Comment by kristopolous
2 years ago
I'm a big fan of the non commercial site search engines because of the gaming aspect. If you're not generating revenue from the clicks the game mostly goes away.
I'm not saying people aren't entitled to make some money, but it clearly incentivizes user hostile behavior.
Maybe make it an option because legitimate sites like journalism also use this model.
Subscription model like Kagi seems to work pretty well against gaming the results.
Their only remaining incentive is to be good enough that people keep paying for the service.
It works not because they're somehow smarter or have more resources than Google at detecting spam/SEO, it's because unlike Google (and other ad-supported search engines), they make money from result quality and have an interest in blocking spam.
Google on the other hand makes money off ads (whether on the search results page itself or on the spam sites), so spam sites are at best considered neutral and at worst considered beneficial (since they can embed Google ads/analytics, and make the ads on the search results page look relatively good compared to the spam).
Black-hat SEO has been around since the early days of search engines and they managed to keep it at bay just fine. What changed isn't that there was some sudden breakthrough in malicious SEO, it's that it was more profitable to keep the spammers around than to fight them, and with the entire tech industry settling on advertising/"engagement" as its business model, the risk of competition was nil because competitors with the same business model would end up making the same decision.
The same reason is behind the neutering of advanced search features. These have nothing to do with the supposed war on spam/SEO, so why were they removed? Oh yeah because you'd spend less time on the search results page and are less likely to click on an ad/sponsored result, so it's against Google's interests and was removed too.
Kagi works because there is no incentive for SEO manipulators to target it since their market share is so small.
Super tinfoil hat to believe Google wants to send users to blog spam websites (e.g. beneficial to Google).
Anytime there is money to be made, there is an effectively infinite amount of people trying to game the system.
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But the author tried Kagi and the results don't appear to be noticeably different, filled with scammy adspam just like Google and Bing. Kagi's results seem to mostly aggregate existing search engines [1], so this isn't much of a surprise. Perhaps a subscription-based service that operates an index at Google's scale might help, but no such thing exists to my knowledge.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Right, but Kagi has built in tools to make it easy to fix that. Blocking those spammy sites from ever showing up again. Moving certain sites up the ranking, and so on. These features mean that over time my Kagi results have become nearly perfect for myself.
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