Preallocate 2-char country codes for Region search bangs

sefidel

Preallocate all of the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes for use in regional search bangs, like !jp.

Kagi already has some regional bangs that follow this naming convention (such as !id, !jp, !cz),
therefore the user might expect the country code to always trigger the regional search.

This would also help increase the overall consistency in the UI, as the regional search dropdown menu already supports using country codes (https://kagifeedback.org/d/998-country-codes-should-work-when-searching-in-country-menu)

Would prevent issues like https://kagifeedback.org/d/3515-add-bang-country-for-indonesia

Now, there's one problem: some of the bangs like !au and !kr is already being used for different websites.
Suggestions welcome!

Recast

Seems good, especially since Twitter moved to !x to free up the bang for Taiwan.

nobodywasishere

We've updated the process documentation for region bangs in the bangs repository here: https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs?tab=readme-ov-file#region-bangs

sefidel

nobodywasishere I’d argue that allocating all of them to regional bangs would be better consistency-wise.

Is the current solution ‘make a PR replacing current one with regional bangs, and remap the existing bang’?

On second thought, I do see how it would be impractical to reallocate all of the 2 char country codes to regional bangs, as some country codes would be ‘too niche’. Is that the reason behind this decision?

nobodywasishere

sefidel That is correct, and because the bangs they would be replacing could be very popular (see the table in the readme, but of note are the amazon/aliexpress/bing/google/etc bangs that would have to be moved). It'd be better to handle this on a case-by-case basis as it may be worth moving bangs to new triggers, or it may not be (and another trigger could be used instead).

sefidel

nobodywasishere Got it. Should I file an issue if I want ‘!au’ and ‘!kr’ reallocated to regional bangs? Not sure how I would file a PR as I don’t know where I should move the current bang to.

nobodywasishere

Please see the documentation here for which region bangs are currently taken by other bangs. As it is unfeasible for us to move all of these taken bangs, I'm closing this as no-fix.