4 ms·

It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most

It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most useless website in their web search.

Nextgrid 3y ago
There's no reason to believe those smartest engineers' incentives are to give you good search results. If this was a technical problem this would be solved long ago by a simple "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()". The problem is that the company employing those engineers is acting maliciously and benefits from you wasting your time with irrelevant/unusable search results as it contributes to "engagement" on the search results page and makes the sponsored results (aka spam) more likely to be clicked (even if by accident). They can get away with it since (besides Kagi) the competition is no better due to having the exact same business model.
- Jaygles 3y ago
  Incentives surely play a massive role but it certainly is a technical problem. Pinterest must be showing up in Kagi's search in order for it to be so high up in the block list rankings. Do they share Google's incentives? The technical problem is deciding what is relevant when you have the entire world working towards gaming your search algorithm to appear at the top of the results. This makes it a cat and mouse game, and playing whack-a-mole by doing things like "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()", isn't scalable.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    > Do they share Google's incentives? No and that's why they are offering the ability to tweak per-domain ranking per user, along with a leaderboard of most-blocked domains so people can easily find and block problematic domains. The issue with blocking Pinterest by default is that people who use Pinterest might actually want those results, so that's not a good default.

4 ms·

It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most

by Jaygles 3y ago

It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most useless website in their web search.

Nextgrid 3y ago
There's no reason to believe those smartest engineers' incentives are to give you good search results. If this was a technical problem this would be solved long ago by a simple "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()". The problem is that the company employing those engineers is acting maliciously and benefits from you wasting your time with irrelevant/unusable search results as it contributes to "engagement" on the search results page and makes the sponsored results (aka spam) more likely to be clicked (even if by accident). They can get away with it since (besides Kagi) the competition is no better due to having the exact same business model.
- Jaygles 3y ago
  Incentives surely play a massive role but it certainly is a technical problem. Pinterest must be showing up in Kagi's search in order for it to be so high up in the block list rankings. Do they share Google's incentives? The technical problem is deciding what is relevant when you have the entire world working towards gaming your search algorithm to appear at the top of the results. This makes it a cat and mouse game, and playing whack-a-mole by doing things like "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()", isn't scalable.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    > Do they share Google's incentives? No and that's why they are offering the ability to tweak per-domain ranking per user, along with a leaderboard of most-blocked domains so people can easily find and block problematic domains. The issue with blocking Pinterest by default is that people who use Pinterest might actually want those results, so that's not a good default.