What the hell is going on with search?

FredNet

Here’s another data point for the UK issue. I posted this in another thread but here’s the same query in the US vs UK. And of course it’s right after I convinced my wife to switch to Kagi.

Truism

FredNet I think that's a general lens vs a US lens. In the UK lens picture, the national lens does not appear to actually be activated (button a lighter colour, text not bold).

pixel

Hey all,

One of our upstream providers just fixed some things, mainly regarding GB region and safe search interactions.
Results there should be better - please do let us know if this is not the case!
We are still diving into other issues so if anyone else has anything, please post it and we'll take a look.

FredNet

Truism Is it not activated because it's the default? If I cancel the US option it reverts to the GB.

pixel Looks much better on my end! Thank you for the update!

Truism

FredNet I see different behaviour between the "default" mode with region filtering not yet enabled and "activated" for my home region, and neither are the same as "international". My conclusion from using this was that activating a regional scope is a fundamentally different search than the same one with no region scoping, but I don't really know.

It's more odd and seemingly fairly arbitrary behavior:

Edit: And I see the same thing on desktop, I'm just on a mobile right now.

johnsturgeon

z64
I had similar success when changing my region from France (where I'm at) to the US, after I did that the results seemed more normal. France does seem to be better now though too. I'll keep an eye out

Truism

What is going on with this? Search is still performing like total ass.

nobodywasishere

Truism We fixed some issues that people reported, are you still running into other issues?

Could you reach out to support@kagi.com to get access to NT search?

Sacha-Wharton

Dear Kagi, my wife and I are in South Africa are definitely experiencing poor search for basic things. I really enjoying using Kagi but if its not doing what we pay for then we are not getting value for our subscription which is not cheap when you are not earning USD. I would really appreciate if Kagi could reassure and fix whatever is broken in Kagi search especially for paying users.

Much appreaciated.
Sacha Wharton

Kagi isn't returning any results from South Africa's main second-level domains: .co.za, .gov.za and .org.za. Other South African domains (.ac.za) and other countries' second-level domains (.co.uk, .co.nz, .co.jp, .gov.au) work normally. I tested through the Search API (POST /api/v1/search) on 2026-10-02. The web UI shows the same symptoms, and my region is set to South Africa.

Searches that return 0 results:

site:co.za, site:gov.za, site:org.za
site:sars.gov.za efiling, site:dha.gov.za smart id, site:capetown.gov.za e-services
site:fnb.co.za online banking, site:standardbank.co.za, site:iol.co.za, site:dailymaverick.co.za

Searches that work, for comparison:

site:ac.za, site:wits.ac.za, site:sun.ac.za, site:up.ac.za
site:co.uk, site:bbc.co.uk news, site:co.nz, site:co.jp, site:gov.au tax
site:news24.com, site:takealot.com

What this means for normal searches: the official sites never appear, whether the region is set to ZA or no_region.

sars efiling returns Play Store links, blogs and a Kenyan SEO site, and nothing from sars.gov.za.
fnb online banking puts fnb-online.com first, and fnb.co.za doesn't appear at all.
news24 with region ZA puts news24online.com first.
home affairs smart id booking and city of cape town e-services return only Facebook and app-store links.

Other observations:

A request-level rule to raise .co.za and .gov.za and pin sars.gov.za made no difference.
A search restricted to sars.gov.za (lens.sites_included: ["sars.gov.za"], query efiling) returned US court sites. The restriction was ignored rather than giving an empty result.
Searches for other topics (technical, recipes, exact-phrase) work correctly in every region and with Safe Search on or off.

Request IDs (trace):

site:iol.co.za → 0 results: cd84dcd8eb9e858c62c62fa32f406465
Search restricted to sars.gov.za that returned other sites: 0f80359fb219f4b8d04e4b40a9a3cd0c
site:iol.co.za with workflow: news → 0 results: d007b339c0bde2126783547dabaf65c5
sars efiling with raise/pin rules: 26222a960331b9486211aa3185126fee

I'd also like early access to NT search, if that would help.

Kagi isn't returning any results from almost all South African .za domains. Only ac.za (universities) is unaffected. I've tested 15 countries and no other country has this problem. I'm in South Africa with my region set to South Africa. I tested through the Search API (POST /api/v1/search) on 2026-10-02, and the web UI shows the same symptoms.

Every .za second-level domain except ac.za returns nothing
site:co.za: 0 results (0f877b7c762cd36962cb305085d44076)
site:gov.za: 0 results (f51f3d007dbfcffd540af99773d6a4ab)
site:org.za: 0 results (4f64ae18e17297ec0f8aa762056596fd)
site:net.za: 0 results (035ec997a0ecc4a314b8891b2addd346)
site:web.za: 0 results (f063b1e8473c6dbcbcb4572872c9fda1)
site:nom.za: 0 results (2fe9f28840669b64261a3ac3604e70ba)
site:edu.za: 0 results (1b9e912aca238c827ba3483c5b39fdbf)
site:mil.za: 0 results (9bdeb419c63ba69dd9b7c0c8af0a2d89)
site:law.za: 0 results (3a8bb425da0ea3a6af4aba04dd2c617d)
site:school.za: 0 results (80739d7b3b36975f8efa3ae122bb54ae)
site:za: 2 results
site:ac.za: 15 results (normal)

Searches for individual sites under these domains also return 0: site:sars.gov.za efiling, site:fnb.co.za online banking, site:iol.co.za (cd84dcd8eb9e858c62c62fa32f406465), site:dailymaverick.co.za, site:standardbank.co.za, site:dha.gov.za, site:capetown.gov.za

No other country I tested is affected

I ran site: searches on the main second-level domains (commercial, govermic) and one large site for each of: UK, Australia, New Zealand, India,Japan, Brazil, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Israel, South Korea and Mexico. All of them return results. That includes South Africa's neighbours (co.zw, gov.zw, com.na, gov.na, co.bw, gov.bw) and other African countries (co.k South African sites on non-.za domains (news24.com, takealot.com) alsowork normally. It looks like .za specifically is being dropped somewhere along the way.

Effect on everyday searches

The official sites never appear, whether the region is ZA or no_region:

sars efiling: Play Store links, blogs and a Kenyan SEO site, with nothrsefiling.co.za.
fnb online banking: fnb-online.com ranks first, and fnb.co.za doesn't appear at all.
news24 with region ZA: news24online.com ranks above news24.com.
home affairs smart id booking and city of cape town e-services: only Facebook and app-store links.
Other observations
A rule in the request to raise .co.za and .gov.za and pin sars.gov.za 331b9486211aa3185126fee).
A search restricted to sars.gov.za (lens.sites_included: ["sars.gov.za"], query efiling) returned US court sites. The restriction was ignored rather than coming back empty (0f80359fb219f4b8d04e4b40a9a3cd0c).
site:iol.co.za with workflow: news also returns 0 (d007b339c0bde2126783547dabaf65c5).
Searches for other topics (technical, recipes, exact-phrase) work corr no-region, US and UK regions, with Safe Search on or off.

I can re-run any of these and send fresh request IDs if that helps. I'd NT search, if that would help.

nobodywasishere

Sacha-Wharton I'd also like early access to NT search, if that would help.

Feel free to email support@kagi.com to get access, though this issue you're describing specifically we know about and are actively working on a fix for. Thank you for the detailed examples!

Truism

nobodywasishere Yes, I'm still having issues. What is NT search? Why am I to ask for it?

nobodywasishere

Truism Which issues are you still running into? NT search is our new search backend that may fix a lot of these issues, and we're planning on rolling it out here soon.

Truism

nobodywasishere To put it bluntly, since you seem pretty blase about this: Search absolutely sucks and mostly just wastes my time. It returns useless results, randomly ignores search terms, fails to return exact match results when they exist etc etc etc. It is as bad as, or worse than, Google was when I first started my Kagi subscription. There has been no noticeable improvement at all since I made this thread or the one before it - nothing affecting me has been fixed at all.

nobodywasishere

Truism I don't mean to come across as indifferent, I just need specific examples of things you're running into with things like search region and queries in order to diagnose what could be going wrong. I'm sorry you're running into these issues, and I can assure you that we're doing our best to fix these, and we have fix some of the issues identified in this thread, but these aren't all the same issue.

Some of these issues have been fixed in NT with some people having a better experience there (such as the intermittent "no results" issue), which is why I was recommending you reach out to support to get access to it, but if not no worries.

As to verbatim search, we haven't changed anything in that behavior in a while. To give more insight into how it works on our end, as mentioned in this thread:

nobodywasishere e do post-processing for key terms after getting results from the upstream providers, and as we don't have the timing budget to fetch each of the pages to verify they contain the phrases, we have to go off the title / snippet / url. Ideally in the future as we build up our own internal index, we may be able to relax this.

Truism

nobodywasishere You mean like this?

I get stuff like this all the time. Search is totally cooked at the moment. It's non-deterministic and rarely returns much in the way of useful results. In so many ways. Searching for astronomy gives astrology results, for another example.

Tecuatl

I'm now using the NT pipeline. It's much better than the old one, in the sense that it's actually useable. But it's not enough to make me keep paying.

Say I search for privateer angle. The Google results are mostly about a bike called the Privateer with a steep seat angle, plus a few results where both terms come up in the context of history or video games. Fine.

The Kagi NT results with verbatim mode off have a lot of the same material. But unlike Google, it almost immediately starts offering results which include only one of the two terms, including absurd things like a dictionary site translating privateer into Slovenian. (Why Slovenian in particular?)

OK, so I'll keep verbatim mode on from now on. But even then, Kagi surfaces low-quality results: the 13th result is an image database where one image has "privateer" in the metadata and a different image on the same page has "angle". With Google I have to dig down to the fifth or sixth page before it resorts to useless results like this.

The fact that Kagi are continuing to charge users for the old search pipeline that they know is broken has made me lose trust in the company; but the fact that even the vaunted new pipeline seems to be a worse experience than Google has made me worry that the whole project is now unsalvageable. Sadly, I'm now cancelling my subscription, although I guess I'll check back every few months to see if somehow they've turned it around.

LC

Tecuatl

The Kagi NT results with verbatim mode off have a lot of the same material. But unlike Google, it almost immediately starts offering results which include only one of the two terms, including absurd things like a dictionary site translating privateer into Slovenian. (Why Slovenian in particular?)

I cannot reproduce this. I have noticed that (weirdly) some results may change if you change Country/Region and/or Interface Language on Settings. Setting them to International and English fixed that for me.

NT search backend looks an improvement to me, but I’ll be honest, I’ve been tagged on the new Kagi’s change-log saying that the issue I’ve reported has been fixed:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/11354-double-quotes-not-working-properly

It hasn’t, since I can still reproduce everything that’s still written in the first post (with both NT and old search backend), except PDFs filtering operator being handled correctly (I did not test this at all).

Pleonasm

My understanding from discussions on Discord is that the new "NT search pipeline" is a helpful initiative by Kagi to fix existing defects that should not have been present from the start (and to provide increased visibility that will help to diagnose future defects). In that sense, NT search is an "improvement." But, I do not believe it is an "improvement" in the sense that it is incrementally adding meaningful features and functionality that raise the quality of Kagi Search to a new level?

doerus

Good news! After the latest deploy, our tests suggest the regression you've encountered should be fixed. I tried it on a few of the cases shared in this thread:

We'd be happy to hear your thoughts.

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