Irrelevant results appear related to my IP address location

quinncom

I use a VPN in a GCP datacenter in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I often see search results that contain the words “Council Bluffs IA” (see screenshot below). This is problematic for several reasons:

The location-based search results are always completely unrelated to what I'm searching.
I don't want location-based results, even if they were relevant.
It's creepy that Kagi is trying to use my “location” when I didn't ask it to.

I'm filing this as a bug report instead of a feature request because these results are so irrelevant as to indicate a broken feature. FWIW, it is my opinion that the feature should not exist, so this might be an easy bug to fix. 😉

Steps to reproduce:
The issue occurs sporadically; unable to reproduce right now.

Expected behavior:
I never want to see search results related to my IP address.

Debug info:
Edge 107
macOS 13
Country/Region=International
Connected to: US-CENTRAL
Network latency: 82ms
All Services Operational

Image/Video:
The following search results were included in a query for “lightning connector to female USB-A”: https://kagi.com/search?q=lightning+connector+to+female+USB-A&from_date=2015-01-01).

z64

Hi quinncom ,

The singular case where we include any kind of location information this right now is specifically when your query ends with "near me" - for example searching for "coffee near me". This is done without sharing your IP with any 3rd party.

I believe this is happening because your exit is the very same GCP location where our US-CENTRAL server is, in us-central1, and not in fact related to your client at all. You could maybe try moving your exit around to lesser GCP regions to try and verify - for example, we do not have a presence in us-south1, or northamerica-northeast1.

We will try and investigate this on our end as well to confirm - this is something we've seen before, our upstream APIs geolocating our own servers, and throwing in bad results. Apologies for the scare!

If you find any more examples, sharing them with their approximate ranking on the page will help.

quinncom

Thanks @z64

I've set up a VPN in GCP's us-south1 and will use it for awhile to test this. It's not often I see these local results, but if it happens again I'll update this post.

beetstabasco

Steps to reproduce:
Search for "docker macos change bridge network" or click this shared link.

Notice odd results from Iowa.

Expected behavior:
Not include odd Iowa results

Debug info:
Brave Version 1.46.144 Chromium: 108.0.5359.128 (Official Build) (arm64)
macOS 13.0 (22A380)
Kagi: Connected to US-CENTRAL

Image/Video:

beetstabasco

Notice the Trulia result (in Iowa) for "macos daemon bip 172". Here is a shared link to the search.

beetstabasco

Shared search link for "spring boot filters"

Notice the hipcamp result.

quinncom

After my last update, I used a VPN in GCP's us-south1 location. I didn't see any localized results from that area.

On December 8, I switched to using a VPN in Hetzner's Ashburn, Virginia location. I didn't notice any localized results at first. However, I just tried the search links shared by @beetstabasco and noticed the results contain pages that are relevant to the Washington DC area.

Ashburn is about 30 miles away from DC, so I think the same problem is happening again for me. I did travel to DC for a week Nov 4–12, but I didn't start using the Ashburn IP address until Dec 8. Either because I'm using an IP address near DC, and/or because of my travels to DC (despite having cleared cookies), Google thinks I'm in DC. Either way, it seems Google is tracking me through Kagi and that is creepy as hell.

Can you explain this? I really would prefer that Google doesn't know my IP address when using Kagi, and I would prefer Kagi's results not contain results related to locations I traveled.

Here's what I see at the bottom of a google search page:

Here's the Kagi search results containing DC-related pages after following @beetstabasco's search links:

Search for "docker macos change bridge network"

Search for "spring boot filters":

Vlad

quinncom The results are local to the exit point of our datacenter. There is one in Ashburn, VA and there is one in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Your IP address is not passed over but the exit points of popular VPNs coincide with popular datacenter locations that we also use. We are looking into how to filter out these clearly irrelevant results.

beetstabasco

I am not using a VPN. I am located in the Southern U.S.

Query: "imagelayers dive"
Shared search link

Notice a few results from IA.

beetstabasco

beetstabasco Query: "imagelayers dive"
Shared search link

I'm still seeing some results related to Iowa

@Vlad, any news on this?

beetstabasco

Query: "credit karma tax"

Shared search link

Again, no VPN. But Kagi is "Connected to: US-CENTRAL"

Vlad

Thanks for all examples, we know the nature of the problem and will look into fixing it soon!

Vlad

beetstabasco I do not know hw do we fix this atm. we do not want to pass your ip address to the upsteream sources we use to protect privacy.

adfaklsdjf

This reply is maybe mostly for @beetstabasco's benefit..

I found this because I am frequently getting results tailored to Council Bluffs, IA. I often use a VPN but not on the machine where I am encountering this, and I always exit the VPN via Canada.

I also see some other locations frequently e.g. Twentynine Palms, CA, but Council Bluffs is the most common one.

I do see above that Vlad says the cause is identified, but I couldn't help mentioning that perhaps this relates to how Kagi indexes the web, if sites are personalizing their content to the location the crawl bot is requesting from.

If my theory holds water, maybe @beetstabasco would be a little bit reassured that it isn't that Kagi is personalizing results to their IP, but rather the nature of today's rotten web is undermining Kagi's efforts to index it reliably..?

The "docker macos change bridge network" search mentioned previously, for me right now, the last result on the first page is an "Our History" page for Council Bluffs:

When I search for "local doctors", my first result is from Council Bluffs, but if I search for "doctors near me", it clearly uses my IP address as described above because it shows results for Cleveland, OH. (I am not using a VPN)

dabluecaboose

This is still an issue. Kagi routinely returns results that have the phrase "Council Bluffs, Iowa" in them as if it was one of the search terms, which is especially frustrating when searching for very specific queries with few results.