Search quality for the search term "white russian" (a cocktail) is abysmal.

jjrvi

Searching for the "White Russian" cocktail, the results are kind of really bad.
I say that without wanting to be harsh. I love Kagi as a product but it is also just the truth, and I want Kagi to become the best.
What is an especially big problem is the fact that many results do not contain the word “white” when that is essential to the query. Google would often do this with searches, giving me ‘must contain: $word | missing: $word’ as feedback.
I know I can literal search with Kagi too, but for a relatively simple search as “White Russian”, this shouldn’t be necessary.

A separate issue is the cocktail site "diffordsguide.com" being far down in the results even when boosted via Personalized Results by me. This site is of similar high quality as "liquor.com", and should not be this low!

At the bottom of this post I have added bad result examples from the first two pages:
I hope you can forward this to the team that tweaks the algorithm!

Thank you again for Kagi!

Results

1st result is a widget by Wolfram-alpha listing data for White-Russia (Belarus), without the N. Anyone searching for “White Russian” is definitely looking for the cocktail.
Google does this correctly and gives me a widget about the cocktail and a header tab I can tap to list recipe URLs

In general Google just gets it right with almost all results on the first pages being about the cocktail!

3rd result is this: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/15/528511980/report-trump-gave-classified-information-to-russians-during-white-house-visit
which has nothing to do with either the cocktail or the country.
2nd result of the second page is this: http://tasteofrussian.com/webpage/category/int which just loads a spam link. No mention of “white”. I have no idea why this would be above Diffordsguide.
5th result of the second page is this: http://www.russianblue.info/ a completely irrelevant page about a Russian cat breed. No mention of “White”.
7th result of the second page is https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/russian-smokejumpers#page=1
which is about Russian airborne firefighters. No mention of “White”.

High quality search results for the "White Russian" cocktail.

Vlad

jjrvi Not expert in cocktails but this looks ok to me.

Can you add more details to help us reproduce the issue you are seeing? (screenshot/ language/region etc)

jjrvi

I think someone might have already tweaked the algorithm?
The results are indeed much improved now.

I was using nothing special, just searching with no lens or anything, region set to "International", language is US.

There is still this as the 4th result, completely unrelated

And this as the 8th result, from the separate keywords "Russian" and "White [House]", which I feel like it doesn't deserve first page billing

Same with result 10, feels unrelated

And this whilst hitting the keywords "White Russian" , is about a niche marijuana strain which just seems again not something for first page billing result 11

I will also hammer again on https://www.diffordsguide.com being on result 14, especially because I'm upranking it. I understand you can't manually interfere and the algorithm would/should "naturally" surface this site. However, together with liquor.com it is one of the premier cocktail sits, and if you'd just visit the URL you'd see instantly its a very high quality, clear site. Not sure how Kagi could "understand" that though.

jjrvi

Results for this particular query have improved significantly!

Some of the stranger results are still left (2x Trump, Russian Blues, Russian Smokejumpers), but a lot of the first two page results are about the cocktail now.
Diffords Guide has also jumped from place 14 to place 8, although that is with Personalized Result boosting so I can't speak to how it ranks 'naturally'.

sarno

I’d love a white russian!

jjrvi Diffords Guide has also jumped from place 14 to place 8, although that is with Personalized Result boosting so I can't speak to how it ranks 'naturally'.