I have an open-ended request to rethink how search experience works for people who speak multiple languages. Normally, I would propose an expected behaviour, but with this one I don't have a clear idea of what an ideal solution would be.
As a bit of background, I am bilingual. I am a native Polish speaker, but also fluent in English. I do my Kagi searches in both languages. My UI language in Kagi is set to Polish, as is my default search region. At the same time, my browser reports English as the primary language.
Now, consider these two searches below. The first searches phrase is "microsoft devkit price increase", which finds a result on Reddit:
The second search phrase is "podwyżka ceny microsoft devkit", which is the same phrase, but in Polish. The result again comes from Reddit, but this time the name of the Reddit topic and the description below the link are auto-translated into Polish:
However, upon clicking the link, the Reddit topic is in English.
The first search result is perfectly fine, but I have my doubts about the second one. To me, displaying a translation (page title + description) in Polish, when the actual linked page is in English, feels misleading and wrong. What would be the alternatives then? I see two options:
- Display the result in English. To me, this is fine since I speak English. However, it is questionable to show results in a different language than the query.
- Omit automatically translated results. This avoids misleading the user about the website language, but potentially leads to a smaller number of results.
I am honestly not sure what the best solution would be. I don't feel the way things are currently is right, but at the same time I don't have a good proposal of how things should work.
