Irrelevant adult results for Chinese query

energize_detonator

Search with the query "黑客风水"
- Direct link: https://kagi.com/search?q=%E9%BB%91%E5%AE%A2%E9%A3%8E%E6%B0%B4
- Lit. "Hacker Fengshui"
- This is just a random query that can reliably reproduce the issue. I have no idea if other queries suffer from similar problems
The top 9-10 search results are all irrelevant adult spam
- e.g. ads for prostitution. (Despite Safe Search being on)
- the pages or snippets don't even contain the keywords in the query at all
- They all come from google.com/mymaps (custom user-generated content on Google maps)
The site details (shield icon) show them as owned by google.com so I cannot block only mymaps without blocking all of Google

This happens on all of the following region settings:

China
United States
International

See screenshot below. Every search result shown in this screenshot is irrelevant spam. Scrolling past them reveals semi-relevant results (including the word "黑客") from other websites (not shown in the screenshot). The widget on the right is also relevant (explanation of the word "hacker" from Wikipedia).

Server: US-WEST. I have only tested on Firefox on both desktop and Android, not other browsers / OS. I've found a related bug report, but I believe I've hit a different issue. The linked bug contains random websites from different domains, whereas my query returned user-created maps on Google.

I expected no adult content since Safe Search is on
I expected no spam results (or at least very low ranking)
I expected search results to at least contain part of the query (ideally both terms)
As a workaround, I expected a way to block custom maps without blocking all of Google

(For context, what I was really looking for is the term "堆风水", a coined term used by the information security community for heap arrangement. I forgot the actual term so I was hoping to locate it by searching "黑客" (hacker / cracker) + "风水" to narrow it down. Kagi was unable to find a match in this case, while Google did return the correct term I was looking for as the first result. Only one Kagi result included the term "风水" -- the rest are either spam or have just the term "黑客". But I don't blame Kagi for this since there's not much relevant content on the Internet to begin with. Anyway, this is not the main point of the bug report.)

Vlad

energize_detonator Can you confirm you are getting good results on other serach engines?

energize_detonator

Vlad Yes, as mentioned above, Google returns a relevant result on the first page. Duckduckgo returns okay results. Also, I'm more concerned about the "bad results" in this bug report -- none of the other search engines returns these adult contents nor results not containing any part of the query at all.

gikkingenhanaya

In the Chinese search results of Kagi, there are some results related to pornographic scam advertisements. These results come from personal maps on Google Maps. However, if I use a filter to block this link, it can only block the top-level domain of google.com, resulting in the exclusion of all Google-related results from the search. I hope Kagi can refine the feature to block specific search results, or directly help to eliminate such search results.
"This kind of junk information in Google Map's My Maps randomly appears in search results for any Chinese keyword. To replicate this, you can search for the keyword '福州外围女'."

I hope Kagi can directly help me eliminate these results from the search outcomes, or provide a more refined system for blocking specific website addresses, rather than just being able to increase or decrease results related to top-level domains.

Vlad

What region do you have set?

gikkingenhanaya

Vlad my region is international

Vlad

gikkingenhanaya What does this query mean in english and what do you expect to get in results?

gikkingenhanaya

Vlad So you still haven't understood what I meant.
Let me give you an example using my latest search results. In this example, I used '美国驻华大使馆 pm2.5 洒水车（U.S. Embassy in China PM2.5 Water Sprinkler Truck）'[https://kagi.com/search?q=%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%E9%A9%BB%E5%8D%8E%E5%A4%A7%E4%BD%BF%E9%A6%86+pm2.5+%E6%B4%92%E6%B0%B4%E8%BD%A6] as the keywords for a kagi search, and the search results showed the images as seen.

This is the fifth search result, which is about 'home service in Tonghua Dongchang (select girls through WeChat 7090046)'. It's all about selling fake medicine, soliciting prostitution, or fraud advertising. This result should not appear in the search results."

gikkingenhanaya

Vlad

I have noticed that when searching for mixed Chinese and English keywords, it's very easy to encounter explicit advertisements, which greatly affect the search experience on Kagi. I hope Kagi can implement filtering for these search results as soon as possible.

runtimeterror

This is becoming a constant annoyance to me too. The Chinese blackhat SEOs would somehow get their keywords stored on Kagi via Google Map search results

runtimeterror

gikkingenhanaya

runtimeterror If you're using AdGuard, you can temporarily solve this problem by adding a rule to the user-defined filters:
kagi.com#?#div.sri-group:-abp-has(a[href*="https://www.google.com/mymaps"])

runtimeterror

gikkingenhanaya
Thanks for that.
However, if I had to use AdGuard or some other custom hacks to mitigate a fundamental bug from Kagi that has been ongoing for a while without much updates (the other post that I linked above was created 24 days ago), I'd probably just switch back to using Google with some search result filtering extensions instead...

gikkingenhanaya

runtimeterror Indeed, we are not paying to watch trash advertisements

aisbgeir

I never knew there were such a way of spamming until I was searching for "烤蛋糕要等它凉吗", which means that "should I wait for it to get cooler when I bake cake". The first 20 result are all some spam advertisement under https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer which has 0 connection to the search term at all.

I expect none of these content go in front, and what I search for appears properly.

FYI, if I only search for “烤蛋糕”，which means "baking cake", none of these content appears.

Vlad

Thanks for al lthe reports, we will be addressing this with the next update.