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Comment by forgotoldacc | Hacker News Reader

How well does Kagi work for places outside the US and non-English languages?

I've only ever seen it mentioned by US users, so I have no clue how support is elsewhere. I briefly tried duckduckgo and its non-US/non-english search results seemed to be lacking (though this was about 2 years ago).

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I use it for Thai result (and sometimes English result relevant to the Thailand region). I found the experience similar to Google. Not once that I need to !g, and the times I do wanted to check Google were producing similar garbage. It still doesn't filter blogspams (where a business website would produce low quality content to appears in keywords) nor pushing small websites - forums and personal blogs are almost non-existent in both result pages, even though it might have been popular result when searching for pre-social media era content.

The deranking & blocking feature doesn't help much as it only sort the result. There are multiple "web portal" that may be useful in one category (eg. entertainment news, travel content) but producing clickbaits in other category (eg. local news) so domain-wide blocking isn't exactly usable here.

I use it with Arabic and I can say it is pretty good. I don't use technical searches in Arabic obviously but I find the quality of search in Arabic better than English without blocking many sites like I have with English. I live in the US though so the local results is not something I do in non-English.

That's exactly where Kagi is so-and-so: Google is much better at focusing results on locality rather than just language.

For instance, a search for Serbian terms will frequently turn up Croatian sites (they are largely the same language), which is not necessarily a problem unless you are looking to get a product locally or for a local place.

Google also does a better job of accepting both Cyrillic and Latin script (Serbian uses both, Croatian only the Latin script) for search terms and finding results in either script (a good test is to type something in Cyrillic and get results on a Croatian page), and I do not get results in Bulgarian or Russian (also using Cyrillic).

Kagi does some of that, but it's obviously a bit worse.

Unfortunately this is a major blind spot for Kagi. I am hoping they fix it soon. Forum thread: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3022-ideas-for-improving-localint...

I've found it's got a lot better in the last year as a user from the UK.

Still English, but the results are a better fit.

For Dutch it is fine really. No issues.

I fallback to google when I need to search for anything shopping related, e.g. in what store can I get this item in my country.

I've found the opposite. One of the reasons I switched to kagi was that Google would not give results for NZ stores even though it had that location set, whereas kagi puts NZ results at the top

Try it! Kagi is the only search engine besides Google that caters to non-English searches.

Duckduckgo has a selector for country on the search results page, is this different somehow?

Try it and judge the quality of the results. I never got any quality non-English results from any alternative to Google, before trying Kagi.

Note that you should select your preferred non-English language as your standard language in Kagi and not the "International" option. You can still search in any language.

Thanks, I'll try that in Kagi! Still meaning to try it out in the first place after they rejected my first payment last time (took the money, didn't credit the account, refunded some time later, forgot to try again after that).

Must agree the quality of local results in DDG is mediocre, but then there's also simply much less information being posted in these minority languages (locals posting info in English and thus not matching the keywords, like I do nine out of ten times as well) so I don't know how good it could be in a perfect search engine

Works great in Danish

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