At the moment Kagi uses dot as the decimal separator, but in certain regions it is customary to use comma instead. For example, what Americans write as 21.37 people in Poland write as 21,37. But Kagi does not recognize this, resulting in bogus results. For example here are results of searching for "21,37 PLN in USD".
Kagi:
DuckDuckGo:
Google:
Note that both DDG and Google do the right thing, despite being set to English and not Polish.
I imagine several solutions to the problem:
- Be smart. If a user uses only dot or only comma in the numbers, assume this as the decimal separator. If the user mixes up dots and commas feel free to return nonsense. This is what other search engines implement at the moment.
- Pre-define decimal separator based on Kagi's language settings. Don't rely on browser settings - as you can see by my DDG and Google examples above my browser reports English locale.
- Allow user to select what decimal separator they want to use.
I lean towards 1 since it's a simple heuristic that works well in practice.
