"X usd" should trigger currency convertion widget automatically

Browsing6853

This is insipered by the recently implemented timezone conversion feature and a comment.

Basically, queries like "33.54 euros" or "123 USD" should automatically show the conversion to my local currency. Just like how "10pm edt" is converted automatically to my local timezone.

Vapid

Coming from Google, this not working is hard to get used to.

Vlad

We typically do not know where the user is. Feels like this would require some more thought. Like another set of options in the Privacy settings where the user will say something like "Personalize my results according to these preferences:" and then share things like location, preferred units etc.

What do you think?

Vapid

I have seen many cases where you mention that it should depend on our location, Vlad.

Whether to use a comma or a period as a number separator, whether to show 12h or 24h time, how to format dates, which time zone to assume you are in, which currency you are assumed to have, etc.

I think you can ask the browser API for the user's locale (not always accurate but a good baseline), and in additional let us override this. Not sure if that would work without JS though. For example, I have my computer set to "sv-SE" so everything in Windows & Linux formats everything correctlt. So if Kagi assumes, or lets me specify "sv-SE", it should assume the standardised defaults. I.e., that I want a Swedish number format (comma as decimal, space as a thousand separator), 24 hour clock, YYYY-MM-DD date formatting, CEST during summer and CET during winter, Swedish SEK currency, metric units etc. These are the defaults in my country.

Depending on your tech-stack and available libraries, maybe some of these are hard to determine in certain regions/countries and I respect that. JavaScript, .NET, Java, etc. all have libraries to handle number, time, date, currency, formatting etc and I would assume your tech stack does too. Of course, it's never that simple 🙂

Letting me just select a region ("sv-SE") and that Kagi respects the standard of that region would solve my use case, but it would probably be problematic for some people with specific requirements or in less standardized regions. Having individual options for currency, timezone, number & date formatting, 12 vs 24h clock etc would be the most customizable and solve the most cases.