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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Asklemmy
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does kagi spit out location-relevant information? that's something I've really missed on startpage, I like being able to just google "chinese food" and have the restaurants near me spit back out, and if a privacy-centered search engine can return a result comparable to something like google there that'd make me real happy
Nope. For that I use the bang shortcut feature to send it to Google.
One nice thing about that, is that you can use
gas a bang, instead of!g. It’s a little thing but easier to type on mobile.They use approximate network location for such requests, yes.
"chinese food" didn't trigger it for me which is understandable since it's a generic term, not a request to show chinese food restaurants near you but "chinese food near me" does show restaurants in my approximate vicinity as expected aswell as localised search results for tripadvisor.
In their privacy policy they claim that that's explicitly the only time they use data that could be considered sensitive in a search request.
There is a map search mode that does surface location aware results, after explicitly getting your permission to get your location.
Kagi does not request location permission; it uses network location (IP geo lookup).
So this is confusing. I did not know about the maps mode (thanks @randomperson@lemmy.today!). If you show the map and then press the “target” symbol to get your location, Kagi will prompt to enable geolocation.
When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away. But if I select Maps first, then it shows my local area and I can search on the map.
Oh, yes indeed. Map mode would request accurate geolocation.
Yeah, that's an unfortunate reality of IP geolocation, it's not very accurate to begin with and can be extremely inaccurate in some cases too.
Does Google (without a login) have the same issue with your public IP?
Perhaps when a location query is detected Kagi could show a little button to use accurate geolocation instead. They seem to be pretty on top of little UX issues like these, so I wouldn't be surprised if they implemented a solution like that if you opened a feedback thread.