Ideas for improving local/international/english search modalities

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.

kirkmc

Long thread, and I haven't read it all. But I think it's wrong that when I search for something, such as a multinational business (example: Nintendo or Amazon), that even though I'm in the UK it surfaces the US site first. If I click through to that site, I get a region popup, I click UK, then I'm taken to the home page rather than the search results page. In other words, it would make a lot more sense if search didn't prioritize US sites just because I'm searching in English, but be aware of my country and put those at the top.

youngji22

Has there been an update on allowing the assistant to only search through specific regions?

kgfbkd

I would be very happy if I could choose multiple languages to be my default, e.g. en-CA and fr-CA. I make searches interchangeably in either language, and my region in the real world is bilingual.

Problemat

Found another case of a local store being overrepresented in an unrelated query, especially considering it's Linux terminology. I knew it's community is big here, but not at a builder's box store. The search also showed trustedshops and Nintendo on the first page. The second had the newyorker and archivist stores, craigslist, the local craigslist - kleinanzeigen and the Rewe discounter.

If I were to be in charge of Kagi I'd implement an option to block all purchasing sites to curb addiction and bad results for free ads.

First comment after 6 months of using Kagi btw.

RoxyRoxyRoxy

Problemat callmewhenyouneedme Thanks for these reports! We currently have a thread dedicated to just this issue, #7920, could you post this over there?

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