5 ms·

Yes, they had it for a few years a decade ago. If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine

by jsnell 3y ago

Yes, they had it for a few years a decade ago. If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public [0]. But even then it might be a great idea for a search engine that's trying to establish an initial niche. It doesn't even matter whether the idea actually works well in practice: if 100k people think that manual curation of search result domains is a high value feature and are willing to pay for it, the feature has done its job. [0] I wrote a more detailed comment on why a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294800

cabalamat 3y ago
> that's trying to establish an initial niche Which suggests to me that while kagi might be good now, if it gets popular it may undergo enshittification in an effort to monetise its popularity.
- freediverx 3y ago
  That’s exactly my fear.
- pokeymcsnatch 3y ago
  It's a paid service and all their competitors are 'free'. Enshittification doesn't fit their business model, they'd go under in a heartbeat.
  - SQueeeeeL 3y ago
    See also, Whatsapp
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Cable TV didn't use to have ads, until somebody figured out you could charge the customer and have other streams of revenue as well. For Kagi, it's a matter of when, not if. Capitalism guarantees it.
    - yakubin 3y ago
      An even sadder example of it: Windows.
      - freediverx 3y ago
        I don’t think the term enshittification applies when a product is fully enshittified from its inception.
    - esafak 3y ago
      No, it does not. They are free to create adjacent products to boost revenue as long as they want without debasing existing ones.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        And the oxygen in the room you're in is free to concentrate in a single corner of it, making air in the rest of the room unbreathable. Both are technically possible, but so extremely unlikely, that you can rely on them not happening.
        yard2010 3y ago
        My ML prof in university used this as an example for something that could happen but is highly unlikely. Each particle of oxygen can be in either half of the room so it's like 1/2 to the power of the number of particles (avogardo?) chance that all the particles are in one half suffocating the ppl in the other half. He was such a great guy.
      - throwaway2037 3y ago
        This is a good point. Did Kagi ever consider having a freemium tier that uses adverts to pay for the (search) content? I don't think it is a terrible idea if it helps Kagi to improve their paid search.
    - version_five 3y ago
      As long as they don't take outside investment that's not a certainly. People complain about the prices but it's charging the real cost that let's them be able to offer something good without mortgaging the future. I concede that if they got big enough, someone would come with enough money that they couldn't refuse, and buy them to try and "unlock vale" by racing to the bottom.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    "Enshittification": God, I love this term. It so perfectly captures what happens to a product when revenues stall and product managers think of anything to drive new revs. See: Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office. I was just about to finish this post and ask if anyone knows the history. I Googled that and was surprised by the answer from Wikionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification ...[C]oined by Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow in 2022. God damn, "Dr." Doctorow again!
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  A key point is that Kagi raised its prices already so it was sustainable. The reason most services get worse is because they are downright unprofitable and it is impossible to get them there without either making them drastically worse, or raising prices, which free sites can't do. Kagi has already put itself on a path where it doesn't have to make itself worse to cover its expenses, because it is already covering them.
  - freediverx 3y ago
    No, the main reason why companies turn to shit is because they’re publicly traded and accept VC money so sooner or later, they’re beholden to shareholders demanding infinite growth and profits.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  This is honestly probably the most tiresome argument that constantly pops up in every HN thread. Imagine if one of your friends come back from a holiday trip and tells you how fantastic the place they visited was. Is your response "Well, maybe that place ain't going to be so nice in a few years!"?
nine_k 3y ago
I think you miss he point. The usefulness of a per-user block list is not fighting outright spam. The statistical filters, etc, as applied by the search engine, work best here, as you correctly state. The point is to remove certain well-known sites with information about well-known topics, which is unhelpful for the particular user, me. That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc. That is, if I search some info about a particular CSS trick, I want MDN be on top, some professional blogs be near top, and w3schools be on the third page. For someone else, priorities may be different, but I know what to expect for the search queries I issue, and I'd be glad if the search engine helped me. Equally, certain domains are known to be more rich with information I happen to seek, like reddit.com, so I'd like to give them a boost. Some other people may prefer something else, or not give any boost at all. So, this is personalization, not anti-spam. If Google kept it, it could even bring important insights into what ads I would skip and what would click :) Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important: with more disposable income, more clout on social networks, more decision-making power. I suppose that the shutdown of Google Reader, which affected a relatively small number of users, affected all the wrong people, and destroyed so much goodwill that the losses from it are many orders of magnitude larger than whatever savings from not supporting it any more.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Get back in line, citizen! You will read the blogspam, and you will like it.
- jsnell 3y ago
  > That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc. I'd count that kind of low quality site as spam, and the problem is that there's a basically an infinite supply of them. The boost feature is more interesting in that the curation is at least not a never-ending task. New high quality sites that I know about don't pop up all that often! It's still not an entirely robust feature since you'll need to do a lot of quality work to prevent mediocre results from a boosted site from shadowing better results from unboosted sites, especially for users with a ton of boosts. But that quality work is much easier to justify when the manual curation is one of your core selling points and used by a large proportion of the customers vs. when it's a feature in a dusty context menu that basically none of the userbase interacts with. > Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important I'd be shocked if the number of users for this kind of feature was anywhere near 10% of all search engine users. Something like 0.1% seems much more likely. But again, if those 0.1% really want that feature it's a great fit for a power user search engine. It still doesn't mean that it's a feature every search engine should obviously have.
bambax 3y ago
From your original comment: > Third, some people will probably block domains they shouldn't have blocked, and then have a bad user experience in future searches as the sites with genuinely best results is blocked. And then you're only left with only bad options: ignoring the users' stated preferences which they'll hate, or serving bad results that they'll also hate. That's a real possibility, but it can be addressed by presenting a block that would say, for example "results from blocked domains" or some such.

by jsnell 3y ago

cabalamat 3y ago

> that's trying to establish an initial niche Which suggests to me that while kagi might be good now, if it gets popular it may undergo enshittification in an effort to monetise its popularity.

freediverx 3y ago
That’s exactly my fear.
pokeymcsnatch 3y ago
It's a paid service and all their competitors are 'free'. Enshittification doesn't fit their business model, they'd go under in a heartbeat.
- SQueeeeeL 3y ago
  See also, Whatsapp
- rchaud 3y ago
  Cable TV didn't use to have ads, until somebody figured out you could charge the customer and have other streams of revenue as well. For Kagi, it's a matter of when, not if. Capitalism guarantees it.
  - yakubin 3y ago
    An even sadder example of it: Windows.
    - freediverx 3y ago
      I don’t think the term enshittification applies when a product is fully enshittified from its inception.
  - esafak 3y ago
    No, it does not. They are free to create adjacent products to boost revenue as long as they want without debasing existing ones.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      And the oxygen in the room you're in is free to concentrate in a single corner of it, making air in the rest of the room unbreathable. Both are technically possible, but so extremely unlikely, that you can rely on them not happening.
      - yard2010 3y ago
        My ML prof in university used this as an example for something that could happen but is highly unlikely. Each particle of oxygen can be in either half of the room so it's like 1/2 to the power of the number of particles (avogardo?) chance that all the particles are in one half suffocating the ppl in the other half. He was such a great guy.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      This is a good point. Did Kagi ever consider having a freemium tier that uses adverts to pay for the (search) content? I don't think it is a terrible idea if it helps Kagi to improve their paid search.
  - version_five 3y ago
    As long as they don't take outside investment that's not a certainly. People complain about the prices but it's charging the real cost that let's them be able to offer something good without mortgaging the future. I concede that if they got big enough, someone would come with enough money that they couldn't refuse, and buy them to try and "unlock vale" by racing to the bottom.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  "Enshittification": God, I love this term. It so perfectly captures what happens to a product when revenues stall and product managers think of anything to drive new revs. See: Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office. I was just about to finish this post and ask if anyone knows the history. I Googled that and was surprised by the answer from Wikionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification ...[C]oined by Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow in 2022. God damn, "Dr." Doctorow again!
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
A key point is that Kagi raised its prices already so it was sustainable. The reason most services get worse is because they are downright unprofitable and it is impossible to get them there without either making them drastically worse, or raising prices, which free sites can't do. Kagi has already put itself on a path where it doesn't have to make itself worse to cover its expenses, because it is already covering them.
- freediverx 3y ago
  No, the main reason why companies turn to shit is because they’re publicly traded and accept VC money so sooner or later, they’re beholden to shareholders demanding infinite growth and profits.
carlosjobim 3y ago
This is honestly probably the most tiresome argument that constantly pops up in every HN thread. Imagine if one of your friends come back from a holiday trip and tells you how fantastic the place they visited was. Is your response "Well, maybe that place ain't going to be so nice in a few years!"?

nine_k 3y ago

I think you miss he point. The usefulness of a per-user block list is not fighting outright spam. The statistical filters, etc, as applied by the search engine, work best here, as you correctly state. The point is to remove certain well-known sites with information about well-known topics, which is unhelpful for the particular user, me. That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc. That is, if I search some info about a particular CSS trick, I want MDN be on top, some professional blogs be near top, and w3schools be on the third page. For someone else, priorities may be different, but I know what to expect for the search queries I issue, and I'd be glad if the search engine helped me. Equally, certain domains are known to be more rich with information I happen to seek, like reddit.com, so I'd like to give them a boost. Some other people may prefer something else, or not give any boost at all. So, this is personalization, not anti-spam. If Google kept it, it could even bring important insights into what ads I would skip and what would click :) Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important: with more disposable income, more clout on social networks, more decision-making power. I suppose that the shutdown of Google Reader, which affected a relatively small number of users, affected all the wrong people, and destroyed so much goodwill that the losses from it are many orders of magnitude larger than whatever savings from not supporting it any more.

jjoonathan 3y ago
Get back in line, citizen! You will read the blogspam, and you will like it.
jsnell 3y ago
> That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc. I'd count that kind of low quality site as spam, and the problem is that there's a basically an infinite supply of them. The boost feature is more interesting in that the curation is at least not a never-ending task. New high quality sites that I know about don't pop up all that often! It's still not an entirely robust feature since you'll need to do a lot of quality work to prevent mediocre results from a boosted site from shadowing better results from unboosted sites, especially for users with a ton of boosts. But that quality work is much easier to justify when the manual curation is one of your core selling points and used by a large proportion of the customers vs. when it's a feature in a dusty context menu that basically none of the userbase interacts with. > Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important I'd be shocked if the number of users for this kind of feature was anywhere near 10% of all search engine users. Something like 0.1% seems much more likely. But again, if those 0.1% really want that feature it's a great fit for a power user search engine. It still doesn't mean that it's a feature every search engine should obviously have.

bambax 3y ago

From your original comment: > Third, some people will probably block domains they shouldn't have blocked, and then have a bad user experience in future searches as the sites with genuinely best results is blocked. And then you're only left with only bad options: ignoring the users' stated preferences which they'll hate, or serving bad results that they'll also hate. That's a real possibility, but it can be addressed by presenting a block that would say, for example "results from blocked domains" or some such.