Millions, probably tens of millions of people have jobs trying to manipulate search results - with billions of dollars of resources available to them. With no internal information, it's safe to say no more than thousands of Googlers (probably fewer) are working to combat them.
If every one of them is a 10x engineer they're still outnumbered by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
> The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary.
(Quoting from this follow-up post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)
I don't think they are; they have realised (quite accurately, IMO) that users would still use them even if they boosted their customers' rankings in the results.
They could, right now, switch to a model that penalises pages for each ad. They don't. They could, right now, penalise highly monetised "content" like courses and crap. They don't do that either.[1]
If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game.
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[1] All the SEO stuff is damn easy to pick out; any page that is heavily monetised (by ads, or similar commercial offering) is very very easy to bin. A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive. Recording the number of ads on a page when crawling is equally cheap.
It’s nowhere near good either. What about the searches for cuorses or classes or training?
Why would they drop that? It's not as if they have to throw away all the preprocessing they do on the search query.
They can continue preprocessing exactly like they do it now.
Google's algorithm is the target for every SEO firm in the world. No one is targeting Kagi. Therefore, Kagi can use techniques that would not work at Google.