Sports and Live Score Integration

Vlad

snowytrees When I type 'mariners' I may expect to get results about mariner space probes. I am not a sport fan and have nothing to do with seattle mariners. How is Kagi supposed to infer this without invading your privacy, logging searches, logging what you click etc? Currently it shows a mix of results which I think is a fair compromise. Please let me know if I am missing the point and what would you suggest?

snowytrees

Vlad
Even if you type xx-location-xx xx-sports-type-xx xx-team-name (hence specific) the sources being used in the news section is still lacking. Basically I am willing to give up the ability of google to infer what I mean by "mariners", but specifying the "seattle mariners baseball" should give me the detailed results I get from google. Make sense? Why is Kagi ranking these random newspapers with syndicated articles (notice Cincinnati Enquirer which has nothing to do with New York Mets or the Atlanta Braves) along with aggregates like USA Today so high compared to actual sports news sites (eg ESPN, fan sites, relevant local newspaper analysis, sports illustrated, etc).

Kagi:

Google:

snowytrees

Basically sports news ranking is bad/broken. Because searching "location team-name sport-type" in normal search actually produces the websites that contain the articles I want to see. But the news search isn't actually sourcing from those websites.

Vlad

snowytrees Ok it seems I misunderstood you from the get go. I thought you were talking about news in general search results and you were talking about the News tab.

That makes more sense now. Yes I agree that our News results can be improved.

What is not clear is how do we approach this. I would not go as far as call Cincinnati Enquirer a random newspaper just because it does not originate from the same town the home team playing does (and what if Mets are playing a baseball club from Cincinnati if that is a thing?)

What determines the relevance of a newspaper if thousands of news sites are reporting on the same news event and probably have same coverage?

snowytrees

Vlad

I am not sure how your news results work currently but I would utilize the rankings of normal search in the news results. So articles that appear on websites that rank higher in normal search should rank higher in the search results. Also disincentive any syndicated news, and promote wherever the source article is from. Eg this result that was in New York Mets (notice it is Associated Press: https://www.oregonlive.com/mlb/2022/10/joe-musgrove-pitches-hometown-san-diego-padres-past-new-york-mets-in-mlb-playoffs.html) I feel this is partly an indexing issue as well illustrated by searching for lookout landing. It is a fan site for the mariners that has no news results:

Vlad

snowytrees Perhaps it is not clearly apparent, but telling that a site is a news site is not trivial to begin with. What makes a site a news site?

snowytrees

Vlad

I'm not sure but however Google determines what page is a news article works. I hate to keep bringing up Google but it is the one search engine that gets news search correctly. Bing, duck duck go, etc. almost always fail. It's honestly pretty philosophical ngl. Going broad on something that i am guessing a search engine can detect is an "article" is a page that has an associated publish date (and an author even if anonymous). A news article would an article that is commenting on something topical around its publish date. Thus a news site is just a site that has news articles.

Vlad

We'll take this as a call to action to work on our news results. Stay tuned!

dronics

I've just discovered that I can search for a team and see the last game and score information, additionally, the recent scores for previous games and the upcoming games are shown too. When I looked at the information for Manchester United, I actually thought that there were recent games missing as the first recent game listed was dated 6th December.

In my opinion, the recent scores should be listed in reverse, with the most recent games shown at the top and then getting older as you scroll down.
I think the "recent scores" should be listed in this order:

Manchester United 1, Nottingham Forest 2
Saturday, December 30, 2023

Aston Villa 2, Manchester United 3
Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Manchester United 0, West Ham United 2
Saturday, December 23, 2023

Manchester United 0, Liverpool FC 0
Sunday, December 17, 2023

AFC Bournemouth 3, Manchester United 0
Saturday, December 9, 2023

Chelsea FC 1, Manchester United 2
Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Could you change the order of the recent games to be in reverse to what they currently are please?
I think this would help with the readability of teams and their recent games and stop anyone thinking that games are missing, like I did.

Holger

I guess the idea might've been to have a single chronological timeline for past and upcoming matches. However, I think I'd agree that listing past games in reverse order is preferable.

eskidost

When searching for "Upcoming Galatasaray matches", the sidebar displays recent matches only.

In the sidebar when I tap "show more" it shows me the upcoming matches, but those matches also don't include cup fixtures. See screenshots below for Kagi vs Google

One last thing is that when I search for the club name, only the sidebar shows an info widget about the club and not the fixtures. It would be great if it could display fixtures above search results as a widget and info about the club in the sidebar.

Vlad

We will be looking more into this. It is rather hard problem to solve

Identifying that a query is a sports query is not trivial ("predators wild" is for example a sport query referring to Nashville Predators vs Minnesota Wild)
Identifying an API provider that can provide this. Getting sport scores for say Bulgaria is very different than for USA.
Translating user input into something the API will understand (you can not dumpt the raw query and hope it will produce output)
Context variety - Live score, vs historical scores, vs upcoming matches
Rendering variaty - Soccer match renders very differently than a Formula 1 race and both render very differently than an NFL bracket...

This is also call for help if you have any ideas in regards to how to go about this.

oup_oup_andaway

Vlad Not sure how easy this would be to implement but one way to help identify the right sports context to provide past and live results could be to have it based on whether a game is soon to be played.

I imagine a lot of sport schedules like F1 would be fairly set before a season starts or at least have an early enough notice for when the next event will be. So as an example, if I searched Ferrari on a regular day it should show me results like the Ferrari website, wikipedia page, etc, and when there is an F1 race that's about to happen (say in a weeks time) then I expect it to show me a sports widget for the next race.

This will probably depend heavily on available API to get reliable schedules for each sport, for F1 there is https://openf1.org/#api-methods , which is free and looks to have everything you would need data wise.

For football, https://www.sportmonks.com/football-api/premier-league-api/ , this api service could be an option at least to test out the idea since they say it's free for getting Danish Superliga and the Scottish Premiership data. If it works and there's a big enough appetite (and there probably will be) then it might be worth paying to get the English Premier League data.

Kagibeh

Vlad

Actually Google has problems identifying a sports query just the same. I guess "predators wild" will always work, but in other sports, you typically enter cities (like "Liverpool Manchester") or countries and then you might end up with a tourist itinary. Fair enough, as this is what someone else might be looking for. You poke around a bit and then come up with a keyword like "score" or "results" which brings up what you're looking for, and that's that. Consistency is key, though - having to type "score" in one sport and "results" in another is where it becomes annoying.

I also believe Google has solved context variety quite nicely - if a game is live, it will show the score, otherwise it'll show the game most recently completed. Click on the game, and you get the schedule which includes historical scores and upcoming matches.

Another thought: Google scores are displayed very prominently, so it's a huge decision whether or not a query will return a sports result OR something else. I assume this is done to please advertisers (if a search returns uniform results, the ads on it can be sold at a higher price, so above all, Google will want to show you a "profitable" result). Imho Kagi can afford more diversity - to the benefit of the person searching. If sports scores are displayed more discretely (you can always click on it if that's what you want) the question whether or not to display them in the first place is probably less brain-wrecking. (If I'm looking to travel India and Sri Lanka, finding out that they are currently playing a cricket match won't hurt me as long as that info doesn't take half the page.)

DanielVPT

We Brazilians are passionate about soccer. I think it would be interesting to put up match tables, in the same way that google does.

The table that google shows is not just Brazilian teams, but various leagues around the world, the table shows news about the team, the standings and players