EU as a region

pcostanza

It would be great if you could add the European Union as a region.

It is often useful, for example but not only when online shopping, to be able to search across the EU.

jimbo

Europe as a region would be incredibly valuable.

Especially when researching whether product is available from Europe. American retailers usually come first on international results but those often have huge import fees and duties.
When researching about compliance regarding EU law, often better in English than in local translations. American news sites are often flooding the results with irrelevant commentary
When planning a journey
When researching about services. In EU I am allowed to for example get banking services in another EU country just like a local, but comparing those offerings in a single country bubble is hard and I have to do the search manually for each EU country

Since to my understanding Kagi combines existing upstream indexes, such region might not exist there and implementing this would involve combining multiple region specific queries together, which obviously increase the upkeep costs significantly unless some cheaper approach is found.

Ultimately the biggest use case for EU region would be the online shopping. For that an alternate approach could be custom search lenses where all relevant online store domains are added to, but there's a limit of 10 domains at least on my current plan. I wonder whether it is raised on the ultimate plan. 🤔

(I have not considered ultimate plan since the major selling point seems to be AI. I use Kagi because it gives me control of the information I see. With AI, I would lose some of the control)

One, quite manual approach to solve this could be going crazy with search operators, I do not know whether there's a limit of site: attributes, since those can be combined with the OR search operator. Such query could be added to Firefox search engine shortcuts and that way one could technically work around the limitations in Kagi lenses.

jimbo

jimbo I tested my previous idea about supplying websites as query parameters.

It seems like in Kagi and in other Google based search engines, there's a limit on the length of search query. You can't therefore list all the relevant retailer domains and expect results. The only search engine that was able to handle my 121 word search query was Yahoo but ranking of the results was so bad that I couldn't still find online stores which sell 2TB microsd cards with shipping to Finland 💁‍♂️

For those interested, I tried with this query:

microsd +2TB (site:multitronic.fi OR site:data-systems.fi OR site:verkkokauppa.com OR site:jimms.fi OR site:datatronic.fi OR site:tietokonekauppa.fi OR site:proshop.fi OR site:thomannmusic.de OR site:prisma.fi OR site:k-ruoka.fi OR site:maxgaming.fi OR site:mafia.fi OR site:computersalg.fi OR site:gigantti.fi OR site:power.fi OR site:compusat.fi OR site:cruzbroker.fi OR site:tokmanni.fi OR site:cdon.fi OR site:elon.se OR site:webhallen.com OR site:dustinhome.fi OR site:dustin.com OR site:komplett.se OR site:inet.se OR site:clasohlson.com OR site:rajalacamera.fi OR site:fotonordic.fi OR site:kameraliike.fi OR site:fotoman.fi OR site:scandinavianphoto.fi OR site:topshot.fi OR site:caseking.de OR site:amazon.de OR site:amazon.se OR site:computeruniverse.net OR site:geizhals.eu OR site:forgamer.ee OR site:arvutitark.ee OR site:f-musiikki.fi OR site:hifistudio.fi OR site:euronics.fi OR site:telia.fi OR site:elisa.fi OR site:dna.fi OR site:mindfactory.de OR site:elektroshemeikka.com OR site:ldlc.com OR site:materiel.net OR site:alternate.de OR site:mylemon.at OR site:rueducommerce.fr OR site:cdiscount.com OR site:fnac.com OR site:boulanger.com OR site:darty.com OR site:grosbill.com OR site:motonet.fi OR site:hobbyhall.fi OR site:e-ville.com OR site:muistikauppa.fi)

Thinking this feature request further: if the search index was split in regional indexes, implementing a super region properly would involve reindexing all the websites for that super region again. In other words, redoing the most computationally intensive work in running a search engine again. Alternatively it could be done by implementing some algorithm which queries all the regional indexes and re-ranks those with less metadata .. so worse ranking result. Additionally, in such implementation single query would generate single query for every sub index, for example single query to EU super-region would generate request for 27 sub-indexes. With conversion rate of single customer query to 27 system queries, it begins to look like a denial of service attack.

Regardless of the structure of search index, implementing super regions could likely require at least some search index reconsiderations. So it could happen by convincing some existing search engine index manager to modify their index or if Kagi considers super regions as wanted feature when building their own index.

OR I'm totally wrong. This was just pure speculation based on - nothing, really 🙃

carl

If it's easy to implement, then there could be a whole flora of interesting super-regions to add, for example: Latin America, West Coast USA, the Caribbean, Scandinavia/Nordic, French speaking Africa, South East Asia, etc etc