Comment by Renaud
2 years ago
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.
2 years ago
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.
That's why taking the money out of the click is effective.
There can be other models for making money, but methods that really on casting a wide net and driving low quality traffic is the thing that shouldn't be indexed or at least labeled as such
Google is a complex system so “want” can just include we are making money from the blog spam and while we don’t like it other things take priority over fighting it as effectively as we could.
It's never tinfoil-hat to assume that a corporation is, at very least, making sure not to fight too hard against any activity that brings it more revenue.
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.
This is addressed in the article. As Hacker News readers and expert computer users, we have a bag of tricks that we can reach into in order to make our searches perform better. With a similar level of effort and an expert user's intuition you can get good results out of any search engine. Not so for the average user. In fact, again paraphrasing the article, Google's original claim to fame was that you didn't have to spend a lot of time doing exact keyword matching and fancy tricks in order to get good results.