Ideas for improving local/international/english search modalities

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?

callmewhenyouneedme

I've only skimmed the existing messages.

Throwing in some other example queries which, when performed from the UK, give USA-specific results. My Kagi region is set to 'United Kingdom'. I've noticed it particularly recently when doing more shopping-related queries, and am finding myself appending "UK" to search queries, or swapping to Google. This is my biggest and only significant issue with Kagi's search results.

'Post Office' should return the UK Post Office first, not USPS (black box is me redacting correctly localised results on a map)
'Amazon' should return 'Amazon.co.uk' before Amazon.com (and should not lead with some AWS blog, weird!)
'Apple' should return the UK site first (top result goes to https://www.apple.com, not https://www.apple.com/uk/)
'gov' should return 'gov.uk' first

Google gets all of these correct.

While writing this post, I've realised this is worse than I'd thought - nothing I've tried has put the UK result higher! Have I got something misconfigured; is something broken?

Boomkop3

This was not what I was expecting. The international search seems to be a bit too eager to assume english-international

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