Search me
May 19, 2025 at 12:28 PM by Dr. Drang
I recently realized that although switching my search engine to Kagi has been a boon for search in general, it’s disrupted the way I search leancrew.com for old blog posts. But I’ve fixed the problem through Kagi Lenses
For ages, I used the site: trick to restrict Google and/or Duck Duck Go searches to just pages here on leancrew.com. I’ve had a Typinator (or TextExpander or Keyboard Maestro, depending on which expansion tool I was using at the time) abbreviation of ;lean set to expand to site:leancrew.com so I can quickly add that when I’m typing search terms in my browser’s address bar. But that trick doesn’t work with Kagi searches. So ever since installing the Kagi for Safari extension, I’ve been unable to use the technique my fingers are used to.
And I search ANIAT quite often. Usually it’s because I know I’ve written about some scripting technique, and I want to remind myself of how it worked. An embarrassingly high percentage of the time it’s to check on whether I’ve written about something—and have forgotten—before I go off and write about it again.
Kagi’s replacement for the site: trick is Lenses. A Lens will focus Kagi’s search on one or more (up to ten) particular sites, date ranges, regions, keywords, or file types. You can also exclude sites or subsites. Kagi has several default Lenses, and you can add your own customized Lenses. As many as you like, as far as I know.
My Leancrew Lens includes one site, leancrew.com/all-this/, excludes one site, leancrew.com/all-this/man/ (because I don’t want to return any of the man pages I host here), and sets the keyword lean to use as a Bang.
With this in place, I can, for example, type
!lean sphere
in Safari’s address bar and get this page of search results:
The screenshot is from a Mac, but the search works the same on my iPhone and iPad.
Although I never made Typinator abbreviations for, say, Six Colors or MacStories, it was nice to use the site: trick “on the fly” when I wanted to find a post I remembered reading at one of those places. But my next Lens will be one that searches the half-dozen or so Apple-focused sites I read regularly. That should take care of my site: anxiety.
Update 20 May 2025 7:41 AM
Overnight, I got a tweet from Wesley Moore, who said the site: trick does work on Kagi. So I tried it again, and he’s right. But honestly, I was not making things up in this post. As of a week or so ago, searches using site:leancrew.com would certainly give me some pages here on the blog, but they wouldn’t be good results. Now they’re essentially the same results I get when using the Lens, at least in the half-dozen or so tests I’ve run so far.
So am I nuts or has Kagi improved? And improved quite recently? I don’t like to think of myself as hallucinatory, but now I’m wondering.
My thanks (I guess) to Wesley for pointing this out and making me doubt my sanity. I didn’t reply on Mastodon because I’m in the middle of changing instances and not posting there for a day or two.