Feedback on the new Quick Answer experience

vip

vohk I agree. I use Quick Answer for simple questions, and it usually only took up a small portion of my screen. Most of the time, I don’t plan to ask follow-up questions or continue the conversation with the Kagi assistant after reading the quick answer. I just read the answer, sometimes check the sources, and then move on.

kf123

It's no longer possible to see the quick answer and a list of search results on the same page together, and requires tapping to switch between one or the other. The only solution atm is to request the desktop site, which has additional margins/padding on each side.

Please create a mobile experience more closely resembling the desktop experience and/or similar to the previous design. I appreciate that now going to the assistant from quick answer does not do an additional search, but the UX is just much worse on mobile as-is.

Luis

Thank you all for the clear feedback.

Our rationale for this change was to give Quick Answer room to scale on mobile. As we add more capabilities, the old integrated UI was becoming constrained.

Your feedback is highlighting friction in this new model, particularly around:

the new screen breaks the scroll flow from answer to links
the extra tap and floating button feel like a step back in ergonomics
a shift away from an integrated tool towards a separate, chatbot-like experience

For now, we're focused on listening and learning. It's important to see how the new design works in practice, once the muscle memory adjusts. This thread is the main place for this conversation, and we are reading everything. Once we have that complete picture, we can plan the best path forward. I'll make this thread sticky.

kf123

Luis imo it's not related to muscle memory - rather that both quick answer + links aren't viewable at the same time and/or accessible at a glance and a scroll, resulting in worse usability. other search engines (google, brave) also show their quick answer equivalent on the same screen as the search results on mobile and the experience does not seem constrained

kirkmc

Luis But the floating button switches away from the quick answer. I want to see both. I want to see the answer, with its citations, then scroll down and see other links. I think that integration of AI quick answer and search results is optimal. By switching back-and-forth, I cannot easily scroll up and down to see the AI answer and the search results.

And, please, no floating buttons. Interfaces are so crammed with buttons and icons and widgets these days; on a small display like a phone, these things just get in the way.

Koolkat

Luis the follow up question text entry box on quick answers, doesn't work after pressing enter, on the new implementation, it brings up an error on the assistant page.

jibbitt

Perhaps if it retained the follow-up questions (but perhaps a little more condensed), and it was clicking one of these that flipped you to the full chat UX, that would feel more intuitive.

It just feels like the full chat UI is being initialised a step too early - I expect a results page with my initial summary, but there is an input box at the bottom of the screen.

Perhaps you could also include a 'move to chat view' icon or link, so the same summary response can still feed into that journey as well as straight into the same UX. You could also only show the FAB-style buttons to toggle between views when someone has already initiated the 'chat from search' functionality, so it wouldn't be in the way of people who just want a summary. This way users could 'upgrade' their search to the chat toggle view, only where they want that experience.

Just some thoughts - I'm sure you have designers with better ideas than me!

Gely

I would like an option to remove the button from the mobile experience entirely to be honest. As someone who goes to active effort to not use AI related features this is just visual clutter that gets in the way of my search results. I'm pretty annoyed that its there

Jesal

For me, I use quick answer in one of two ways. The first being that I just read the quick answer result and leave. The second being I read the quick answer result as a way of providing some context or a summary of what I'm going to see more of when I look through the results myself. Having it be a more separated experience disrupts that second use case for me.

I feel like having an ever-present floating quick answer button would be more helpful if I were often wanting a quick answer mid way through viewing the search results, but this isn't the case for me. I usually want it as the first thing I see. One of the things that I've liked about Kagi's search experience historically was that it was free from distractions in both its content and visuals. As it stands now, the new search experience is a first step in being more visually distracting than the other mobile search experiences I checked just now in my opinion (Google, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, self-hosted SearXNG).

ldmitch

Jesal I read the quick answer result as a way of providing some context or a summary of what I'm going to see more of when I look through the results myself. Having it be a more separated experience disrupts that second use case for me.

Exact same use-case for me. With this change, I guess I just won't be using quick answer on mobile. If I want more detailed research done with an LLM, I would have started in the assistant in the first place.

thoroughburro

If the floating button remains, there must be an option to disable it. I hunted through settings twice today because I couldn’t believe such fine-grained options wouldn’t a cover “how about turn off the big floating nuisance covering up my results?” use case.

alexchadwick

thoroughburro you probably can do it via css, I can figure try to figure it out tonight if nobody else has

alexchadwick

Seconding, the segregation of assistant and search makes sense, but quick answer is clearly designed to aid IN searching. I honestly don’t even feel that having the option for follow up’s makes a lot of sense since at that point if I have more questions, I would not want to be using Gemini 2.5 Flash Nano (or whatever mini model is used). Idk, the muscle memory for assistant still hasn’t changed for me, and it overall hinders the experience to have things like non static important indicators (like the current model being used. Even from an accessibility/customizability standpoint, I don’t think it is too crazy to ask for an opt in for that imo.

ldmitch

For iOS users, you can also use the "Hide Distracting Items" feature in Safari to remove it. It works similarly to the element zapper/picker of uBlock Origin

Jesal

You can add this to your custom CSS to remove the floating quick answer button

.qa-mode-box {
   display:none !important;
}

kslays

On mobile, clicking the magnifying glass to see search results is not intuitive, but now that I've found it I think I might get used to it. I can't think of a way to teach it for initial use. Maybe a popup highlighting the glass that only appears the first time a user does a ? search. Here are some more suggestions:

Make the glass and the lightning bolt in the same spot on the screen so I can flip back and forth. Maybe trial a Kagi search bar at the bottom to match follow-up questions? Or maybe just move the bolt up to the same spot as the glass.

The browser should remember my scroll position for results. Right now it jumps back to the top.

phuertay

Just wanted to say I agree, the old version was much better for searching. If I wanted a detailed LLM discussion I would've gone straight to Assistant

tsr

I'll also say I'm not a fan of the new UI, I much preferred the old UI where the button for quick answer was under the search bar with the other search options, and the search results stayed below the output. If I wanted a fullscreen LLM discussion I'd go into the assistant.

bostonblack

I do not like this change as well. Quick summaries are helpful in some cases, but they should not be the "main feature" of the mobile kagi experience implemented in its current form for threereasons:

Switching panes takes attention away from the stars of kagi - the search results. If I wanted AI chat, I would go to AI chat. Kagi already has that feature.
Suggested prompts feels like every other AI app, where they want to foster engagement and more prompts. Kagi should foster search for proper original sites. This also reduces the interaction whith the content itself, site visits, etc. - I dont think kagi should take that route, which results in less visits for original content. Less visits also means less disvoery. I loved kagi for showing me new pages and blogs.
The button clutters the search results and is not removeable. And while it is technically "opt-in" it is also very nudgy-ly placed to be pressed a lot. This conflicts with kagis stance on AI: "AI should be used to enhance the search experience, not to create it or replace it (meaning AI is opt-in and on-demand, ..." https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html

Quick search, even without a colorful highlighted icon, is very useful as part of the search results. But the new changes just feels a little too pushy. I would like a way to reduce its visibility and I wish, Kagi would focus more on things besides AI. For me Kagi is a search engine, not an answer engine and I am really happy about this, because every big search engine is doing that pivot currently.

Regarding that: Does anybody know the css to remove or decolor that button? 🙂