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What concrete advantages has a non ad-based business model given Kagi as a company? And, beyond privacy, what concrete advantages does a non ad-based business model given Kagi's customers?
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In the last two years Kagi made more innovation in the search experience than legacy search engines did in two decades. We are able to do that because on Kagi, users and customers are the same.
On legacy search engines, customers are advertisers and inevitably the design of the search experience is geared towards them which is the reason it has deteriorate so much in the last two decades.
With Kagi, customers will always get the best search results we can produce and they are often much better than on other search engines including Google because they have different incentives (keep you searching, so that as many ads are displayed).
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163 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 11 Apr
Google does have incentives to return poor search results if it means you'll view more ads. They wouldn't do this intentionally I imagine, but these things are a kind of invisible hand.
What's an example of a design choice you made that's incompatible with ads?
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We downrank results that have ads/tracking on them. This small adjustments vastly improves the quality of results in Kagi, and is something Google could never do (as most ads on those sites come from them).
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Bro… what of course they know what they’re doing and make the trade offs intentionally. Ads is their entire business. As long as they don’t lose too many users, revenue will go up if more ads are shown. Nothing invisible about it
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