I understand this suggestion is super special and also very localized, so maybe a long-term stretch goal: When searching for a well known highway name in Germany (they are all colloquially known as "A" plus a number, so for example: A3, A93, A100 etc.), the information I usually want to see at a first glance and would warrant a special widget is, whether there's currently congestion or an accident blocking that highway and how much that delays me. I guess in other countries people have similar needs, but of course using different street naming schemes etc.
Let's compare results as they are right now:
Google:
Google recognized it's a highway but shows me a couple of utterly irrelevant information in the widget, where I'd simply visit the wikipedia page if I'd be interested. The map's not great either - Google will show any random middle point on a street on the map even though for example Wikipedia has nice overview maps like this or this linked from every article about a highway.
Google's LAST link on the first page of results will lead to traffic congestion information (it's slightly better for other highways, sometimes the results prioritizes congestion information).
Kagi International:
Shows some obscure product on the right, a GPU on the left. Now, how the international version should behave is probably up for debate, but as the search results on the left show, there are probably even more appropriate products it should focus on the right side. If in doubt, repeating the information from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A100 would probably have been a better idea than showing that "Zircon StudSensor A100" thing.
Kagi, region Germany
Good: Links are in general better, at least for the detailled use case. Second and 7th links actually links to webpages with congestion information.
Not good, not bad: Recognized I probably mean the highway and shows me the Wikipedia excerpt.
Bad: Chooses to extract the most irrelevant picture from the Wikipedia article and shows it immediately. More sensible would be to display the map from the Wikipedia article so I at least get an overview where that highway is located.
Kagi, German version, different highway:
Recognized it's a highway, again shows me the official logo instead of some kind of overview map right. This time it shows a map on top of the results and marks some kind of random point on the highway. The map that way is pretty useless. In general, if searching for a street, it makes no sense to center the map in such an up-close zoom level on some random point on that street.
First real link to adac.de is awesome though
Anyway, neither search engine will immediately RELIABLY display me the information I'm most interested in.
My dream search engine would AT LEAST:
- Make sure at least one link leading to a page about traffic congestions is prioritized in the search results and shown above the fold, preferrably at top position, RELIABLY. It works often (though will pick different pages sometimes, depending on the highway) right now in Kagi, but often the links further down. For example while searching for A1, Kagi will prefer the website of the AUSTRIAN, not German, mobile network A1, while searching for A2 will point to https://www.a2hosting.com/ even in Germany region, which is an utterly irrelevant result for someone searching for A2 in Germany)
- Show me relevant information IMMEDIATELY, like "Accident between city1 and city2. Highway blocked partly for 2 hours"
Not sure where one would start implementing this and where the raw data is. Could probably be licensed from navigation service providers. There's quite a lot websites covering traffic information (I'll simply list a few, maybe useful as a starting point for future research). Not sure whether one could scrape the information there or would entering licensing agreements or something:
https://www.adac.de/verkehr/verkehrsinformationen/de/ (ADAC is probably the most respectable source in Germany)
https://www.verkehrsinformation.de/A100
https://stau.info/autobahn/A3
https://www.ffh.de/verkehr/staupilot.html
https://www.antenne.de/service/aktuelle-verkehrsmeldungen
It's interesting to see that there also a couple of low quality sites there who still have current information. This hints that the info is up for licensing SOMEWHERE, but I don't know where.
