Ideas for improving local/international/english search modalities

Pictor

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

Tube

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

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

MonoMatrix

When searching for Amazon on Kagi with the region set to (ES - ca), the results show the UK and US websites, and the Wikipedia widget also displays the Spanish version:

Google is working as expected since it is showing the Spanish Amazon website in its results and for the widget it is using Viquipèdia, which is the Catalan version of Wikipedia:

MonoMatrix

When searching for Amazon in the Andorra region (AD) the US version appears instead of the Spanish one:

And furthermore in the region of Andorra (AD), the Wikipedia widget does not appear:

In the Spain region (ES - es) it does appear:

howie

I'm British, and the one thing Kagi really struggles at for me is searching for things like shopping items, as the search engine is US-centric in its results. It finds US products from US stores and doesn't give me much to work with. I'd be fine with just using the Google bang to make these searches, but Kagi appears to default my location to Washington DC when it feeds through to Google without allowing me to override it in any way - I think Kagi is doing this, but correct me if I'm wrong. This is totally understandable on the face of it given the search engine's privacy focus, but yet again isn't letting me find any UK-based shopping results! There might be a way to deal with this already that I'm not aware of, but it bugs me for now. I have selected "United Kingdom" as my region in my account settings and yet it seems to do very little to help this in any way.

Luis

howie we are defining the solution to this problem, and expect to have it done by mid Q1. I will merge your post with the main thread to streamline communication

goulot_situez

A few days ago, I could switch from International to France in a few clicks:

open locale drop-down menu
type "FR"
press Enter

But a recent changes makes Belgium (BE - fr) the top suggestion. This is absurd to make "Belgium" ranks higher than "France" for the "fr" query!

Moreover, it's still impossible to remove locales from top of menu, or this reset it. Mine is mess due to this badly implemented search and some mistakes I made years ago (when I clicked the first result "Afghanistan" option instead of my previously selected locale that didn't show up at the top).

This ought to be fixed. It's really annoying when half your queries require a change in localization.

3x071c

I agree re mixed results with the OP: I'm multilingual, but prefer results in English/international. If I search for a term, regardless of the query language, I'd like to see matching results in all languages I know, but preferentially with my primary (e.g. Wikipedia etc. should be surfaced in en-US first). This is how Google works.

Leward

Vlad I am in a similar case in Canada, sometimes searching in French, sometimes in English.

One way I would like for this to work is for a region that has multiple languages like ca-fr and ca-en to do a quick guess of the input language (quick because we still want the results to load fast 😉 ) and pick the the correct language based on the input. If the result is uncertain, keep what the user has as a default.

For regions that have multiple languages this can be a reasonable behavior IMO.

hmenzagh

Reposting a previous reply of mine on another post but it seems relevant here too ! :

I really like the fact that my results are more "international" on Kagi, but sometimes my local bakery is called "Utopia" and I know, in advance, that Kagi is going to fail, that's one big reason I still use google services for some searches.

May I suggest some ideas:

Add city location selection
- This can become convoluted quickly but adding a few custom cities from settings that would be available from the "location" dropdown might be a workable approach
Add a bang that could retrieve location info dynamically
Location aware bangs
- (e.g., !nancy or !berlin to restrict results)

Either way "location-specific searches" should see their ranking strongly impacted in my opinion

Boomkop3

Perhaps a toggle for "local results" could be an option? And it doesn't really matter if there aren't a lot of result's. I'd rather see less results that are relevant than more slop/filler that I have to weed trough

macro

Could ECS be a technical option ?
https://docs.controld.com/docs/ecs-custom-subnet (here it's a cases applied to controlD, but it means that kagi could leverage ECS to identify location/language without compromising privacy.

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