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Most promoted and blocked domains on Kagi
- spooneybarger 2y ago[flagged]
- bl4kers 2y agoThe anti-Pinterest political party
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- darkhorse13 2y agoThat's the only party I can get behind!
- rychco 2y agoI think it’s more likely that Kagi users value relevant search results & accurate information.
- ddtaylor 2y agoWhat direction was the skew?
- spooneybarger 2y agoThere's a couple "left leaning" media sources in the boost list and 3 "right leaning" in the lower list. There's none going to the other way for sources and their generally acknowledged "lean". I interpret that as a skew.
- RajT88 2y agoSkew in the user base at least
- leereeves 2y agoThat's natural. Kagi users are mostly techies and techies skew left.
- userbinator 2y ago[flagged]
- t-writescode 2y agoHow do you mean? I’d love to know more about your theories!
- userbinator 2y ago[flagged]
- int_19h 2y agoI don't think the rank and file employees are going to blindly follow where their CEOs go on this.
- rsynnott 2y agoI mean the other way to look at it is that there are two quality newspapers plus the BBC in the boost list, and a notoriously dodgy tabloid, a TV news site, and whatever the hell Breitbart is (I must say, I hadn’t realised it was still a thing) in the lower list. You’re not really comparing like for like.
- crooked-v 2y agofoxnews.com is near the top of the block list. Of course, Fox News has made the legal argument that people shouldn't believe what they say (https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-believe-the-facts-tucker-carlson-tells-you-so-say-fox-s-lawye https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...), so it's not surprising that people paying for a service to look for actual information would block them.
- gotoeleven 2y agoAnd here's the same thing for MSNBC https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defense-to-oan-defamation-lawsuit-is-that-on-air-statements-shouldnt-be-considered-fact-869161/ https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defen...
- beachy 2y agoI found that interesting too. Not a Kagi customer yet but I always feel the need when googling to be able to blacklist SEO spammers, and that would include Pinterest as an image SEO spammer. But blocking political sites you don't agree with? I don't get it, it's not like they are polluting my search results.
- Aeolun 2y agoI think there's another commonality in the 'lowered' sites that has nothing to do with political leaning. Especially for the top two lowered ones (foxnews and dailymail) You don't go there for news. You go there for your daily set of outrage and panic.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- viraptor 2y ago> blocking political sites you don't agree with? There's "don't agree with" and there's "website is known for spamming false information". Fox, breibart and daily mail all fall into the second category, whether you agree with their political ideas or not. Edit: I wanted to link the original "things that cause and prevent cancer" list page, but it's not online anymore unfortunately https://web.archive.org/web/20140807144235/http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140807144235/http://kill-or-cu...
- freehorse 2y agoThey are news sites, not political sites. Maybe some people do not want them in their news searches because they consider them low quality, or for some other reason I guess? I would def not consider sites like dailymail.co.uk a good source of information.
- rsynnott 2y agoThe Daily Mail and Fox News are more purveyors of fiction than anything else (just ask News Corporation’s lawyers if you don’t believe me: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-believe-the-facts-tucker-carlson-tells-you-so-say-fox-s-lawye https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-... ). Many people, on searching for current events, prefer news to news-based fanfic.
- gopher_space 2y agoEvery news source blocked generates more noise than signal as its main feature. I doubt that even a regular Fox News reader wants their results full of articles they’ve already read.
- bdangubic 2y agoyes they do mate - yes they do… :)
- i_love_retros 2y ago[flagged]
- mvdtnz 2y agoI found it interesting too, not sure why you're being downvoted.
- Sloowms 2y agoHow would you be able to tell if it wasn't that some of the search results have such an obvious leaning that they would not be considered useful search results? Other than that there is also a chance that certain websites have a high hit rate because of the words used in the articles or the amount of articles put out. If certain publications clutter your results they are likely to get banned.
- sedatk 2y agoWouldn’t such a statistic cause a feedback loop?
- lmm 2y agoThat's a concern as old as search engines themselves. https://tomslee.net/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html https://tomslee.net/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html
- carlosjobim 2y agoThese rankings have no effect on how Kagi ranks domains, so not in that sense. Maybe in the sense that a user will go down the list and also block the top blocked sites and uprank the most upranked sites, but that's just idiots being idiots.
- rcyeh 2y agoWhen I subscribed to Kagi, my block/lower/raise/pin lists were very highly correlated with these aggregate ones. It makes me think that for Kagi customers, search engine rankings optimize for something other than useful sites such as docs.python.org and cppreference.com
- Sabinus 2y agoGoogle Ad team can dictate to the Search team. We have the leaks. Google has sold out.
- neilv 2y agoI love that wiki.archlinux.org is a top-Pinned. I'm firmly a Debian shop, but I find that the Arch Linux wiki often answers non-distro-specific questions that I have about how to do something on Debian. (Especially since I'm usually using Xmonad without a lot of the "desktop environment" stuff.)
- hx8 2y agoThe Arch Linux Wiki has some awesome information, but it's a little too informal for it to be a go-to for me. It's information is incomplete, opinionated, and sometimes has a "works on my machine" sort of a vibe. But sometimes it just has the answer you need in an easily digestible format. Top 10 source for me, but not a top 3. -- Some nerd with almost two decades of distro-hopping experience.
- neilv 2y agoYeah, I don't expect comprehensive and definitive documentation from it, nor copy&paste answers. But for getting pointed in the right direction about things that have been obscured by the desktop environments, and then left largely undocumented nowadays, the Arch Linux wiki usually points me in the right direction. Much of it would be pretty confusing to someone who only wanted high-level documentation in terms of the Gnome Desktop or KDE Plasma, though.
- hx8 2y agoOh it's really cool that you've used the arch wiki in that way. I had already done Linux From Scatch before I ran across the Arch wiki, so I was already familiar with concepts like boot loaders, kernel modules, and daemons. I mostly used it to find some sane config file values.
- neilv 2y agoSimilar here (25+ years Linux experience, including making my own distro). Personally, I use the Arch wiki for pointers to the current way to do system-level things, which has changed over time, with kernel and userland (e.g., all the things systemd changed, and for various kinds of devices), and sometimes for applications (e.g., what programs are currently available to do some small thing). Maybe the value comes not just because they bother to maintain a wiki, but that Arch Linux tends to select for above-average technical people, even more than Linux in general does. (Even if Arch people strangely don't run Debian goodness; but we benefit from a diversity of perspectives, even if they are unexplained. :)
- claytonjy 2y agoNot the point of the post, but i’m surprised to see less than a million queries per day. Is that all of Kagi, or just some subset?
- MostlyStable 2y agoThey only have 43,000 members (stat from the same page), so that's 20 queries a day per member, which doesn't seem that crazy.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Brajeshwar 2y agoSo, only us HN members are members of Kagi.
- Semaphor 2y agoYou are (maybe) joking, but I’d guess there’s an extremely high overlap between HN users and Kagi users. I converted someone from a metal discord I’m in to Kagi with a promo gift last year, and he’s also the only HN user on the server ;)
- Brajeshwar 2y ago“Many a true word is spoken in jest.” ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_a_true_word_is_spoken_in_jest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_a_true_word_is_spoken_in_...
- barryrandall 2y agoIIRC, nerds were the primary drivers of the search engine wars.
- t-writescode 2y agoThat said, 43k paying users is quite a bit of money, so if their team is small enough, that’s good enough, stable and steady income
- kristianp 2y agoI feel like I haven't seen a pinterest link for ages, and I use google.
- titaphraz 2y agoPintrest owns all the top 7 blocked results. Good, they've earned it. I never understood why Google let them destroy Google Image search results.
- RajT88 2y agoAll of those top domains (of which the majority are pinterest) have more than earned it.
- waiwai933 2y agoI'm surprised - simply because I never get Pinterest results on Google. Now admittedly most of my searches aren't the kind where Pinterest is likely to have relevant results, but even then, surely I'd at least see them _sometimes_. But I literally can't remember the last time I saw a Pinterest search result. Unless, as you suggest, they take over Google Images but not text search results? I could believe that I use Image search sufficiently rarely that I wouldn't have seen a Pinterest result.
- danpalmer 2y agoI only get Pinterest results when I'm searching for something generic enough, and in those cases, why not use an image from Pinterest. I don't really understand the hate.
- zonkerdonker 2y agoIt's a nightmare for finding the original sources of images. For example, I was looking for a new sink basin and doing some quick image searches for various styles. All the ones I liked were pinterest posts with zero attribution. A reverse image search then just brings up dozens of ripped and reposted copies of that pinterest post, also without attribution. It gets frustrating
- kjs3 2y agoI assume with the 'popularity' bias (probably not the right phrase) in the modern internet this is pretty much the future of search. Someone comes up with something cool, posts a pix, and someone else puts it on Twit/Face/Tube/whatever and it gets reposted over and over and over and since the original is some worthless peon as far as the algorithm is concerned you'll never, ever find them.
- 0xTJ 2y agoI'm not surprised to see w3schools.com up there. I haven't come across it recently because of shifts in what I do, but it used to come up so often when I was looking for coding documentation. It was almost always useless.
- lucgommans 2y agoIf only it was merely useless. I know its reputation but it had some information that MDN did not have, so I used it this once in recent years. Turned out, the information was simply wrong and so I made a wrong decision based on that. (It might have been about favicon format support in different browsers. Presumably it was Safari that never had support for vector graphics whereas w3schools listed it as such, and it's not like you can just download Safari to double check.) Regardless, what I'm sure about is that I alerted them to whatever the problem was, but for me it was the last nail in that coffin
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stevage 2y agoOh yeah, I always had that plugin that removed it from Google results. What trash.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y agoIt's better than it used to be, but I've long since had muscle memory for appending "mdn" to any webdevy or javascripty search. I wish geeksforgeeks would die in a fire, no offense to its operators.
- CobaltFire 2y agoI was confused why all the blocked results said “reset” until I realized I was logged in and had them all blocked… I don’t recall using this list to populate mine but I think I must have!
- agnishom 2y agoSome people seem to be blocking `w3schools.com`. What is the rationale?
- wetpaws 2y ago[dead]
- hatthew 2y agohttps://www.w3fools.com/ https://www.w3fools.com/
- lolinder 2y agoIt has a pretty bad reputation from an earlier era when it was actively providing bad information [0]. That's largely been resolved from what I understand, but the reputation lives on. People may also just find that they don't get a lot of value from it, but if that were the only reason I'd expect geekforgeeks to rank equally high with it or higher. [0] https://www.w3fools.com/ https://www.w3fools.com/
- pesus 2y agoIs w3fools now defunct, or just broken on mobile? All I'm seeing is a message explaining that w3schools doesn't suck as much anymore.
- Numerlor 2y agoFor what came up to me when searching for Python info before I blocked it, they still have plenty of incorrect information or information that's useless for the tutorial page it's on
- Sxubas 2y agoWhy is healthline so high on the block/lower list? (Excluding Pinterest) IMO I like the fact that they link sources to their claims, which is very rare on the current web. I think of it as a somewhat trustable source of information. Am I wrong?
- leereeves 2y agoI think it's reasonably trustworthy for a popular health site, but if I used Kagi I would block Healthline myself. Their Top N lists frequently appear on top of my health related searches when I'm looking for something more scholarly.
- eclipticplane 2y agoI block them, but I block most common health sites. When I'm searching a health condition, I almost always only want Wikipedia. But Wikipedia's search is pretty bad unless you know the exact name of what you're searching for.
- eddythompson80 2y agoCould be because healthline blocks most VPNs and manifest-based ad blockers. Kagi users are basically HN users.
- computer23 2y agoHealthline is not a trustworthy site- See Wikipedia discussion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_409#Healthline:_deprecate_or_blacklist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/N...?
- Semaphor 2y agoI have it blocked because I had them show up with auto generated (and, obviously, wrong) AI slop results. Anything like that gets an instant block.
- knowknow 2y agoInteresting that TikTok is the 3rd highest on the block list (considering Pinterest links as one). I wonder why since it’s not often that I get it as a search result on Google . Is TikTok showing up as a result common on kagi or is TikTok just that bad?
- bcoates 2y agoTiktok has a lot of deep-ish search keyword spam that doesn't actually lead to anything related to the query, just some generic videos and a pitch to install the app. It's basically useless as a website.
- janalsncm 2y agoLikely because it requires a login?
- KomoD 2y agoTiktok is just really annoying, they rank high for a lot of keywords but the results will either just redirect you to tiktok's homepage or a bunch of "discover" pages with random videos that contain those keywords. If you're on mobile you'll get asked to install the app, if you try to view a video on mobile you'll probably get asked to solve a captcha and again asked to install the app. Say you search something related to repairing a bmw, you might get results that are "bmw mechanic", "bmw repair inclusive", "bmw maintenance meme" which just lead to those tiktok discover pages.
- mid-kid 2y agoWhat bothers me the most is getting an image result I want the full res version of, and being redirected to a discover page that doesn't have what I wanted
- theshrike79 2y agoRequires login to actually do anything, like Twitter. Making both completely useless as sources
- carlosjobim 2y ago
- Brajeshwar 2y agoTwo different views for logged-in users and public. I realize that it has a different view from a different non-logged-in browser (or incognito). I stopped wearing T-Shirt swags from companies quite a while back. Recently, I thought of promoting Kagi and wore the T-Shirt they sent at a few meet-ups, office spaces with lots of tech-people and no-one recognize it. A few of them thought, when we talked, if the logo is for a Golfing group/community! Personally, I was thinking I’m proudly promoting something akin to ‘Wearing Google T-Shirt in 1999’ but this time, “Humanize the Web.”
- mastercheif 2y agoSuch a huge miss not including the name of the company on the shirts. It could be a fitness logo for all anyone knows.
- edoceo 2y agoFirst rule of marking. Say your name, loud & proud! Bragging doesn't take care of itself. Gotta be like the Beastie Boys, say your name 3+ times in every song.
- finnthehuman 2y agoBleh, that attitude ruins merch. If all you care about is maximizing the number of walking billboards then you're satisfied because it's impossible to calculate the ROI of making available designs that people actually want to wear in public but reduces walking billboards. The only tech merch I've ever worn was back when firefox had a good logo, goodwill, and no text on the front of the shirt. Lots of people just want a simple graphic tee and IFKYK. It's not sports. Bands can sometimes get exceptions, but often approach wrestling tshirt levels of gaudiness.
- mediumsmart 2y agoYou’d be right if it wasn’t a search engine.
- accelbred 2y ago
- bcoates 2y agoLooks like alternativeto.net wins the most divisive prize, for being on the top boosted list but also heavily banned/demoted. Runner up to the NYT
- crooked-v 2y agoIt's probably got to do with the bizarre design that hides the actual link to a productms website as a small element on the page and makes the most prominent links and buttons go to other things instead.
- duskwuff 2y agoThey're not very good at identifying what's actually an "alternative". By way of example, some of their top alternatives to OwnCloud include Dropbox, MEGA, and Google Drive. (All of which completely miss the point - OwnCloud isn't just a file storage service, and one of its key features is that it's self-hosted.)
- lucgommans 2y agoI really like alternativeto. It's not always good: sometimes there are simply no good alternatives, or the community hasn't voted for the ones I'd have voted for and so a good option is way, way down. But if I want to know alternatives, I go there directly, so I guess that's maybe why people block it from appearing in random search results? I found it puzzling to see a useful site blocked (especially when I haven't seen it appear much in search results, but then, I've also been using DDG primarily, which ranks things rather differently)
- galleywest200 2y agoJust as I suspected, fandom.com appears on the top "lowered" list. So many games have moved to different wiki sites but because of SEO the Fandom.com wikis still appear near the top of "normal" search results, unfortunately.
- p3rls 2y agoI run a competitor to fandom (in kpop) and fandom isn't even the worst offender by a mile. Google has made my niche dominated by porn ads and underaged nude leakers for the past decade. Even gaming is completely fextralife enshittificated. Fandom at least has some professionals behind it. The sad thing is we should be living in a golden age for these sorta websites, but Google has to promote dogshit so nothing cool gets built.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- edelbitter 2y agoIs there an opt-in for sharing such analytics/telemetry/statistics/insights (or whatever the euphemism treadmill is at now) -- or did all customers "consent" to this simply by using private settings "used by at least 20 users"?
- joshuaturner 2y agoI'm not seeing a way to opt-out on any settings page
- xigoi 2y agoWhy should this require opt-in? I don’t see anything wrong with publishing interesting statistics.
- bloppe 2y agoSeriouseats in the top pinned results. So dank
- fumufumufumu 2y agoWhat I gather from this is few if any non-software devs use Kagi 8 of the top 10 "raised" sites are software dev sites and with #6 being MDN I'm guessing it's not just any software devs, is web developers specifically that use Kagi. Am I drawing the wrong conclusion? Does that mean Kagi's days are numbered? What would it take for them to get enough non-web-devs that the top 10 raised looked more representative of the average internet user?
- ZiiS 2y agoWell I am a webdev who more or less exclusivly uses Kagi so I guess I support that point; but I also havn't bothered raising any sites and I would guess a lot of people don't.
- chillfox 2y agoThe average internet user is never going to pay for search. Trying to target them would likely be a mistake.
- tonyhart7 2y ago[flagged]
- doublerabbit 2y agoI am an average internet user. I pay for Kagi and it's refreshing to actually see real results rather than sponsored slop from the others.
- qmmmur 2y agoI want to like and pay for Kagi but from australia it feels like it isn't behind a CDN.
- redrix 2y agoThat was my experience with them as well. There is a noticeable latency rendering the search results with Kagi as opposed to alternatives.
- nxpnsv 2y agoThis is convicing me to try Kagi for a while... search without pintrest would feel good.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- randomNumber7 2y agoWhy do people block ny times and Washington Post newspaper? Is it because it is paywall or for political reasons?
- benterix 2y agoWhat I gather from this the single decision Google could make to improve Google Search is not to give Pinterest preferential treatment as most people hate it (not the site itself, it has its uses, but the way it's promoted in Google Image Search results).
- Phil_Latio 2y agoHow pinterest got this big in the first place is only explainable by corruption/kickbacks within Google antispam team.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- thoroughburro 2y agoI don’t like Pinterest, but it’s easier to explain than conspiracy: a valuable demographic was underserved because people tend to overlook that women are half of humanity. Mood boards do nothing for me, but that isn’t true of everyone.
- juped 2y agoI get the most value out of this feature by blocking fandom.com, fextralife.com and pinning quality wikis on gaming/nerd shit, fwiw.
- meta-level 2y agoI guess if you could easily block sites as easily from the image search, too, at least alamy.com and dreamstime.com also would compete for the most blocked domains
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]