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Comment by Zambyte | Hacker News Reader

> presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop

Right... why? Is it really too much after talking to the assistant and finding the item you want to purchase, to then click the provided link to the product page and click buy?

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My assumption is something like the google shopping feature. This shows the product you're looking for at all available sites in your country so you can purchase the cheapest one.

I've been using Kagi assistant for this for quite a while. I just run a query with some variation of "Compile a list of online stores with shipping+price, sorted by the average user review score of the entire site, sub-sorted by price where I can buy $foobar?" sometimes I have to give it another push to tell it options or where to look, but this works pretty well for comparison shopping.

LLMs are not magic, nor are they gonna crawl some dozens of websites, they work with search results they are provided with, and thus they need good search results to work with. Maybe in the US or sth it is better, but where I live finding good shopping results from local shops/websites is not straightforward. Google shopping, that I just now checked, seems much better with querries that I struggled with kagi. Typically, in order to find things I need I usually run searches on local price aggregators than kagi, though it is not perfect because they do not include shops that don't want to pay them, and their search features are not great either. But running kagi for local search shopping results ime is not great, and similarly the assistant do not provide great results either.

I do not want a click-to-buy button, I want kind of lens that is specialised for shopping within specific regions (the current kagi lenses allow only 10 sites which is not really enough for shopping).

> nor are they gonna crawl some dozens of websites

That is quite literally what !research does.

But agreed on local search - I tend to use Google maps for anything local. Otherwise for something I'd buy online, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I meant, they are not gonna start from scratch by crawling websites, they are gonna rely on the search results to grab content of relevant results. I think this is what research does, in a higher quantity.

In contrast, I may start with a page in a website and start going around looking for related products etc. The assistant is not gonna start doing that (I think at least), it just gonna get the page provided by the search results. For this reason, what search results it is provided with is important.

I am also (mostly) buying online, but for certain reasons I want to buy from domestic websites rather than ones based in other countries, if possible. Kagi has not been great at providing great results for that.

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