It would be useful if I could sort or filter search results by US State (province, territory, canton, geographic locality, what have you). In the UI, there's already a nation-level region filter, and an 'order-by'. I'm envisioning a sub-level menu under order-by to let me prioritize my home state of California. The existing search experience would be unaffected unless the user chose to nominate a preference and sort/filter by that value.
Use Case: I'm using Kagi to search for a specific product that I purchase infrequently. I have no preferred vendor, apart from a preference that I avoid throwing my money into large rivers. I would like to find a small-business vendor who is located in the same state I am, so that the order arrives quickly, and minimizes transit costs. I feel icky about having my purchase trucked across 2000 miles if there's one on somebody's shelf an hour across town.
This would be distinct from a "pizza near me" mapping search - I don't need to strictly rank the results by distance from my exact location. Rather, I have a specific manufacturer and part number, and I want to find an online shop that has the item, and any vendor could be a candidate for my purchase. I don't have a pre-established idea of vendors, so I can't use the Kagi rank adjustments.
I'm not exactly sure how to determine the location of a business behind an online shopping storefront, and many do not have a physical presence at all. Presumably there are indicators embedded in many of the results (mailing address, phone area code, D&B business number, etc) and those could be weighted more heavily for nearby brick & mortar operations, as opposed to drop-ship phantoms, and deprioritizing the huge platforms.
The current behavior does not seem to take location into result; the search "71825 Replacement Filter Hot Spring near me" returns exactly what I want - a small business with the part in stock, BUT they're on the other coast. I can keep working down the results looking for something closer, but really it would be enough to know they were in California like I am. If I search "71825 Replacement Filter Hot Spring in california" - That does work nicely (sweet!) but I'd rather not need to add an 'in california' suffix to every shopping-type search I do. So I guess that's a persistent preference that I'm asking for.
I propose the user navigates to the Kagi Search UI, types in "71825 Replacement Filter Hot Spring". The search returns a number of online shopping opportunities, and the user uses the new "sort by state" or 'vendors near me' feature to order the results such that vendors (appearing to be) located in the same state are listed first. Or the user could pick from a list of states. This could be a transient per-search feature, or it might be a persistent preference set for the user's profile. It does imply a certain privacy disclosure, but it could be a user-pickable choice option instead of a mandatory device geolocate, or an ISP location.
I am not aware that any other Search product has a dedicated 'Sort by State' or 'Shop Local' feature; such a thing would be antithetical to the "auction off the profile of the search user to the highest bidder, whomever they may be" model. So it would be a nice product differentiator for Kagi. The benefits to the Kagi product would be well-aligned with your "Humanize the Web" mission. I'm trying to make my online shopping practices more human-centered, and reduce the ecological footprint of my purchases. I'm very much enjoying the 'like it was back in the early aughts' flavor of Kagi, and a 'shop local' feature would be more of what I love about Kagi.
