This seems like a problem of the search space rather than solely Google's. How are you supposed to guard a system which, by its nature, provides financial incentive to others to game it?

No matter what weights and checks are put in place, some observers will notice how their rankings change and make appropriate modifications.

This isn't solved by Kagi's product, either. I'm a happy user and use it as my daily driver. That doesn't mean that, if it increases in popularity, the results will remain unskewed.

That is true. But you can still try to learn from others mistakes to make it as hard as possible?

Tiny Kagi has already shown an ability to produce better results than massive Google, despite them both dealing with the same SEO site gaming/structuring. Which is the reverse of what would be expected if Google's greater resources were also focused on quality.

Kagi already dodges the SEO bullet.

Disclaimer: I pay for Kagi. You should too!

> the same SEO site gaming/structuring.

This isn’t totally true. They can dodge a lot of stuff, because optimisations target Google’s algorithms, not Kagis. And Google also has conflicting intrests on same cases to let them just be.

I have paid for long time as well. But this brings new ”attack vector”, which is important to consider.

Paying Kagi customer here as well.

Kagi is leagues better than now-Google. It is about on par, slightly worse than the Google of yore — not by their own fault, but because they operate in a much more professionalized, difficult, hostile web.

They didn't dodge the SEO bullet — nobody has aimed at them yet.

If the userbase grows enough (let's say 100x that of today), they could become an SEO target. As happy as I am with the current results I am aware that SEO gaming is only a problem once scale is relevant. Once there are teams of people reverse engineering kagi's ranking explicitly wanting to beat it.

There's a good chance not enough people are willing to pay for search and this never becomes a problem.

Disclaimer: happy paying customer.

With Kagi’s customers being users, not advertisers, they can put in features to mitigate against problems caused by SEO, like how Kagi bundles up all the “Top X abcdefg” lists that turned Google into trash.

The parent context was:

> Ie user activity on embedded sites helps indicate interest in Kagi index updates.

Doesn’t this mean anyone? And once someone fakes user activity, that make it useless measure in the end.

If that becomes a problem, they can alter the plan. Kagi doesn’t have the same conflict as pretty much every other search engine when evaluating this stuff. If it starts making things worse, stop factoring it in, or reduce the influence in the ranking.