How did Kagi change your search habits?

Vlad

We are interested to hear in what ways did Kagi affect the way you use web search.

What changed in your behavior? What kind of impact did it have in your life/productivity?

tuesday

I'll try to think of more answers later, as I'm sure there are many, but the first thing that comes to mind:

The "first result" shortcuts make it extremely easy and intuitive to visit webpages and websites without knowing their exact URL.

if I don't remember a website's TLD (or if maybe it's the thing they do sometimes where part of the name is inside the TLD, like “foob.ar”, or “getfoobarapp.com”), I can just type websitename ! or \websitename and it'll take me right there
if I know there's a specific page on a website I'm looking for, I can just type the relevant keywords plus an exclamation point, and I'll end up right there

While DDG has this feature too, they often return my desired destination as the second or third result, making this unreliable and therefore useless, since correcting the error means I'd have to completely retype my query. Kagi is smart enough that every single time I've used this feature (which I've done multiple times a day over the last couple of weeks) it's brought me exactly where I wanted to go!

This has changed my browsing habits quite a bit. I'll give an example.

Previously, if I wanted to find the page for a certain department at my organization, I would do the following:

type "organizationname departmentname" and hope that it's one of the suggestions in the omnibar from my history (which requires reading the suggestions, making sure it's the right thing, and arrowing down to it)
if it's not there, I've already wasted several seconds, but I hit enter to initiate a search. Then I look at the results, skim the names and URLs to see if the first or second one is what I need, and click on it.
This doesn't add up to that much time on its own, but (1) this happens many times a day, and (2) it requires me to analyze the suggestions to find the right thing.

With Kagi, visiting any website/page in this category is as easy as typing the domain name of a website you visit regularly! I simply describe the page in 1-3 words, hit enter, and I'm there — no effort or reading or clicking required. It sounds pretty minor in some ways, but I feel like it's comparable to the difference between looking up a number in the yellow pages, and just saying "hey Siri, call John's Garage"!

Vlad

tuesday Very cool, this is a use case I didnt think about previously. How can we expose this to new users in a better way without overwhelming them?

seventhwave

I'm an heavy keyboard user, and I use Vimium on my primary browser (Firefox).
So, I'm quite nitpicking about website keyboard navigation.
The page result has a very good navigation with the arrow keys (and TAB): and I use exclusively this way of navigation/result browsing (cmd+enter for opening in a new tab) while I interact with Kagi.
In other browser feels lot less natural and productive, and I'm forced to use Vimium shortcuts or mouse, near for every search.

kagi-user

I find myself having to iterate fewer times on my search queries. Filtering out the "Listicles" is especially helpful for surfacing the stuff I care about toward the top.

LKD70

A little different of a response here from what you were perhaps hoping the answers to be, however one thing that I have changed is a somewhat bad habit of using the search bar as a calculator. In Google I'd type all my expressions in to the search field everytime. Now I've moved to using the Kagi calculator widget. The reasoning behind me making this change is pretty unappealing though as it's simply an attempt to lower my daily searches.

Another way could be that I've became a little more confident with my searching. I'm less worried about the eyes of g👀gle monitoring and using everything I ever type. This might also be seen as a bad habit to slip in to, though it certainly feels a lot more free.