Thanks for the feedback. A few thoughts on specific items that were raised:
RoxyRoxyRoxy I don't think this is a good idea, as you mentioned many users are vehemently against AI such as Quick Answer; in fact many users come to Kagi specifically to escape Google's shoehorning of their poor AI "overviews".
Yes, when quick answers were first rolled out, interrogative words triggered quick answers. I think the issue here was specifically that quick answers was turned on by default for existing users, many of whom left Google to escape quick answers as you mentioned. I don't think there's an issue with interrogative words triggering quick answers per se. Already today the quick answers toggle is on by default for new users, so this just makes it more likely that Kagi's existing configuration is discoverable and provides value. I do want to acknowledge that this change would push some users who have the toggle on today so they can use question marks in a similar way to "q!" to turn it off. This might be annoying for some users on the margin, but I feel is an acceptable tradeoff since "?" and "q!" seem duplicative today.
RoxyRoxyRoxy Can I ask why? There's a Quick Answer button right under the search bar, no need for the !q or question mark even
When I first started using Kagi I looked at the settings above the results I was focused on the items on the left side, because from a UX standpoint that's where the mostly commonly used stuff tends to be put. I use the forums toggle, and basically nothing else, so I didn't bother reading everything else in this settings section. Based on what I've seen over the years running UX studies, this is a pretty common usage pattern. People reliably don't read what's on the screen that's not immediately tied to their task.
laiz Nevertheless, a separate toggle for this feature could be a solution, if the Kagi team is willing to entertain the idea of increasingly complicated toggles.
I don't see a need for a separate feature toggle here. Interrogative words can just be added to the existing feature toggle that triggers quick answers with a question mark. Both question mark and interrogative words are "natural language" approaches to triggering quick answers that serve a similar purpose of improving discoverability and ergonomics for non-power users, IMO. Power users who want to selectively trigger quick answers can continue to use the "q!"/q command which is unaffected by the feature toggle.
laiz If I remember correctly, this was the case when quick answer was first implemented but following user feedback it was removed as most Kagi users found it annoying.
I saw that there was a lot of negative responses to this feature, but I have a hypothesis: that there's some selection bias in who gave feedback. The people most active on the feedback forums are clearly a vital part of Kagi's community and deserve increased weight in their feedback due to their contribution to the product, but I suspect there are also a lot of users who don't contribute to the forums who are also incidentally more likely to have an experience like mine and not discover quick answers. And additionally unpaid users who are just trying out Kagi are the most likely to have this issue and the least likely to provide feedback. I don't have the data to support this, but this kind of selection bias is a very common pattern in product feedback. I'm sure some usability tests (which @Vlad actually referred to in one of the discussion threads) could shed some light here.
[edited to fix markdown errors]
