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I'm using the "International" region and searching for things in non-english languages, my OS is set to a non-english language, my browser is set to a non-english language, and Kagi UI language is in a non-english language. Searching for people, recipes and places in that language. Recently Kagi has begun to push English language results to the top, and given English results much more weight than non-English results.

I expect to see non-English results for non-english search queries. Even a normal recipe search for a local dish will yield mostly English results, even searching for the president will yield a ton of English results and American newspapers instead of the homepage of the president or the local Wikipedia.

Kagi used to be great for non-english search queries, on par with Google or even better. This change must have been implemented in the past few days, and it is very noticeable.

    • Vlad

    • Best Answerset by Vlad

    Hey people, I merged a few similar threads here and want to come back to this.

    Re-reading this thread I see two conflicting schools of thought that can be roughly summarized as

    1. If I am in [xx] region show me only results from that region
    2. If I am in [xx] region, show me a good mix of international/english results

    Kagi currently leans more towards 1.

    What is some of the low hanging fruit we can quickly implement to make the situation better for everyone?

    If you can afford, please re-read the entire thread before sharing your opinion because they are different, often conflicting use cases provided.

As of now, Kagi has become much inferior to Google for non-English searches, due to insisting to insert and promote English language results for searches in other languages, in non-English regions. When I first tried Kagi, I was amazed, because it was the only other search engine besides Google, that was useful for non-English queries. That was Kagi's strongest selling point, in my opinion.

I have to ask for it, even though it seems like a dumb request: Can you revert non-English language users to the older, better Kagi algorithm?

To better understand the problem, can we get few examples/steps to reproduce the problem?

    Here's a few example searches in Swedish. I would not expect English results for any of these queries, and especially not in the top spots.



    This started happening a few days ago, for some searches German results are now bad to unusable

    I searched for "Olympus E-P2" with region Germany (via !de bang):

    https://kagi.com/search?q=Olympus+E-P2&r=de&sh=_mC_4tNveXYeaTLHnAUCgg

    Despite there being many German results, the first 2 are in English, followed by the first German result. Then it’s amazon.com, German result, 3 more English results. Even sites like Amazon, MPB, and eBay that have both German and English equivalents show up in English first, and only second in German, if at all.

    Here’s a screenshot with all English results highlighted:

    Getting German results.

      [delete]

        Merged 3 posts from German search shows mostly englsh results.
          12 days later

          Any progress report? Or did Kagi just give up on international users? I find the silence about such a huge issue pretty disconcerting.

          The issue is really that Kagi has no "only search in this language" option, unlike Google.

          Local language searches has improved vastly lately for me.

          Before the latest changes, I was annoyed with about half the Kagi searches I made, because I had selected (Norway) when I searched for something in English, and had to redo the search with (International) to get good English results.

          Previously I had to switch between national and international all the time, that was a pain, especially since you can't see what language is selected from the browser address/search bar.

          Now I can just keep it on my local language, even while doing English searches.

          A toggle for "only search in this language" would satisfy both the people above who like to select their language and me, who don't like to manually switch between my languages all the time.

          If I search the news tab for "Blusky" I get tons of articles of recent events. But if I instead search for the correctly spelled "Bluesky" I get only some interesting finds and then the two main results is 1) Pretty old and 2) Completely irrelevant

          "Blusky":

          "Bluesky":

          If I switch off the "Sweden" region and instead switch to America, I get tons of results for both. But just like with the search region, the Sweden region should include international and Swedish results.

          Having to switch between regions whenever I want to look for news is a terrible and frustrating experience. Kagi's search results handles this well, but not the news tab. I speak Swedish and English so I want results in both.

          Here's "Bluesky" with the American region. These results are so much better than either of my searches in the Sweden region:

          • Vlad replied to this.
            6 days later

            Vapid We can not include both swedish and international results when in swedish region as this is economically prohibitive (counts as two queries, and half of our users use non-us region).

            Now Bluesky is a non-swedish search term so it it expected that searching it within swedish region to produce lower number of results.

                @Vlad I understand your point, but I must submit that this is an incredibly frustrating experience. Me, my friends, and I expect many people whose primary language is not English, search very often in either English or Swedish without thinking about it. When using Google, I never think about if I'm searching in Swedish and English. It "just works". Having to "think" about search makes it much less seamless. It should be quick, thoughtless.

                When in regular search, I usually get good results for both Swedish and English in the Sweden region. I stay in the Sweden region 100% of the time because anything else would be frustarting. I would have to think about what language I am searching in, then do the search, then switch the region to match whatever language I searched in.

                Besides, Kagi's regular results are usually good independent of the language I search in. But it is inconsistent. Some results are poorer, and I start to feel doubtful of poor results are because of my region, or just a bad search query. I find myself double checking that the results are not better in the International region.

                It being inconsistent is almost worse than it not working at all. If I search for news about "Finland election" in the Sweden region, I get seemingly good results. But searching "Bluesky", the results were bad? Am I going to have to check my region after every search just to make sure I'm not getting a worse experience?

                I don't know. I'm ranting. I'm just saying this is frustrating and makes me feel doubtful when searching. I don't know what the solution would be, on your end. I never had this anxiety when using Google. It "just worked" when it came to Swedish vs English queries :/

                  Vapid What do you propose we do?

                  Perhaps you can add several more queries comparing Kagi and Google results so we can figure something out.

                    Merged 4 posts from More news for misspelled "Blusky" than "Bluesky" in Sweden region.

                      When searching for highly region specific information like Lightweight Ebikes, I'm using the Australian region filter and expected to see mostly local results containing products available in Australia.

                      Instead I'm seeing a lot of results from the US and other countries (even with the region filter set to Australia). Unfortunately the products referred to in these results aren't available internationally.

                      I appreciate the local results given by the lense, but I would like a way to exclude international results entirely for certain shopping queries.

                      • Vlad replied to this.
                        MattLisson changed the title to Region filter not filtering out international results .

                          MattLisson It is intended behavior as often times regional results are not enough to satisfy the query and you could get none or very few results.

                              I tried this query: "Lightweight Ebikes Australia" with the region set to Australia, and I got many .com.au results.