Thanks. If I’m understanding you here, you use both Kagi and Calude for general search?
Assuming you default with Kagi, but switch to Claude (API? Raycast?) for search if you don’t like the results you get?
Perplexity I’ve found incredibly powerful for search as it’s fast, and I love being able to toggle “Social” as a source quickly before sending an inquiry off - in case I want opinions vs sources.
That said, I have found it on occasion being lackluster a handful of times on the first go, so I have to manually switch the model from the default “Best” mode (which selects the best model for the task) - to specifically Gemini, o3 etc. to get a better result.
Probably they are using 'Kagi Assistant', which is essentially kagi acting as an intermediary to the major LLMs. You get a catalog and a monthly quota.
Pretty handy. You can also make your assistants use the same custom 'lenses' you do to constrain their searches.
Interesting. The lenses sound similar to “Spaces” on Perplexity, where you can segment searches to a specific prompt every go and upload files etc for context. Safe to assume that’s a pretty common feature now, maybe I should look at Kagi again - it’s been a few years since I’ve last peeked at it.
The lenses are more about what results will be returned by Kagi's search. They were originally (and still are) a search feature you can use in regular searches.
For example, one of their default lenses is "Academic". It searches research institutions/scientific journals/universities/etc. So as an example, if I search "ulcer risk of ibuprofen":
The "Academic" lens returns the NIH with "Research summaries -- Preventing peptic ulcers"[0] and ScienceDirect with a paper on "The gastrointestinal effects of nonselective NSAIDs and COX-2-selective inhibitors"[1].
Searching without the lens, I get Healthline's "Ibuprofen and Ulcers: Why They Happen and How To Avoid Them"[2] and Medical News Today's "Ibuprofen ulcers: Effects, symptoms, causes, and more"[3].
You can apply these lenses to searches the AI assistant performs separately from the prompts/context/etc. So, for instance, I can set up an "assistant" based on Claude called "Research" restricted to the "Academic" lens. When I ask that assistant questions and it performs a web search, only results from the academic lens (research institutes, universities, etc) will be returned to the AI.
You could do similar with, e.g., setting up an assistant for "Coding with Python" and creating a lens that's restricted to the Python documentation, one for "Local Knowledge" that's restricted to sites from your region, "Recent Developments" that only considers sites published in a certain timeframe, "eBooks" that only returns epub results, etc.
Your prompt/etc is configured separately as part of the "assistant" you're using. So you could have a research assistant with a prompt that asks it to approach the problem step-by-step and evaluate the veracity of the sources, a coding assistant whose prompt includes the language/framework, etc. But there's nothing stopping you hooking your "research assistant" up to your "Coding with Python" lens.
Assuming you default with Kagi, but switch to Claude (API? Raycast?) for search if you don’t like the results you get?
Perplexity I’ve found incredibly powerful for search as it’s fast, and I love being able to toggle “Social” as a source quickly before sending an inquiry off - in case I want opinions vs sources.
That said, I have found it on occasion being lackluster a handful of times on the first go, so I have to manually switch the model from the default “Best” mode (which selects the best model for the task) - to specifically Gemini, o3 etc. to get a better result.