Low quality translated Reddit results

sparksbet

This is still a problem and it is extremely frustrating. As an American living in Germany, I only search in German when I want local results. I've frequently searched for information about specific legal or bureaucratic issues present only in Germany and gotten badly-translated Reddit threads talking about their US equivalents. The fact that clicking the link sends me to the original English-language reddit page is better than nothing, since it allows me to easily see I should ignore this result, but it's extremely disruptive to be more ot less completely unable to ensure my results are not all auto-translated slop when I search in German -- and it makes me even more worried about what inputs Kagi AI is using, since including information from American threads for the types of questions I'm asking in German would make the results patently wrong in almost all cases. I'm extremely concerned if this is genuinely an issue where the Kagi team is completely unable to do anything about it.

Numerlor

The reddit result got duplicated and randomly translated to Czech, which is kinda the same to Slovak as the set region but I'd expect it to just stay in English not do some AI(?) translation

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/xqtigi/what_is_meant_by_dmi_40_x4_or_x8/?

Just the first result

Luis

Thank you for the reports.

Numerlor , dderg this shouldn't happen, we'll review on our end. I'll keep this thread updated

bram

I've still been encountering this issue for the past few months, and it feels like I've recently started encountering it more often.

The URLs are now in the form https://reddit.com/.../?, whereas regular results do not have the trailing ?. You can still hide these results with custom CSS rules by matching with a[href*="reddit.com"][href$="/?"].

jjrvi

bram I just checked, its still ?tl= for at least nl, de and sv, so I assume its like that for all en > lang URLs.

Numerlor

the en->cs from me was also just .../?

dderg

Sometimes I want to search something in Swedish to find local results. And recently I started getting a bunch of automatically translated results from english. It does that by adding "?tl=sv" to the url. It's not a Kagi problem, google does that too, but it would be nice to be able to filter out by a regexp. Discussion of the issue I found:

I expect Kagi to only return the pages that actually contain the search query (or to allow me to set a filter to remove "?tl=sv" urls from the results)

mint_tamas

I started encountering this issue recently (about 1 month ago). I was surprised to learn from support that this existing bug report seems to be much older than that. I'm not certain that it's only reddit posts for me, though after a few tries I could only get reddit results back like that.

bram

Hi Luis, it's been over 2 weeks, do you maybe have an update for us?

I keep running into this multiple times a day now. Is there anything we can do to help, like gathering problematic queries for example?

hell_no

This is happening for me too. I'm getting links for auto-translated Reddit posts when I'm running queries in Russian, and these links come with no query strings attached.

I wonder if there is perhaps a way to filter out these results by comparing the language of an indexed link title to the language of the linked post, but I have no idea how computationally expensive this task could be. Ugh. 🙁

Sominemo

This is indeed something Reddit does on their end, polluting the search index.

I'll note that the original results themselves are sometimes good, but:

When I search in English with region Ukraine, translated Reddit results in Ukrainian, Russian, and sometimes absolutely random languages pop up, while the original un-translated result might be missing
Even if I would use a redirect rule, the snippet is still machine translated, which is not good

It seems to me that the best solution is to discard all Reddit URL's with tl=xx in them as non-canonical and low quality.

It was mentioned here, and I noticed it too, that sometimes Kagi shows a translated snippet but the link leads to the canonical untranslated URL, without the tl=xx parameter. I am not 100% sure, but it might be something to do with Kagi's indexing or the earlier mitigation made for this problem. I think so because I can fetch the untranslated page reliably by removing the parameter, while also can reliably translate any Reddit discussion to any language by adding the said parameter. There is still a chance Reddit might be doing something special only to crawler requests, though I think it's unlikely.

Kagi is more positioned to be a search engine for people who know how to use search, and these people would know to search in multiple languages if they want to gather more perspectives. Of course regular consumers wouldn't do this very often, and it's a problem for a site like Reddit. But the problem Reddit tries to solve should be solved on the search engine end, if at all. E.g. Kagi could introduce multi-lingual search that would automatically look up the request in multiple languages and compile the results, this could be useful.

Steady Google Search quality decline and Reddit machine translated results pollution are the reasons why I'm fleeing to Kagi, and I hope the team finds a good solution to this problem while not hurting all search results coming from Reddit. I am losing any hope in Google Search team caring about the quality at all, since Google Search Central directly prohibits surfacing machine translated pages as original content, but Google's representatives discarded the problem when this concern was raised to them.

adikso

I was removing these results with css rule that checks for "/?", but after Ctrl+F5 in my browser suddenly "/?" is not being added to the url anymore.

Thibaultmol

so tbc, Kagi hasn't really found a solution to solve this problem yet. So as @Sominemo noticed, they are just displayed the (unfortunately) translated page title and description (as they're getting it from their upstream search providers). But for user convince are then stripping the tl=xx from the actual url so you do go to the original language page.
it's not ideal, but it's the best sort of workaround they have atm.

LunarWatcher

For a few days, I've been noticing that often (but not always) the second sub-result on a reddit post is translated to Norwegian (my own language, and the search region I use). Today, I ran into another more extreme variant, where the last sub-result to a reddit post was the same as the main reddit post, and translated to Swedish:

https://kagi.com/search?q=ducky+one+3+qmk+&r=no&sh=Yu7AQsYzl_ls7LZZ_1RgHg

Another one with a norwegian result, but a fully different post (sub-result 3):

https://kagi.com/search?q=openrgb+gmmk&r=no&sh=h7L_aPyxfPDbkTLXAqI-1w

This is the more common scenario, where other reddit posts appear, and one of them just happen to be translated to Norwegian. For the record, in both these cases, the source posts are English, not Norwegian or Swedish.

As far as I can tell, this is specific to reddit links. I have not (yet) experienced this with any other sites than reddit. For good measure, though I doubt it's relevant, I use the pre-provided reddit->old reddit URL rewrite thingy:

^https://www.reddit.com|https://old.reddit.com

I don't know if this matters.

I'd expect the posts not to be translated, or at the very least not include duplicate results. The translation only happens in search, not on Reddit itself. The translated links (including in the case of the outright duplicate links) are not special. They just link back to the same post, without any special parameters for translation or anything like that, so they're functionally identical - aside the weirdly translated excerpts in search only.

fleebee

I took matters into my own hands and wrote a userscript that compares reddit.com search result titles to the href attributes they enclose and deletes any results it thinks are translated. The heuristic is wobbly at best so if you choose to use this script be aware of that. In my own use I haven't encountered a false positive yet but using a language that has nothing in common with English helps.

Here's the userscript. It does some debug level logging in the console so check that out if you're curious what it does.

arathunku

If we have to run additional scripts to filter results, I might as well stick to google with the same problem, or ask LLM with WebSearch (it doesn't run into this problem). Currently, it's the most annoying thing about Kagi for me, taking from its premium value.

JingoBirds

If this can't be truly fixed, but Kagi is detecting and stripping the tl=xx from the URL, would it be possible to have kagi like... display a badge or something that indicates the search result is translated when it does this? That would at least stop me from constantly clicking on these results to see if they're translated or not.

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