Keyboard shortcut or bang to enable a specific lense-search

gesumin

I have kagi as my default search in my browser and type my queries into my address bar more often than not. Now if I want to do a lense-search, I would have to do a normal search first, then move my mouse to the lenses and click a lense.

Of course I can make custom searches in Firefox instead, e.g. "kp" being the keyword to enable a kagi programming-lense-search and then just enter "kp query" into the address bar, but if kagi supported this natively, I wouldn't have to set something like this up on all the devices I use. Having a shortcut or bang to go directly to a lense-search spares users from a needless query and mouse click.

Vlad

gesumin We have bangs for lenses planned.

Of course I can make custom searches in Firefox instead, e.g. "kp" being the keyword to enable a kagi programming-lense-search

hmm this is not supported?

gesumin

Vlad

hmm this is not supported?

What do you mean? I can set up https://kagi.com/search?q=%s&l=3 as a bookmark in Firefox with "kp" as the keyword. Typing "kp help" would then turn to https://kagi.com/search?q=help&l=3 with l=3 being my programming lense.

MalcolmCook

Vlad keyboard
out of curiousity, can you share your plans for "bangs for lenses"?

Might I suggest you used a different key than "!" to avoid possible conflict with DDG bangs. Perhaps % (which kind of looks like a pair of glasses 😉 ).

Oh, and, I like the idea of using lens numbers as they are short. But, as you say the number/lens correspondence might change which is arguable undesirable. What are you going to do?

Vlad

gesumin Right, although l=3 is dynamic if you fiddle with lenses. Thanks for clarifying.

Vlad

MalcolmCook We are going to use bangs, and since it is user customizable, the user chose what bang to overwrite if any. We need to keep things simple.

GeoffFranks

I'd like to have either a default lens, or the ability to use lens ordering to provide different weight to my search results.

For example, right now, if i search 'diego', i get the san diego zoo. If i apply the 'programming' lens, I get a result from github. It would be nice to have results from the programming lens appear first by default, whether that means setting the programming lens as a default in kagi, using a special link for my browser search, or using the ordering of lenses to provide weight/ranking to the sources of results.

e.g. prefer programming, but fall back to discussions, then news, then recipes, etc.

I'm probably not doing a great job of explaining this though, so please let me know how i can clarify 🙂

Browsing6853

Does it fit what you are looking for?
https://kagifeedback.org/d/658-lens-stacking/4

I think I saw somewhere an idea about allowing lens to be specified by bangs too (can't find the URL). This would allow you to search using a specific lens very quickly (e.g. just "!programming <query>")

GeoffFranks

Stacking would definitely help part of this, but having that lens be my default for all searches would be great.

If that can be accomplished by customizing the search query template in Orion using the bang based searches per device, that would be perfect!

Vlad

@GeoffFranks merged with this as it seems it would take care of the need for the most part (ability to assign a bang to the lens).

Running lenses in parallel to main search results is an interesting option, but would affect our cost to search. Every lens search is a new search. If we were to run 2-3 lenses every time you search we just made our search cost 2-3x bigger. If our subscription was $30/mo that would be possible.