Hi Johne ,
If I am understanding correctly, your default region on https://kagi.com/settings is set to "International" but you're occasionally still seeing more "localized" results.
If that is not right, please clarify - some examples are extraordinarily helpful in these types of questions! But I can talk a little bit about this setting:
"International" is kind of a "Best effort" thing on our part. Basically, the APIs that we use usually do not support an explicit notion of "international". Some of them do, but most don't. You can either pick one region or you can completely omit it. What "International" does is the latter - we make it completely ambiguos to the search index what region you want.
Since we use 5 or 6 different sources, it tends to produce a blend of results, albeit some sources are slightly biased based on the location of the datacenters that we deploy to. (You connect to a different one based on your location, out of about ~9 regions)
We'd love to have a more rigorous implementation of this, but at the moment this is what we can do with the resources we have at this time. If you have some example queries and some idea of the results you expect, we could try looking for some patterns to optimize, but it can be difficult to make changes without other use cases getting caught in the crossfire - just to set expectations.
In the meantime, it may be best if you experiment with other settings for your default setting (e.g. US, UK) to see if that, on average, yields a better search experience.
