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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

That's great if I'm trying to find a location, but that's not what local results is about.

Local results means that if I search for "driving laws", Google gives me .gov sites for my state as the top results, while Kagi's first page gives me results for 8 other states (including Alaska!) but not for my state.

There are a lot of kinds of queries that benefit from knowing the user's location even though they aren't actually looking for a place that exists on a map.

(I'm a happy paying Kagi user, but OP is right that this is its weakest point by far.)

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Isn't the alternative to just simply type "driving laws for [state]"? That doesn't seem too odious.

This boils the problem down to a dichotomy which isn’t how it works in the real world. Most of the searches I make that aren’t tech related searches have a location based aspect to them. Anything I do in my day to day life involving logistics has a high chance of needing some location based search. Kagi (and DDG) performs at a range of 0% usefulness to 70% usefulness on average for these kinds of searches. Usually it’s 0%. There is simply a huge gap here in what Kagi offers when you need to search for results near you vs the leading competitor

Yep. Or county or city or whatever is relevant.

It's not terrible—as I said, I'm a happy customer—but it's not a habit I have and it feels like something that should be configurable once in a settings menu. I don't even really want to have it detect my location live, I just want to be able to tell it where I live and have it prioritize content that's local when given the chance.

For what it’s worth DuckDuckGo is flawed in the exact same way. I ended up leaving DDG for the exact same reason years ago

The entire selling point of DDG is that its search results are not personalised. This is not a flaw.

Personalized != contextualized. You could have a search engine that uses geolocation without building any sort of cross-request profile on the individual making the search.

But OP is right that this would actually be serving their target demographic less well than serving everyone the same results regardless of context. The fact that the results don't know where the user is is reassuring for the kind of user who wants to use a privacy-oriented search engine, regardless of whether localized results could technically be provided in a privacy-preserving way.

These things are not mutually exclusive. Allow me to specify a city or state or county or country or zip code as a bang in my search and show me good results based on that. Both problems immediately solved. I wouldn’t be any more or less reassured about a search engine’s privacy stance if that feature was offered to me. This is a feature I can absolutely use in a private way (I can do that search over tor or a vpn with two hops if I so desire), and it gives me the control over what I provide the search engine and how and when.

Right now search engines don’t provide an interface for good location aware searches that you can manually specify - you have to let them build a shadow profile on you via all sorts of privacy violating fingerprints or just give up location aware searches altogether. There’s no reason it has to be that way though.

> These things are not mutually exclusive. Allow me to specify a city or state or county or country or zip code as a bang in my search and show me good results based on that. Both problems immediately solved.

Do you actually find that attaching your location to the end of the query doesn't work? I don't do it naturally, but when I do do it I'm rarely disappointed.

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