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qwertox 5 days ago

I was given a free month of Kagi to test, and it had so many rough edges that during the last days of of the trial I was already using Google again.

Notable issues for me:

- maps (from Mapbox) are really bad. Sluggish performance and lack of information

- barely any info boxes

- no translation feature ("gründonnerstag englisch") gives me links to leo.org (which was a cool site in the 00s) and to other sites, but Google gives me a translation box with the result

- no timezone calculations: "10 am PT" in Kagi: "= 10 Pt am (metric petaton attometers)" in Google: "10:00 Freitag Pacific Time (PT) entspricht 19:00 Freitag in ..."

- no search history, which is sometimes really useful to have

Other than that, the search results are really good.

bigstrat2003 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Other than that, the search results are really good.

I'm confused why anything else would matter. For example, I'll readily admit that Kagi maps sucks compared to Google maps. But I just use Google for map stuff, and use Kagi for searching. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me that it's a tool which does one thing and does it well.

qwertox 5 days ago | parent [-]

Because all these things improve efficiency. They give you the result at one glance.

With good search results I refer to those which normally take you to sites, not just quick lookups like time zone conversion or translations. For example results which point to documentation or GitHub.

5 days ago | parent [-]
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msdz 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While I'm aware this is a case of "you're holding it wrong" – !translate <phrase> should do the trick. And that's not an excuse for not having better detection for when an info box should exist, because they do have them, especially for, but not limited to the WolframAlpha integration stuff. (For example, a friend and fellow user was awed when searching "internet speed test" and saw it integrated, no idea if Google has that too though).

Other than that, make sure your region/locale is set correctly (I'm not getting the metric petaton, for example), and for everything else, they have an excellent feedback forum for suggestions/bug reports.

hobofan 5 days ago | parent [-]

> make sure your region/locale is set correctly

Last time I checked (which admitedly has been a few months, but I haven't seen anything in the changelog/announcements that make me belive things got better), that's not a viable option.

I always keep it as "International" (luckily that's an option!), as setting it to "German" significantly degrades the results as for e.g. technical topics it will rank many rubish German results higher than they should be. Google still has a significant edge in getting the distinction right between regional and technical expertise and how they relate to language.

i_love_retros 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Kagi not saving search history is a big selling point for me. I don't want yet another tech company keeping tabs on me.

And I wouldn't care if they dropped maps, I pay for kagi for search and the assistant.

ziml77 4 days ago | parent [-]

I feel the same about their maps. I pay for Kagi for search primarily and assistant secondarily. I'm fine getting my maps from a different source. Not every service needs to be an "everything app".

hobofan 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think those are all perfectly valid points. As a Kagi early adopter they don't weigh as heavily that they ultimately make a difference, but it also feels like most things that are not AI related are not receiving that much attention nowadays, which is a bit disheartening to see.

raffael_de 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> - no translation feature ("gründonnerstag englisch") gives me links to leo.org (which was a cool site in the 00s) and to other sites, but Google gives me a translation box with the result

How about a custom Bang for dict.cc?

Bang shortcut could be "dcc" with URL: https://www.dict.cc/?s=%s.

Then you can translate using "!dcc gründonnerstag".

tomjen3 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When did you try it?

Because they have been working on all those issues. They even have their own translation now.

5 days ago | parent | prev [-]
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