I think it also has to do with incentives. If your business model is selling ads then you have a balancing act between user and customer satisfaction.

With Kagi as I understand it, the customer is the user since it’s a premium product that isn’t selling ads. There’s really no good reason for them not to just nuke bad actors.

Not necessarily. You'll still be able to nuke the whole domain from your results, permanently. That means you'll see the spam once, and getting a new domain promoted to the top takes time and effectively money.

I also hope that domains which get blocked by lots of people will get reviewed for global downranking, but I don't think that's happening yet?

That is true, I really wish I can tell Google to simply filter out learncpp.com and some other websites.

I managed to filter that, geeksforgeeks.org and towardsdatascience.com out with Kagi. It's quite helpful being able to slightly reduce prioritization on a per site basis so that instead of showing up as top result it'll be buried a bit but still accessible.

You can with browser extensions, fwiw.

uBlacklist can only block sites. But Kagi can raise or lower sites in pagerank, and can pin sites on the top. Boosting sites up in the result is more efficient than blocking spam sites one by one.

Since the browser extension only works on the FE, this just means you are hiding the site and receiving fewer results on a page.

If that SEO means removing ads and tracking from your page to get a higher rank, I'm cool with it. :)

hopefully what will happen is no single search engine will be dominant, ensuring that problem can't happen (we'll probably have other problems instead)

Two-sided/platform market dynamics are really interesting to this economist.

I wonder if kagi's going to have to charge for listings some day, instead of users paying in, if they intend to grow substantially.

SEO should be called "GEO", it's google optimization. Spam keyword blogsites only work because google prioritizes that stuff. They're driven by ad revenue so they're incentivized to show commerical sites over non commercial ones, etc. ,etc, etc.,etc.

Except that the problem isn't specific to google search. The others are much the same.

> The moment any search engine becomes commonplace I think they will inevitably succumb to SEO

Thankfully when I come across a irrelevant domain in Kagi I can just remove it from any future search results completely. If enough people do that, it may show up on the "most commonly removed" list inviting others to also ax it.

I rarely ever have an issue with spam on Kagi just by largely using the standard filters, and I'm confident this will remain the case.

And unrelated but I really like that I can redirect all reddit urls in search results to old.reddit.com, twitter to nitter etc. very helpful in searching on mobile.

A paying search engine will always be a niche

There is a good chance that it will remain niche due to the paid and forced-login model. This is a good thing. I hope they will manage to position themselves well as an alternative search engine with clean, unmanipulated results; and be careful about unhealthy (greedy) growth.