Feedback on the new Quick Answer experience

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? 🙂

kirkmc

The new quick answer on mobile sucks. I want quick answer to give me an answer, with citations, but allow me to scroll further down search results. I don’t wanna have to do a separate search to get both.

kslays

kirkmc Just to be clear, you don't have to do a separate search. The web search is already there and completed, just hidden. You can click the magnifying glass at the bottom right to instantly see the results that the quick answer was built from.

One thing that has become clear to me is that there are two ways of using Quick Answer:

Reading the answer, trusting it, and being done. (I don't do this because LLMs' accuracy are too low.)
Using it as an alternative way to find and re-rank websites. This is what I use it for. So for me, the references are very important, and I would scroll down to see the snippets. The best approach might be to click the reference number in quick answer and have the scroll jump to the relevant snippet in search results, instead of duplicating references and snippets.

Prostagma

I'll start by saying I vastly prefer the old version.

This new mobile Quick Answer interface simply feels like Quick Answer and Kagi Search are separate halves of the whole. In the previous version, a simple scroll would be enough to get away from Quick Answer and show the search results. Now I have to tap a button, which just feels unnatural and requires more cognitive load because I'm forced to context-switch. It's an extra step for something I'm likely to do 99% of the time, and I don't like it.

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.

dreifach

I agree with the sentiment of this thread. If the Kagi team are insistent on keeping the changes, please (at the very least) add options to disable these changes and change back to the old UI in the AI settings.

coffeefirst

I get what this was going for, but what I've realized in the past few days is I never use quick answers without also wanting to see the search results. That's the part that made it really good—it complements rather than replaces a regular search.

nlty-from-reddit

I was advised to cross-post from reddit. My post there, with some added clarification:

The old UI was the best "trust but verify" interface to asking an AI a question available anywhere, which is really the only way I want to interact with AI. I tend to invoke quick answer by ending my query with a "?" and look at the quick answer to get a summary of the results, then I scan the citations and other links surfaced below. Now, on mobile, it's an extra click on a fairly small button to move between the quick answer + citations and the full search results.

It's not just muscle memory. The new button is a reduction from a touch target that was ₁₀₀% of the screen to a touch target smaller than my thumb to navigate between the two sections. To navigate back? 100% of the width of the top of the screen.

I'm also noticing that the "?" at the end of a query no longer reliably triggers quick answer for me, sometimes you have to hit the new floating quick answer button after the results load.

This feels like KPI juicing for a product I already have multiple ways to access if I want it: assistant. There's a bang, I could put a home screen shortcut on my phone, etc etc. I'm not accusing y'all of doing that because I don't see a lot of that kind of UX on Kagi, I'm just describing how it feels.

CrunchyFritos

I personally like the new interface. I know what I'm getting when I append a ? to the end of a search. And when I'm on my phone I like the reduced friction for getting to a quick-answer / Perplexity-like UX. Maybe some workarounds are:

Allowing users to turn off the ? quick answer only for mobile
When scrolling to the bottom of the new Quick Answer mobile full-screen experience, I wonder if there's a way to have a "scroll past the bottom" finger swipe automatically trigger the toggle to search results instead of bouncing? Kind of like swiping down at the top of a page is the default action for refreshing a page in most apps.

With the scroll at the bottom to toggle action, that still gives users the Quick Answer experience as if it were a standalone app, but easily transitions to classic search in a seamless way.

winkelgasse

CrunchyFritos
I do not think disabling the "?" Quick answer would be an acceptable solution for most people, at least the ones in this thread since it sounds to me as if we all liked using the old quick answer on mobile.
If you add the ability to scroll past the bottom you may aswell just let us choose between the old and the new version.
But if you make it seamless like it was before then I think this could actually be great.

bostonblack

I remember when trying Kagi for the first time, that I really liked, how quick summaries where implemented: they were opt-in, they didnt take away too much screen space and they prominently listed the used sources.

The current implementation on desktop is too much, the follow-up prompts are to nudgy and the mobile experience also is too much genAI for me.

the_hattar

I thought quick answer was broken on mobile and it took me quite a while to figure it out. Like others, the ? doesn’t trigger reliably any more which compounded the issue. The UX is poor: I dislike switching between search and summary, the floating button is annoying, the alternate interface for mobile feels like a hack instead of a well-constructed and universal experience.

Ultimately my concern is that this feels like a shift from the search focused experience I pay for and hype to other people, to an AI focused experience available for free by going straight to my LLM of choice.

Whiteboard_Frontiersman

I'm not sure the follow-up questions are going to be particularly helpful for me. What I do for a living requires a lot of concentration, and noise-free results during a search; Kagi has always been great about that whether it's with its search engine or its LLM.

However, in my experience, follow-up questions often have nothing to do with what I'm trying to find out, and serve to drive usership of an LLM service. Case in point: every response ChatGPT provides these days ends with a sequence of total tangents, suggesting we go down a rabbit hole instead of get back to work on what we're building. It isn't helpful to the end user in the least, and when I'm already hip-deep in an algorithm, it interrupts both my thought process and my comprehension and is actively hostile to my focus!

I can certainly understand and accept that not everyone will agree with me on this, which is fine; but this is a feature we should at least be able to turn off in our personal settings.

bostonblack

Whiteboard_Frontiersman This is so important!

Because it is not, that those rabbit wholes havent been possible before genAI was in search. Non-genAI-search also opened up long strings of google, wikipedia, random blog, scientific paper, etc. - there was a real sense of discovery and curiosity there and you were working with real sources. Doing this with AI seems easier and faster, and it is faster, but it also introduces a lot of perils, like the ones kagi itself is describing here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html

There is a place for quick answers, but quick answer and deep research is a contradiction. I would much rather kagi focusses on discovering original content. yes, there are sources, but it dont think, many people check them out. maybe i am wrong here, but first studies on geminis quick answer suggests likewise.

backyardwoodworksla

This update missed the mark on mobile and is making me want to cancel my Kagi membership. You added more clicks into getting an answer and looking at search results. I will cancel my subscription to Kagi if the mobile version is not reverted or given an option to return to previous version.

seeing the quick answer and ALL results was the whole point of paying for Kagi.

You all broke a good thing with this upgrade. For me to come on this forum and leave feedback and see others mentioning the same feedback tells you all you need to know. You missed the mark on this update for mobile. Listen to your customers. Pull this change back or you will have nuked Kagi on mobile unannounced. It’s a bad look.

vangelis_91305

Kagi, please, don't use FABs. They're a nuisance on mobile, plus the previous UI was simple and speedy: all results in one place.

Why take one more second of my life every time I do a search?

marsbars

When I follow up with Quick Answer Kagi takes me to a whole other tab which is not a great experience, and it certainly doesn't feel "seamless" as the changelog states.

I really like the updates to Quick Answer. But, the changelog says "Seamless transition to Kagi Assistant". However, this is not the case as I see and experience it. "Seamless" is a bit of an overstatement. It's pretty jarring that it opens a whole new tab. And once the new tab opens the follow up content is way at the bottom with 0 padding making it awkward to read. Also the text in the assistant chat is hard to parse with your eyes quickly. I have to really hunt for where the question is and the thing that stands out the most is that purple box saying "Searched with Kagi". Not sure why that needs to be more prominent than the actual answer.

There's a lot more room for improvement here and I hope the team will make this much smoother. What I would prefer is either a chat overlaying the results where it looks like the Quick Answer view grows into the overlay. This would feel like I'm still in the original context. Or it would be great if a mini chat appeared to the right of the results at the top pushing any widgets down below it that may be showing at the time. Then there would be a button saying "Open Assistant in new tab" or something like that which would do what it currently does today if someone really wants a more focused chat/session. Though, chances are someone has a follow-up, gets a couple more missing pieces of information that they need and then wants to return to the results page. Opening up the follow-up feature feels like too much of a break away from what you were doing, basically making the word "quick" in "Quick Answer" feel not so quick, but rather fragmented.

Just my thoughts on how I think it can be improved. But I like the direction.

kriops

I had a long comment written out about how you needed to have a button so I can access Quick Answer with a single click (I can type ?, but I want to minimize keyboard usage on the phone because it is bad even on expensive phones).

That is to say, you might want to look into visibility 🙂 This was on dark mode, and I was explicitly looking for the button because I got a question from somebody else about why Kagi had removed the Quick Answer button.

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