When search terms use boolean and literal operators, consider adding a form of syntax highlighting or annotation in the search bar to show the user that the terms are being interpreted that way.
Example:
I'm a programmer and was searching for information on a feature flag I was unfamiliar with. With my query 'gcc -ftime-report', I didn't receive any meaningful information on the flag, because I believe the flag's leading minus sign was interpreted as a negation. This confused me for a minute or so. When I replaced the query with 'gcc "-ftime-report"', I got the information I expected.
If the operator and/or affected substring of the query had special highlighting (and/or perhaps a tooltip on hover), it would have been clear immediately to a user that their search term was being interpreted with a specific meaning. As it stands now, accidental boolean operators can "silently" affect results in unexpected ways.
Also note: I wasn't able to find documentation on the operators with the query kagi boolean operators, so I'm guessing it's either an undocumented feature or the docs are tucked away somewhere. That's fine! I appreciate that Kagi respects boolean operators (unlike some search engines) and has advanced features, but users likely aren't actively scanning one-off queries for syntax that might be accidentally interpreted as operators.
I DO imagine:
- Immediate visual cue such as highlighting, shading, etc upon text entry when the user types anything interpreted by the engine as special syntax
- Additional information on how the information is interpreted upon hover.
- Possibly a tooltip for the AND, OR, NOT keywords when hovering over them
- Perhaps a human-language rewrite of the query subtitling the query with the operators taken into account. (I.e. 'gcc -ftime-report' is subtitled with "Show results for GCC which don't include 'ftime-report')
I do NOT imagine:
- a graphical "editor" for logical propositions within queries
- additional operators or expanded query features
This is just a suggestion, but I figured I would mention it, as Kagi is a great engine and I want to see it succeed.
