Not disagreeing with your main point but some anecdata on local searches: for me, Google likes to show me the other, larger city by the same name several hundred miles away. If I use Google Maps it likes to teleport as well. Sometimes even serving results for unrelated businesses, like one time I was searching for a photo developer and it recommended a B rate fast food chain.

Kagi has done a much better job of respecting where I live, though it has had a few minor misses that Google produced (maybe after wading through some crap).

By “local”, I’m mainly concerned with the country rather than city level. I’m not US based and most search engines have that bias.

For example, searches about news, public holidays, or certain statistics should default to the user’s home country (however that is determined, which is admittedly a whole other can of worms that even Google doesn’t always handle well).

Ah! Miss on local, apologies

It's rather unfortunate that this unergonomic convention of requiring shifted far away 1 key spread , this should be customizeable to some better ,comma prefix or something

Hah fair point. It's like when people set their Vim leader to , or ; instead of ESC.

Also, for the single-key abbrevs I'd not use any prefix at all just like I have in my browsers "g something" googles "something", it's close to never when I need to search for a single letter (and in those cases I'd just add a space before " g" to let it parse as a literal)

These ! prefixes are nice "visually", but the ergonomics haven't been thought through

Basically, customization is the solution to such design mistakes, but lack of customizatin is another design mistake :(

Kagi does have this feature but as an opt-in per bang. It's called "Allowed Quick Bangs": https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/search.html#overview

The default leader key in Vim is \, which is already an easy non-shifted key.