Results about "Groningen" show up a lot in unrelated searches

neysofu

When I search for site:reddit.com independent gyms, all results are from /r/groningen for no apparent reason.

Interestingly, this doesn't happen for site:reddit.com independent gym (without the final "s").

I'd expect some subreddits other than /r/groningen to also show up in the search results.

neysofu

Here's a relevant conversation on the Discord server: https://discord.com/channels/1256077108111868035/1262752714757247037/1269298292353663127

neysofu

A few minutes later, and now only some of the results are from /r/groningen.

berlinflight

I also get Groningen-related results for a number of very broad search terms, e.g.:

a
f
h
wo
stadt
city
town

This has been happening for as long as I have been using Kagi (a few months by now) , I just never thought to report it before.

azdanov

I get it when searching for 'weather'. Search region was set to International.

Value7609

Can reproduce this too

berlinflight

Looking at this further, it seems to happen with many (but not all) searches that might attempt to provide nearby results, almost as if Groningen as a location is given too much weight somewhere.

E.g.,

rathaus
town hall
restaurant
bahnhof
train station
street

Interestingly, searching for "railway station" does not produce any Groningen-related results, but searching for "train station" does.

z64

This is related to one of our indexes geolocating and overfitting to where our requests are exiting from when using one of our EU nodes that is out of the Netherlands. It is in a DC that is right next to Groningen.

It's pretty annoying as we don't have a way to ask them not to do this (it just happens implicitly), this for example is the same exact issue for US-central:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/1088-irrelevant-results-appear-related-to-my-ip-address-location

We can take another look, but not optimistic there is a simple solution here, and we otherwise do not want to drop this index.

Value7609

z64 you said on discord, that you could supply a location to the APIs, wouldn't it work to randomly use some cities and rotate them every few requests? This may yield more diverse results, while still not using the users location and it won't be fixed to one single location.

z64

Value7609 (Sorry just seeing this)

That is an interesting idea. I am not immediately sure if that will do more harm than good - for example, if people complain about Groningen, we at least know it is this issue. I could imagine it becoming hard to debug if similar reports open with other locations.

Plus, I think we would have to build logic to pick some place within the region you have selected (I think most expect Lat/lng), otherwise a random coordinate will certainly be more harmful, if it overfits to e.g. some place in Japan when you are in Spain.

Unironically, I am wondering what happens if we pass Point Nemo.

Food for thought, thanks.