First up, I have been using Kali for over a year now, I love it, primarily the fact that I can rank sites and block certain sites from results and there are no ads.
However there are a few things that I'm finding detract from the overall experience and utility.
Searches seem to be returning fewer results than expected, after taking into account sites I have blocked, which is the opposite of what i would hope for a paid search engine.
For example: I do a search for the word "ansible". Now, ansible is a relatively widely used software tool and should be mentioned in quite a few blogs, Linux distro manuals, tutorials and the like.
Just now, on opening up a new Kagi browser tab, with my default settings, I get only 31 results searching for the word ansible. This includes region "Australia" and several blocked sites. So, I figure the region setting is dropping some results, so I set it to International. This dropped the count to 29 results! I double checked both in case the count has a delayed update, by scrolling down and having to click "more results" a few times.
Aside from the suspiciously low number, some sites I would have expected to see are missing. One of these is a major Linux distribution, Arch Linux.
So I went and validated the search using two independent search engines, DuckDuckGo and Yandex. Both of these return in the results, a link to "https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ansible" - hit 24 in yandex, about 120-ish in DuckDuckGo. Both sites have over 100 results each, I didn't bother clicking to find out the bottom. I assume some proportion of those results are in sites I blocked. Yet this particular result (among quite a few others I noticed, that should not be blocked by my settings) is not returned by Kagi. And I am definitely not blocking archlinux.org!
When I switch from "Personalised" to "Verbatim" the results drop by 1, I guess this is personalised mode augmenting the result somehow.
The results look similar on mobile, except that doesnt even show the count. In any case, arch linux is missing.
If necessary I can provide other examples I would have expected to see.
So primary problem: regardless of my region setting, many results one might expect to see, from sites which I have not blocked, are not being shown.
Secondary problem: I am I misunderstanding what the "international" region is, by possibly incorrectly assuming it means "dont limit search results to a particular region"?
Other things I noticed:
- clicking on web reverts International back to my default, Australia so to run successive international searches requires two clicks. This is different from changing the time, for example, which stays until reset.
- when I experimented by repeatedly clicking on "Web" - at one stage, for every result, the search returned a different count! e.g. 31, 43, 34, 31, ... This wass rather disconcerting. Then I tried again 15 minutes later, and the same count was returned - 31, 31, 31. Don't know whether I got lucky with some kind of update, or some other problem
- I really really wish I could show 100 results at once, on desktop browser in particular, like was (is still?) possible with google. I couldnt find a setting for this. There was one for infinite scroll, which I left off; I know I'm not alone in detesting infinite scroll, I just want to see a lot of data at once and skim it with my eyeballs and in particular use the browser CTRL+F to search it too, without having to keep clicking
When I search for a word, I expect all results from sites that are not in my personalisation block list to be returned. Surely this is the key critical function of a search engine.
(It is of course possible I have something set doing this, but I have been through my settings and if so, it is not obvious.)
