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Comment by solso | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: Works at Brave, before at Tailcat.

Goggles white-paper was released more than a year ago, long before Kagi was even announced to the public.

Additionally, before Brave acquired Tailcat (Jan 2021) I had the pleasure to share the draft of the paper with Kagi's founder.

So no, there is no prior art.

Let me add that I do not claim that Goggles is prior art of Lenses either.

One of the key features of Goggles design is that the instructions, rules and filters are open and URL accessible.

A Goggle is not so much a personal preference configuration, but a way to collaborative come up with shareable and expandable search re-rankers.

Very different goals if you ask me. Of course, Goggles can be used for personal preferences exclusively, but that's not the use case we had in mind.

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Hello Josep ! (Kagi founder here)

For a bit of historic accuracy if it ever matters for future readers:

Kagi was founded in 2019 and we have operated for years in private beta with thousands of users before public beta release this June.

Goggles were not inspired by Kagi”s lenses and I can confirm seeing the whitepaper before we got the lens feature out last year.

Kagi”s Lenses were inspired by Blekko’s “slashtags” which is probably the original “prior art” for this kind of feature.

Looks like we arrived to similar idea, but different execution. Kagi”s Lens feature is osimple to create filter for the web, that anyone can make with a few clicks plus a bunch of powerful built-in lenses like “noncommercial” or “discussions” search.

I'm a paying Kagi user, it's a solid search engine and the lenses feature is excellent. Keep it up :)

I'm a paying Kagi user because doublequotes works, i.e. if I search for something using doublequotes around it, Kagi actually makes sure those words are in the page, and if it fails they create a bug report and fix it.

It seems to be better in every other way too, but that is actually the single reason why I pay for it.

We applaud all these innovations and are glad to see what is being done with Kagi Lenses and Brave Goggles. The Web ecosystem and users need innovations in search.

Our own innovation in this domain go back to 2005 and was called Personal Search Engine. https://web.archive.org/web/20060220233451/http://www.mojeek... (first capture Feb 2006).

We are currently bringing this back (in Beta). RollYo innovated too (private Beta August 2005). Google Custom Search launched in October 2006. So there were at least 3 services that predate Blekko (2010).

Hi Vladimir! Good to see we are in sync. Glad to see Kagi doing well as well.

For the record, when I said "long before Kagi was even announced to the public." I meant exactly what I wrote, not that Kagi did not exist, it did.

That is what I corrected, assuming you meant we were announced to the public in 2022.

Kagi was announced to the public in 2019, long before public beta release this June. I understand it is kind of hard to track small, bootstrapped startups with no mainstream exposure, but as I said this is for historic accuracy.

I love the initiative, but I agree with parent that some prior art should be acknowledged.

My extension has existed since 2012: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-filter/eidh...

In June 2020, I added support for external (collaborative) filter lists which are incredibly similar to Goggles.

Not saying anything was copied, just that it might be nice to cite/reference prior work.

Do you offer public access to those lists or are they only available to users of the plugin?

This sounds like an opportunity to create white and blacklists in cooperation among various projects.

Filter lists can be hosted anywhere and imported with the @ syntax:

# Make these domains stand out in results +en.wikipedia.org +stackoverflow.com +github.com +api.rubyonrails.org # SPAM - never show these results experts-exchange.com # Pull filters from external source @https://clobapi.herokuapp.com/default-filters.txt

This default list is the only one I distribute but users have come up with own lists.

It would be nice to have a Github repo with such lists (or meta lists: the @ syntax works recursively, allowing lists to import other lists).

Your suggestion of having a standard for the list syntax is interesting.

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