While a search engine obviously is intended to search, in this day and age it is used for far more than that. It is used as a way to quickly access a website, despite the fact searching it is far more costly in electricity than simply using a bookmark. It is used as a spell checker/dictionary. It can be used a calculator, or a million other non-search engine related things. It would be better for everyone if those functions didn't take up the computational power of an entire search. Rather than immediately doing a search when entering something in the address bar, a confirmation/landing page would allow the user to either do an action other than search, or cancel the search altogether.
This would make the starter plan much more palpable, since my limited number of searches would actually go towards things I'm wanting to search, and not times where I can't remember how to spell a word, or navigate to a website I use sometimes but not seemingly often enough to justify a bookmark. If you have unlimited searches, you are far more likely to use those extra resources with reckless abandon.
There would be a setting that requires confirmation for every search done from the address bar, where you decide what function you want to execute. I'm thinking when I do a search in my address bar, rather than it immediately executing the search it brings me to basically the search homepage with my text in the search bar. That page would have options of what function I am wanting to execute, with the big main one being SEARCH, and the other options would be things like dictionary, calculator, website, etc. This would both save on searches for users with the limited plan, and would save Kagi the additional resources for unintended searches. This would be especially useful when I am trying to navigate to a website using a bookmark keyword in my address bar, but accidentally misspell it causing it to search instead.
Given that this could add an extra step, I imagine it would be off by default. Though if it works well, enabling it by default would save a lot of unnecessary searches.
This seems like it would be mutually beneficial, since how many unnecessary searches could you cut down on? And it would make it much easier to not worry about the 300 search limit of the starter plan.
Scenario 1:
I type in "Crepuscular" in my address bar and press enter. This then brings you to the Kagi search page with "Crepuscular" in the search bar, with a big button that says "SEARCH" and smaller buttons that give me the options of "Dictionary" "Calculator" "Website". I select "Dictionary" and it redirects me to a dictionary site of my choice, and doesn't count towards the search count.
Scenario 2:
I have a keyword bookmark in bitwarden with the keyword "bitwarden". I type in "bitardem" in my address bar on accident and hit enter. Rather than it searching "bitwardem" it would bring me to the search landing page. Since I did not mean to type that, I would simply go back to the address bar and correctly enter "bitwarden" and it would not have cost me an unintentionally search, not would you have used the computational resources to search because of a typo.
Scenario 3:
I type "How to buy kagi" in address bar and press enter. Once again, it brings me to this landing page. Since I am doing a search like I want, I simply hit enter again and it proceeds with the normal search operation.
