Why pay for a search engine

Kagi is great because SEO cargo cult haven’t caught up yet. Once Kagi gains traction I guarantee result quality will nosedive.

The magic is in letting real humans curate what gets boosted and what doesn't. My results tend to be quite good because I've hidden tons of sites that I don't care about. It's the same reason uBlock works: filter lists can be shared.

> Kagi is great because SEO cargo cult haven’t caught up yet

This seems like a hard problem to solve, the incentive to be top ranked is just so high. What could be the solution? Can AI even help? Do we need to go back to manual curation after all? I remember in the 90s there were manually curated lists of websites, something like a website directory. At this point I'd rather get recommended a list of websites from a reddit user than relying on Google's ranking.

Maybe, but one major problem with Google search is the perverse incentives. SEO garbage sites tend to be filled with Google advertisements, which means a Google search user who clicks through to a SEO site makes Google money. As long as the result is good enough, users still get what they need and the search is successful. And by good enough, I'm talking about sites like "geeksforgeeks", "towarddatascience" or "realpython" that just put additional text and ads around existing documentation; they do answer your search query, you just have to scroll and ignore the 20 ads on the page to get to it. It's to Google's benefit to offer one of these pages up over, say, python.org as the top result.

Kagi, at least for now, is making its USP the fact that it surfaces more professional, curated results. Its algorithm is susceptible to manipulation, for sure, but unlike Google, it actually has an incentive to keep SEO garbage off the first page of results.

If kagi ranks according to pages that provide high value relevant information about the subject, how would SEO work around that? If they are willing to provide quality content, I guess they deserve to top the search?

I don't think SEO actually beat Google. Rather, Google simply capitulated or was captured. I distinctly remember a 2019 update where things really went bad.

Part of the situation is that a company that relies on ad revenue will get gradually feel the pull of the advertisers more and more.

I'd be more worried about someone nefarious buying Kagi if it got big. Someone else would be willing to pay a whole lot of money for those eyeballs.

> a hard problem to solve

Indeed. And perhaps part of the issue is that there is not a single solution.

Even manual curation is ultimately based on trust. If someone's trusted list of recommendations gets popular enough, what's to stop them from "selling out," breaking that trust, to make money?

Also, the good curated stuff is typically correspondingly small and focused. But lots of people want broad results in their searches, and it's hard to imagine a person or handful of people being able to cater to all of those varying needs equally well.

Sometimes a person wants excellent narrow results (eg: academic looking for papers), other times they want broad shallow stuff, and at various other points want various other things in between.

There's a whole field of expertise, sometimes called "Library and Information Science" about organizing and making information findable, since long before computers existed. Even for them it is not a solved problem.

But the cat-and-mouse arms race that the online version has turned into makes libraries and asking a librarian for recommendations feel a lot more appealing (:

> the incentive to be top ranked is just so high. What could be the solution?

To not be top ranked ? /s

Being paid, I don't think Kagi will ever "gain traction" in this way. Which is great for its users.

What? My niche is already dominated by the same SEO spammers as Google on Kagi and always has been. Kagi just takes google results... I swear some of you guys it's like we're not even using the same software.

Care enough to give an example or report to kagifeedback.org so we can check what is going on?

SEO spam is correlated with ads. Google dominates web advertising. Google’s interests are aligned with SEO spammers, as long as it’s not so terrible you switch to another search engine or stop searching.

Sure, my niche is entertainment, so let's search anything in the international music scene and check out the rank orderings...

Lo and behold it is exactly the same as Google pagerank.

How about an exact example so that we are on the same page? Thanks.

Sure, I'll give you a recent example that I'm #1 in on both Google and Kagi:

2NE1 ages

I can go through this list and see you are exactly the same, except you leave up more spam.

Just one example of thousands I've looked at.

Did I misunderstand you when you said Kagi results are same as Google results and you really meant that just result #1 happens to match? For your query I can see there is a difference already at result #2, #3 etc..

Also if you believe this is wrong you should submit search quality feedback to kagifeedback.org

We get a lot of feedback but it is mostly for technical queries that we usually address:

https://kagifeedback.org/t/search-quality

If you provide details what went wrong in kagi results for this query (and what sites should rank #1, #2... in your opinion) we can take a look. With search quality because it is such a broad space, what does not get reported, does not get looked at and addressed.

I get that the scale of this problem is dazzling but think that fundamentally you do not have a solution if you are copying pagerank (even adding upvotes etc.) for queries that haven't been screened by your staff.

I think you need to take a good hard look at what makes for shitty content and build some parameters off that. And if you had to go off pagerank (to begin with) I would be trying stuff like adding hidden penalties to popular CMSes, boosting reddit/HN content, and following SEO trends just to thwart them. I would categorize websites by expertise so queries related to korea do not rank pages from the hindustantimes. When you search for air filters, you should probably get that housefresh team and not forbes etc. The upvote system you have is moving in the right direction but even that will need to be fortified with anti-seoer measures.

I would try to create real EEAT standards that cannot be gamed without massive investments.

It's too late to undo the damage that the Danny Sullivans of the world have done but maybe can save something here.

With being paid it's golden target for various "influencers" because it's users already did auto segmentation and assigned themselves to group of very wealthy individuals and ones eager to pay for internet services.

All we need is a search quality report as I indicated before and our team will look into it. The fact that there is no or little spam for other things Kagi users care about, is a testiment to our determination to deal with it.