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