Option to disable automatic spelling correction

keyes

Kagi will correct the spelling of words in my search by default, even if I explicitly chose that spelling. One way to get around this is to put speech marks (") around the word I want spelled correctly, but I'd rather not have to.

I like what Mojeek does, which is to search for what I asked for anyway, and still correct my spelling and offer me the opportunity to search the corrected query. See this SERP for example: https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=wofi+not+working+on+gnome

Kagi, on the other hand, searches for the corrected term first and then asks me if I wanted to search for what I actually wanted to search for: https://kagi.com/search?q=wofi+not+working+on+gnome

I am, in fact, looking for issues with the Wofi project, not Wifi issues.

It would be nice to have a setting that enables verbatim searches by default, or just search for what I ask for by default. It chews up 2 searches for every 1 search I make that was misinterpreted, otherwise.

z64

It would be nice to have a setting that enables verbatim searches by default

The verbatim option is "sticky" - if you turn it on, it will stay enabled until disabled.

keyes

z64 Is it sticky for my account or sticky for cookies? I use three different computers with Kagi, so it would be helpful if it was saved in my account.

z64

keyes Yes, the current state is saved with your account

keyes

z64 Great, thanks! Feel free to close this request then.

keyes

@z64 Sorry, I'd just like to clarify something.

With verbatim search, is this the same as:

"wofi" "not" "working" "on" "gnome"

Or is it the same as:

"wofi not working on gnome"

Does it search for an exact match of the entire phrase, or just exact for the keywords? And does this turn off matching for synonyms and word-stemming? Those would return potentially useful results. If it does, I'd like to ask for an option to just turn off the spelling correction, at least by default.

Vlad

keyes Entire phrase.

keyes

Vlad If that's the case, I don't think Verbatim search adequately solves this feature request. In an effort to turn off spelling correction by default, this also turns off other search features I do want; like searching for synonyms and generally reducing the potential quality of results. I've trialed verbatim search for a time and this is my experience.

So, I'd really like the option to just turn off spelling correction by default.

Vlad

We could have such option, let's see if other users find it useful.

Rasmus

I've found this thread, because Kagi does the American thing of changing non-american phrases to American phrases. Verbatim doesn't stop it. See screenshot below.

This is a dealbreaker issue. I search in 3-4 languages on a daily basis, and being shown anything other than what I search for, is useless beyond belief. Many names can be misconstrued to mean something in American.

Vlad

Rasmus I can see how is that a problem. Can you state what is the ask in terms of UX/features?

Rasmus

Vlad

An option to disable “showing results for [x]”.

If I've spelt a word incorrectly, the search results will show me, and I can re-evaluate. Here are some of the most grotesque examples. I come across this almost daily.

Here I've searched for a person, whose last name is also an American noun, and verbatim is turned on. The results match my query, but Kagi decides to show their wrongly corrected query.

Search for non-American name

Even the grammar is being corrected, despite the results matching the query:
There is no possessive apostrophe in Danish

Kagi goes a long way, to chop actual words up:
This is just mayhem

Azxiana

There really needs to be an option to turn this off. I had to unhelpfully change "shatters" to "shutters". I really feel like this feature is designed to hide that Kagi has a lack of search results for some things.

z64

Azxiana We don't do the correction "in house" - the reason for the current semantics are due to limitations and consistency issues with consuming multiple upstream indexes. Some indexes autocorrect, others don't, and some may or may not provide a way for us to control this behavior.

Say for example, you submit a query with a typo - if Kagi were to do "nothing", you might get some results based on your typo verbatim, and some results based on the "autocorrected" version of your query. To make sure the results simply make sense we had to pick the semantics that was the best quality for the lowest latency. And we built the "verbatim mode" feature so that you can always search for exact terms - I can suggest trying that in the meantime if you haven't yet, and seeing if that works better for you.

So TLDR - its like the way it is because we were between a rock & hard place compiling results from multiple upstream indexes with regards to balancing quality vs consitency vs latency. It's tricky.

But - the good news is that we are reviewing other internal changes that I expect to allow us to change the semantics to be more in line with what most expect, which is to show the results consistently for your terms as-written, and prompt for a "Did you mean?" instead of a "Search for <possibly typo'd terms> instead". So please stay tuned in the coming weeks for a potential update on this.

Rasmus

z64 Do you do the verbatim option in-house? I'd prefer it to treat each word verbatim, not the entire query.

When writing this comment, I've struggled to recreate my earlier problems 🙂 So something has changed. Good work!

z64

Rasmus Yes, we've done some simplifying of how this system works. Not as dramatic as totally changing the semantics as I previously discussed, but overall it should be better & faster.

Verbatim is done by us, and it works by checking that each word occurs at leat once in either the title, URL, or snippet, in any order or distance (e.g., occurences do not need to be next to each other, as long as they all appear once). Effectively the same as if you were to manually search for "each" "word" "quoted" "like" "this"