Ideas for improving local/international/english search modalities

Vlad

carl There was no change, and we are trying to understand how people expect Kagi to behave in locale modalities which is why I merged all these threads together (it was hard to track them and have a meaningful discussion). But I want to us to solve the problem for good.

kristofferR

Vlad If I am in [xx] region show me only results from that region
If I am in [xx] region, show me a good mix of international/english results

Kagi currently leans more towards 1.

What is some of the low hanging fruit we can quickly implement to make the situation better for everyone?

I'd argue that Kagi currently leans more towards 2, and that's good.

I don't get why you don't just copy Google. Let users who want it select "Only from" Region/Language for a search in the search settings:

That way people only wanting content from their selected language/region could easily set that, and the rest of us can get good results, with a natural mix of region language and English depending on our search term, without all the extra labor and headaches of having to redo half our searches solely because we did a search with the opposite region set previously (as it's obviously impossible to see what Region you have selected when you search from the browser address bar).

When I type an English search term I want English results, when I type a Norwegian term I want Norwegian results, and if I type a mixed/unspecified term I want a good mix of both if they exist (in Norwegian), otherwise just English results ofc. Without having to manually change regions all the damn time. That's how it currently works, please don't change that! [1]

However, I should be able to force the search to only display crappy local results, like on Google.

One improvement over Google would be making the settings mentioned above "sticky" (like Lenses) so they don't reset for every search. Another obvious improvement over Google would be to show all languages/regions, like the current region selector, instead of the stupid way Google does it with only showing All and the Language/region of the Google ccTLD you are on.

[1] This is a great example of the perfect mix that is currently there (open in new tab):

CWagner

carl Vlad This merging might confuse the issue. My OP was specifically about the "International" region, which I assume does not mean "English", but multiple languages.

FWIW, I do not need multiple languages with international. For me, it was always the only English region not country specific.

kristofferR

Kagi currently leans more towards 1.

What is some of the low hanging fruit we can quickly implement to make the situation better for everyone?

I'd argue that Kagi currently leans more towards 2, and that's good.

It used to lean towards 1, it was always about being explicit. Now, the option to be explicit has been taken away, with no way left to say "I only want regional results". I don’t really care how it’s implemented, your suggestions are as good as any, but it mostly worked that way already before for me.

When I search in German, I always append !de to temporarily switch the region to Germany. I also do that for English terms that might show up in German news. When I don’t want that, I search in international by default, where I don’t need German results.

In total, what I always liked about Kagi was being explicit. I don’t want it to second guess me (which already got worse with more often verbatim being required for searches not to silently drop terms, but that’s a different issue), DDG and Google are both good enough at telling me "You have no idea what you are doing, here’s a different search that we think you actually want".

To sum in up, I need "English results", and "German results", that I can control via Bang, with "English" being the default. The less Kagi interprets about my search, the better for me. Regionally relevant results would be nice. If I can search in English with !de and get English articles relating to Germany, that would be nice, and I think it worked that way (but that’s a rare thing, I certainly wouldn’t bet money on my memory there). Everything else discussed, like multi-regions, region and language independent selectors, would be nice-to-have but nothing I need.

But currently, I can’t search for German results anymore, unless the query contains enough German to block English results, which absolutely tanked the search quality into the ground, Google, DDG, and Bing all now have better results for regional searches than Kagi, which outside clear bugs was never the case before.

zarwiz

Using a search engine comes with an intention, which can often be region/locale agnostic, and other times be region/locale specific. I agree with kristofferR on this issue, and I've becomed used to results that match the queries' intentions regardless of the language used.

I need to use both English and French in my day to day, and I instinctively search in the language that feels the most relevant/natural to what I'm looking for, so having to play with a language switcher comes with a lot of friction. It's also the first time I feel like the results I'm getting on Kagi are binary. Either in French, in English or not really local.

The behaviour I would expect is that results could be biased towards a region/broader region (for example Canada) and agnostic to the language in that region. When possible, results could be displayed in the language of the query, if detected, and if not, in the default user language. In my recollection, that's how it felt before the integration of locales.

Vlad

CWagner

But currently, I can’t search for German results anymore,

Saying 'I can't search for Gerrman anymore' is not useful to understand the issue, please be concrete with examples. For most of Kagi feature I have pretty good understanding of what is going on, but since I do not use localised search, I appreciate concrete examples and explanation of expected behavior so I cna properly triage the issue.

CWagner

Vlad

I gave an example: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-ideas-for-improving-localinternationalenglish-search-modalities/6

carl

Let me frame the question like this: Why do English results get pushed to the top on "International" when there is nothing indicating that the user even understands English? In my setup there is nothing in English, OS language, browser language, Kagi language, keyboard map. Why English then? Why not Mandarin or Russian?

Seeing English as a default is not the right perspective.

Vlad

carl English is de-facto language for international communications.

carl

Vlad Okay. I just wish it could be reverted to how it was, because I don't understand the need for two English filters. In Google I search for a term in English, I get English results, I search in Swedish I get Swedish results, I search in Finnish I get Finnish results, I search in Portuguese I get Portuguese results. Never having to manually set or change any region. Kagi "International" worked like this as well until recently, even better than Google.

Vlad

CWagner Would it be acceptable for you that all results are in german when you specify "de" region? (no english results). Because we can either force a mix results (and you have to be ready that an english result could ranked higher than a german one) or force language specific results (eg: only in german; but then when searching for kagi on "de" region, you would not get kagi.com)

kristofferR

Vlad Give options! Forcing local language only results can be great for occasional searches, or for those who prefer it permanently enabled like @CWagner, but it's a horrible default - especially for non-huge languages.

CWagner

Vlad Would it be acceptable for you that all results are in german when you specify "de" region? (no english results).

The way it used to be until recently was better, but only getting German results when searching with !de works for me.

Vlad We did not change how International works, so if there is any perceived 'change' we need to better understand what that is.

Until about last year, when there was a language mix, it was far more weighted in favor of the language you either selected by going regional, or by searching unambiguously in that language. What specifically brought that change. Maybe the people here who do regional searches more frequently than me can try and pinpoint the change.

Holger

Vlad we can either force a mix results (and you have to be ready that an english result could ranked higher than a german one)

I think people are used to mixed results and to English content possibly being ranked higher, so the discussion is 'just' about the extent. I guess this makes the issue so complex to discuss and analyze :-(

Until about last year, when there was a language mix, it was far more weighted in favor of the language you either selected by going regional, or by searching unambiguously in that language.

Kagi's results lately do seem a bit off to me as well, in this regard (compared to other engines). I mentioned elsewhere that I now see the case where for a local web site that translates some content to English, those translations are ranked higher than the local content. Similarly, en.wikipedia.org results are often ranked higher than their local equivalents. Those might be two examples of why the ranking feels wrong-ish from a user perspective?

What specifically brought that change.

The cause is obviously hard to tell from the outside. As for when things changed, my guess would be around December. I made this wild speculation in the posting linked above:

The results for those queries don't appear to be stable for me, in some cases the German-language results are preferred as I'd expect. I think I've read somewhere that you're currently using Brave for maybe 10% of the queries, but I can obviously only guess whether that might be related.

May well be nonsense of course (and if it happened to be true, then the Brave-influenced results would seem to work better for me). But either way I think the region-related ranking change happened somewhere around the time the Brave thing was announced.

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.

Vlad

carl We did not change how International works, so if there is any perceived 'change' we need to better understand what that is. The only thing we changed was inclusion of additional locales like 'CA - EN' and 'CA - FR' for a few regions.

zarwiz

Holger To me, such ideas seem unrelated to the question how the ranking should look like for the 'common' localized case.

I have the feeling this discussion mixes two different issues in one. Some people are concerned about language in regions where multiple languages are used by the same person and others how the ranking looks in ‘’common’’ cases.

Vlad The only thing we changed was inclusion of additional locales like 'CA - EN' and 'CA - FR' for a few regions.

How was Kagi interpreting results in Canada before this change? Was it english only? Was it multilingual? Did it behave more like international today? Is it just a change in regards to the geography?

Vlad

CWagner

but only getting German results when searching with !de works for me.

Note that this means if you searched for kagi or openai you would not get the (english based) homepages?

carl

How about a "Multilingual" option, where the user can just click checkboxes in the list for the languages she'd like included? If this would cost more on the backend, you could make it a paid Kagi add-on. I'd happily pay extra.

Holger

carl How about a "Multilingual" option, where the user can just click checkboxes in the list for the languages she'd like included?

To me, such ideas seem unrelated to the question how the ranking should look like for the 'common' localized case.

Vlad

zarwiz We were just using CA region which could mean anything. By being more specific (en/fr) the results are now more fine tuned.

zarwiz

Before, when it was only CA region, I don't remember Kagi making much distinction between english and french websites in Canada, maybe more english biased but overall pretty acurate given the language used in the querries, which made the experience much more organic. French canadians are used to this reality, and we consume english canadian website as well when browsing. I don't see how this is an improvement as french is a minority language in Canada, and completely ignoring french results when tuning in to EN-CA must not change much from a canadian perspective.

Maybe some people enjoy this new locale feature, but its made my experience horrible. Just today I had to manually change the locale more than 20 times. I see myself constantly using the g bang to get what I want quicker, while before Kagi felt much more relevant. I really hope this is solving other people's issues in Canada in some ways because the upside in Quebec is definitely hard to find.

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