Ideas for improving local/international/english search modalities

tomr

Sure thing Vlad - google picks up the locally relevant context of riverside options etc too
)

Vlad

tomr Note that these exact results, appear in your Kagi results too, just they get grouped into the listicles box (because these results are listicles).

Rasmus

Vlad I've read the thread, and would like to add my specific feature request, and the reasoning:

FR: Allow `lang:[xx]` to specify result language in search query

E.g.: commander cadre lang:fr

When I search in specific languages, it's not necessarily from the region where most people speak a certain language. It's to find documents whose existance I'm pretty sure of.

My search activity is 35 % legal, 35 % developer and 30 % personal.

A query example could be a position paper by Greenpeace, on the legality of occupying drilling rigs, written in Dutch. It may be on Greenpeace's Canadian site, for all I know. Most HTML pages have a lang tag, so it should be fairly easy.
Another example could be an article written in English, by a Swedish academic, teaching in Karlsruhe.
A third example is faux amis. commander cadre means very different things in French and English.

pe1uca

I just went and set international as my default region, it shows all the results with somewhat good filter for local stuff. If I have to look for something more specific I just type the region since actually using the setting hides relevant results for the search from other regions.

For example if I search for "ine México" with Canada (CA - en) the official page for the institute is nowhere to be seen, only with Mexico or international it shows up.
So, when you select a region some results can be hidden even when they're the correct ones!

It can also be somewhat seen when I want to search for "elecciones México". With region Canada (CA - en) it only shows results in English even when my text is in Spanish and the topic is related to Mexico and Spanish results would be more relevant to the search.
If I set region as Mexico I get results mostly from Mexico or only in Spanish, not from any other international page even if they're more relevant than regional sites.
When I set it to international I get a somewhat good mix of relevant results both in Spanish and English.

This setting should only boost the results for the selected region, not hide results form other ones.

ntt

I am searching for "Dopamin Detoksu" (Dopamine Detox) with the Turkey region selected. 13 of the 36 results are in English, meaning the rate is more than 30%. This is a very important problem for me. If I select Turkey and search in Turkish, I should see results in Turkish.

Havok

Someone has probably asked for this, but since we can set our primary "Country/Region" in settings, why not let us set more than one country/region and then place them in priority list like with keyboard languages of what we want to see, and even let us block entire countries and regions from showing up? (or is this already a thing?)

azdanov

When searching for an online store that sells a specific item or any other references in my region the Kagi search results only shown 2 links that were somehow related to the region (EE), the rest were leading to irrelevant websites which didn't have anything to do with the region selected. And I had to scroll down just to notice those 2 links.

https://kagi.com/search?q=comandante+c40+mk4&r=ee

On the other hand, the Google's regional search found many relevant results. https://www.google.com/search?as_q=comandante+c40+mk4&cr=countryEE and put them on top of the results.

It would be nice if there was some way to improve regional results, so I could stop having to use google when Kagi didn't work 🙂.

slamor

The first 5-6 results in local searches on Kagi are completely garbage.

Luis

Hi! We are working to improve localised search queries. I will merge this thread into a larger discussion on the topic. Stay tuned for further updates.

Tube

Luis

Just want to chime in and say, I'm finding the search results heavily biased towards US English results too, even while searching in French!

The biggest problem with this is the fact that if I'm searching for something I need to buy, the results are useless unless I block or lower every US based site that comes up.
If I'm searching for a problem I have with Windows or, say, a woodworking skill I need to learn, I really need US based sites to come up along with other countries.
On the contrary, if I'm searching a recipe, I really, really don't want US based sites appearing, I refuse to use either cups, medieval measurements or high fructose corn syrup 😃

This is a massive quandary, right enough

Pictor

I think it's ok to get international results, even when region is set to some country. Region is a default setting, and for me means "Give me a wide net of results, but biased a little more to my region"

If I want exclusively my region, I will add that into my search terms. However, region, and language, are in my opinion, completely unrelated. I mean yes, Spain results will have more Spanish probably, but that's not the same as saying "I am ok with Spanish results when I search Spain related content". I may be there on vacation, but don't speak a word of it. I may be a native hispanic, but looking for Spanish language news reports on the latest EU vote in Moldova.

I really think there should be some form of language preference that is unrelated to the region preference. It could be

Give me results in:
Primary: English
Other: French, Spanish

as a way of indicating I am fine with content in any of those languages, but biased more to English. This then is my language preference, irrespective of region.

slamor

Pictor Just what I wanted!

Pictor

Slightly confused why my previous comment says "[deleted]"

mgw

I would like to second the need for separating region and language settings with my specific use case.

As a Software Engineer who's native tongue is German, in my professional life I mostly use English. When I use Kagi for work related searches (e.g. technical documentation, SaaS product pages etc.), Kagi sends me to the German language versions of those sites, because my Kagi setting is "Switzerland (CH - de)".
I would prefer the English versions, because they are more familiar to me and usually of higher quality.
Examples of first results:
https://kagi.com/search?q=aws+s3 -> https://aws.amazon.com/de/s3/
https://kagi.com/search?q=azure+compute -> https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/azure/architecture/guide/technology-choices/compute-decision-tree

I haven't set the region to "International", because I do prefer the regional slant to Switzerland, but not the language slant to German. (Especially for my private searches, which happen on the same machine.) These types of searches are so frequent for me, that it is too annoying to always switch to "International" just for that instance.

On Google, my settings are:
Results language filter: English, German
Results region: Switzerland
This results in good regional results, mostly in English. For the rare occasion that a local Swiss site has an English version, that is usually the one in my Google search results. I would prefer the German version, but am ok with this compromise because of my settings.

My machine, browser and Accept-Language are set to en-US.

A similar use case is the one of expats living in a foreign country. They would probably prefer English results but still with a regional skew.

sleepysnooze

There are already a lot of good discussion on the normal search, so I will add my feedback on the Assistant. The Assistant has similar problem that it will get results from websites with the same language as the language the user types. Telling it to get information from foreign sources doesn't work. The workaround that I use at the moment is that I tell the assistant to translate my prompt to the desired language, do a search in that language, then translate the result back to me in English. This works sometimes with mix sources of both English and foreign languages. But when I try to dig deeper into a certain topic, it reverses to English sources again.

I want the Assistant to help me expand my search capability into sources in languages that I don't know, but communicate with me in English. If Kagi Assistant can do this, it would be a very powerful search tool.

MonoMatrix

When searching for Zara on Kagi with the search region Spain (ES - es), the UK site version appears instead of the Spanish one:

The same Google search does show the correct site according to the region:

Kagi should find the website corresponding to the region from where the search is conducted.

silvenga

Luis

This is a good example; I'll merge it into the main thread

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