kagi the chance to do it the right way.
My opinion is that this data has value, which unfortunately makes it upsettingly profitable. I want to receive this value directly, safely, transparently, and with consent. I also truly desire to see what amazing things could be acomplished through data collection and sharing when it's unincumbered by greed.
I stand by this sentiment, and I'm happy to (respectfully) debate or discuss with anyone who thinks differently. (Perhaps over here if you'd like to discuss kagi user data as a general concept: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5766-kagi-user-analytics )
Just scrolling through this thread, I'd propose (and love to see) just a dead simple upvote/downvote ranking.
Feature a "Kagster score" or something in the results listing. Add a score ranking sort/filter later on if it makes sense. Start adding awesome features on top of it and let it grow.
I would assume that like-minded subscribers gravitate to Kagi for a lot of the same reasons I do. I value this community and it's opinion. I want to know what you all think about websites that appear in search results.
Capabilities of this nature could be made self-limiting by allowing only one vote/sentiment per site or domain. This probably requires some sort of user data retention.
I've said it before regarding similar suggestions, but I'll repeat myself: It is better to wait with this kind of feature until Kagi has grown and has a broader customer base. Right now, the customer base has values that are very different from most people, meaning that any socialized ranking will risk turning Kagi into a very niche political censorship engine, rather than a search engine. Just looking at the "Domain insights" of most blocked and most raised domains will show this.
One idea would be to make a fake "collaborative ranking" feature that shows as if the user is influencing the search results of others with their rankings, but which in reality has no effect at all. This would be a way to keep busy all the activists that are drawn to Kagi like a magnet, with their dreams of wielding power behind the scenes. They can then spend their days searching for websites they hate and don't want to see to down rank them, instead of using their paid search engine to find interesting and valuable infromation.
I'd much rather have "Super lenses", where people can use a set of rankings provided by other users as a lens. Collaborative ranking could be one of these lenses. But it's my honest belief that super lenses created by individual Kagi users will always wield higher quality than any collaborative aggregate of ranking.
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I mean - you can wait as long as you want to adopt an opt-in feature right? Just wait until it's more mature if that's your sentiment. I'm interested in this feature. I'm interested in the sentiments of Kagi subscribers, and I'd be happy to help dig in and help refine in whatever way I can.
I... Carl I was going to skip over the second paragraph, but it just isn't very .. nice. I can relate to your frustration very well, but one person's activists are another's friends. This is rude and defeatist. Play nice.
I do like the lens idea. It would be amazing if lens (or something like it) had some basic analytical tools. (does it?).
That being said, I'd prioritize search context. Just even right up next to the other site intel. Give me user rankings, maybe a group-by. Happy days.
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Yeah i wasn't even going to click on the domain insights link, because within this context i honestly don't care what it says. Scrolling the top 10 or 20 sites of each of category quickly informs me that those choices are very well aligned with my own. Perhaps I have found my niche. The "censorship engine" so to speak works. I would like to be able to collaborate with these fine folks within a search context.
I will tell you though, you may have a future in marketing - Kagi: "has values that are different from most" search engines. I love it.
Just to be crystal clear: what I want is a collaborative capability. The current composition of the user base is an irrelevant but welcome surprise.
maurs I mean - you can wait as long as you want to adopt an opt-in feature right? Just wait until it's more mature if that's your sentiment. I'm interested in this feature. I'm interested in the sentiments of Kagi subscribers, and I'd be happy to help dig in and help refine in whatever way I can.
Yes, but if it's implemented right now it might have unwished for consequences, due to the unbalanced user base. It will determine what kind of customers will be attracted to Kagi and what kind of customers will avoid Kagi. Because word on the web will be "This search engine is great because you can block and pin results, by the way there's also communal results ranking"
Then they check out Kagi and the communal rankings and see that among the blocked websites are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon and LinkedIn. Making Kagi useless for almost everybody except a small subset of people.
I block Twitter myself, but I don't think most people will want such an important platform blocked from their search results. Rather they will consider Kagi to be broken as a search engine. Even if they themselves have turned on communal rankings, because that's what everybody online said was so great about Kagi...
Any new online project will attract a disproportional amount of activists, including Kagi. I'm not referring to you, btw. I really think it's better to wait until the user base has grown and became more broad before implementing these things. As for the political leaning: there are hundreds of countries in the world, the aggregate rankings as of today would mostly cater to people who are aligned with one particular political party in one particular nation. That would be limiting for Kagi, who aims to cater to an international crowd.
I think the difference is that if the tool is built to learn what I would like, not just assume I am like the rest of Kagi users, this problem should not manifest. Now, users who are substantially dissimilar from the Kagi norm (if that’s even a thing, notice lots of sites are commonly boosted and commonly blocked) will benefit less because of lower statistics. Is that a huge problem? I don’t think so: as proposed above, it seems that substantial value could be derived by leveraging the usage of a single high volume user on their own results.
There could be an issue with a self-bubble in that case, but we can already do that with manual tools.
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I sense a lot of... fear of the future/unknown/internet-populus floating around this conversation, and I think it's driving a lot of assumptions.
I agree that there are a lot of branding and bias management issues surrounding this concept. My opinion is that with some creativity and a well honed perspective, a lot of the perceived blockers can be used as advantages. If they are no longer treated as blockers, then progress can be made, rather than wait-and-seeing the feature to completion.
For Example: I don't assume that the terminus of this feature will not support multiple pools of site rankings that a user can create their own consortium from. A user may be able to select from a menu of sentiment pools, or be matched to a pool(s). I have no idea what this would look like, but i have several ideas surrounding the concept.
I loathe to mention it, but just think about reddit within this collaborative social search context. They have many many maaaaany self selected groups based around the core concept of up/down votes.
I will admit that I hand-wave away the activist element, and it may be bigger than I realize. My assumption is that features of this nature should be architected in such a way that is tamper-resistant. Given the kind-of non-single-kagi-user-pool thoughts I've been chewing on lately, I also suspect that a majority subset these 'activists' are just maybe the angry-pitchfork-rabble sentiment group. Ok .. welcome - knock yourselves out. here's how you socialize about where to throw pitchforks... so to speak. (or perhaps more accurately, here's what pitchfork-wielders up/down doot most 
)
As far as timing goes... I also have a different opinion. One could also say that the small tight knit nature of the current user pool lends itself to 'simple iterative' feature delivery at a time when growing-pains might be less impactful. Perhaps this feature will have refined to the point that it's ready to support the diversity of the internet, before said diversity shows up at the front gate. The small nature of the user group might be an advantage from this perspective.
I think that this is an extremely relevant perspective in this context, and I thank you for sharing it.
I'm not sure if a feature like this can ever be advanced enought to "just work" in the background without even realizing, but I think maybe. There are definitely degrees-of-feasibilty between manual and magic through, and I think that it's very possible that 'really-intuitive' is deliverable.
To summarize this thread, would a simple to use option be to be able to enable 'wisdom of the crowds' basically downranking sites that other users have downranked automatically. This would work well for spam, the tricky part is political content (left vs right for example as this is personal preference that we wouldn't be able to tell).
I like the summary, but I have one suggestion. You called out downrank specifically, and I think that there might be danger/additional cosideration to be made if this was intentional.
I intuit many fewer 'social dragons' with an upvote-only solution. Upvote/Downvote functionality is a litle more challenging but perhaps balanced. Downvote only is perhaps an angry-mob-summoner for a few reasons.
I like "wisdom of the crowds" - I think it's a good perspective.
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I wince a bit when the conversation shifts to managing negative impacts around politics and user bias. My personal strategy for socially charged features such as this, is to maintain awareness and rigorously architect a solution that bias-free enough that there's not really anything in the delivery pipeline to point at as evil or unfair.
examples: (i'm just exploring possible foibles, not suggesting implementation here)
1: I choose "users who love github" as a sentiment pool to enable. I review the upvote-only list and see that stack exchange and some others are also prioritized. Why isn't devdocs.io listed? dunno, maybe i should upvote it and get others checking it out!
2: I choose "users who love github" as a sentiment pool to enable. I review the upvote/dowvote list and become offended that devdocs.io is deprioritized. the nerve of these kagi users, would do such a thing. I'm upvoting it.
3: I can't wrap my head around what a downvote-only capability would look like - insert downvote-only scenario here. why is devdocs.io deprioritized? this is ludicrous. it's just a reference agregator. I might just go chew someone out on kagifeedback. this is unacceptable.
I chose to use the "Users who also love" sort of paradigm very intentionally earlier in the thread. It's hard to target percieved political bias when the dimensions of grouping have nothing to do with politics. Sure there would be biases within user's shared sentiments, but they might be bucketized in a way that diminishes that impact perceptually and functionally.
Vlad Just be aware that such communal rankings can be what defines Kagi, which is in a sensitive state of growth.
I'd like to toot my own horn again, and beat my dead horse for my "Super Lenses" suggestion: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5051-suggestion-super-lenses-portals
It would enable people to subscribe to rankings and avoid associating Kagi strictly with one political party, one nation and one distro (Arch Linux).
This is dangerously close to making Kagi the next Reddit. We assume that all users have same search behaviour instead of “personalised” ranking. The strength is my Kagi is MY Kagi. I pay for it because the rankings are what I prefer, not what others do.
Google already does this based on other users behaviour. They float ads that you are likely to click if you searched X because they know more users that look for X will be tempted to click an ad.
When Kagi grows, bots might take over (paying for accounts won’t be an issue) because you can deploy bots to keep floating certain webpages or sources as “crowd prefered”.
Why would anyone go to those lengths? Because if Kagi is the future of search, it will not be liked by sites that make money by serving ads to more people. So to get more people to click on that site is by floating it back to the top. Right now it doesn’t even exist on my search list but what will stop this happening?
Also “personalised search” is my Kagi USP.
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I agree about reddit, and feel like Reddit is kind of a cesspool with a handfull of decent subreddits floating at the top nowadays. I don't want that, but I think that an up/down vote option is a far cry from user submitted and commented links.
Try to keep in mind that kagi's user base is not a captive audience, and I don't think it will be treated as one in the future. Kagi is also (hopefully) not sneaky and will not scheme against the user. This defangs the ad revenue generators a bit, and also disincentivizes bot voters quite a bit. This changes my own view on the overall situation.
Kagi (bless them) kinda upsets a lot of the current predatory business models when they behave as a faithful actor, rather than a two-faced adversary.
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Being able to create shareable and modular lists of adjustments to your rankings would be nice for crowdsourcing the labor of curating results.
This builds off my "bug" report and this feature suggestion about marking sites as AI generated together with my experience using Bluesky's Moderation Lists
Note: I know there's Lenses which can be shared, but their functionality is really meant for, as the name implies, very specific and repeated search situations.
Ranking Lists would be groups of adjustments that could be subscribed to and merged into your existing rankings (where your "global" adjustments take priority). This way if it would be possible for people to say highlight a collection of high quality blogs or provide a good starter kit for addressing SEO mills about a topic they follow (programming is obvious, but it easily applies to gardening, cooking, and hobbies generally).
When making an adjustment on the popover there would be a way of adding it to a list (graphic design is, in fact, not a huge passion)
A ranking adjustment could be on multiple lists, but (and I recognize this might be controversial to some people) the adjustment itself would be global to your account. If you're deeming a website useful or not in general it's context shouldn't matter. That's where Lenses would come into play.
Because of that I could see the current Personalized Results settings page continuing to exist but having a way of seeing the lists a domain is on (maybe the same list selection interface as the popover), plus an additional detail page for managing/viewing lists individually. More or less replicating what Bluesky has going on.
Some design thoughts:
- There would need to be a visualization indicating if a modification you've made overwrites something on a list or if a domain was added by a list and not by you
- Conflicts between lists (since it's not just "here's a list, take one specific action" as with Bluesky) would need to be addressed
- It may make sense to limit lists to
RaiseandLowerwith noPinsorBlocksor making accepting those an option, similar to how Bluesky hasMuteorBlocksubscription types
I'm sure there's a world of technical reasons this would be difficult to implement in the backend, but I think it would be a great addition to the platform!
P.S. the Personal Results settings page uses a Select for the selected adjustment, but the Domain Leaderboard lets you choose using a Radio Button Group
7 days later
dysiode thanks for the detailed explanation. I believe the problem you're addressing is the same discussed in this thread - https://kagifeedback.org/d/4502-opt-in-collaborative-shared-result-ranking ; I'llmerge them unless I misunderstood something (?)
I like this explicit approach of shareable lists. This is a topic we're going to spend some time analysing and defining next steps. We'll keep the main thread updated.
Merged 2 posts from Sharable Ranking Adjustment Lists .