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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Kagi stands to me as proof that search can be better if it isn't run by an ad company. Kagi deliberately downranks sites that are loaded with ads and trackers, and the quality of their results is much higher, with much less SEO blogspam. Unsurprisingly, having a high concentration of ads and trackers is highly correlated with having content that is intended to maximize views rather than provide utility.

Google has a conflict of interest here: on the one hand their users need information, but on the other Google is the primary vendor of advertisements on these garbage clickbait sites. It would not surprise me if Google intentionally upweighted results that have their ads in them, and they certainly are not downweighting them the way Kagi does.

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If Kagi were as popular as Google, you'd quickly see pages appear "without ads", that looks suspiciously like what an ad would say. The problem is SEO, and it affects the mainstream search engine because that's what's worth optimising for.

For instance, Google product search results would likely be greatly improved by always showing relevant reddit posts first. But this would last a very short amount of time until reddit would be completely drowned in junk. (I've seen people argue that this is already the case, but searching reddit still tends to work well for the products I search for)

We can be happy that Google search hasn't gone this way, and as a Kagi user you should be glad that it's not a more popular engine, as the quality of results likely highly depend on that just fact.

In a way the ads-filled product search results are better, because at least they're honestly trying to sell you the product you are searching for rather than making fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content.

> that looks suspiciously like what an ad would say ... fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content.

This is already a thing under Google's system: if a result isn't an ad-ridden mess, it's content marketing trying to sell an adjacent product.

You haven't addressed the conflict of interest that Google has as the largest vendor of ads on the internet. Right now, Kagi's sole job is to help me find what I'm looking for. If SEO started to game their current algorithm, the incentive would be for Kagi to improve their algorithm and win the meta game. If they fail to do so, their payments will dry up as people look for an engine that will.

Google has no such incentive. If their algorithms consistently drive traffic to pages that have their ads on them, Google is incentivized to keep that traffic flowing, regardless of how SEO'd the content is. The user isn't Google's customer, the advertiser is.

In addition to what lolinder writes Kagi already gives me what we have askes for from Google for a decade or two: a way for us to punish creative SEO artists by individually downranking or outright block them.

If they start popping up in Kagis result they will bother me at most two or three times before I hit the downrank or block button and they are gone.

Why Google hasn't managed to create something similar during the last two decades I leave as an exercise for the reader.

> In a way the ads-filled product search results are better, because at least they're honestly trying to sell you the product you are searching for rather than making fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content.

In what universe can for-profit behavior be trusted or accepted at face value as genuine? Also, maybe I'm using it Wrong™, but I don't use general search engines to look for products. I'm not shopping all the time, so why should we be advertised to all the time? I use a blocker and aggressively eradicate ads from my experiences, precisely because they are useless to me, take up valuable screen real estate and bandwidth, and are security and privacy vulnerabilities.

It wasn't so bad back when it was just a JPG and a link, but the telemetry that gets baked into it is creepy as well. For-profit Internet behavior needs to rein in its snooping if it wants to gain trust.

I interpreted differently, in that it’s easier to filter out the explicit ads than the sites that purport to being honest review pages but actually have affiliate deals for every product

How does kagi do with "corporate blogspam" - things like tutorials, guides, intros, etc created by a company as a funnel for conversions.

You know, things like the fusionauth OAuth guides (not trying to call them out).

I ask because it's a weird area where it can be shit and predatory, or a general good thing.

It's present on Kagi as well, but less so than on Google.

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