> Kagi surfaces shopping results featuring unbiased reviews and no affiliate links to help you identify the best product across categories. Top results include discussions focused on helping you find the best item to purchase - you are not bombarded with affiliate links and ads. Continue to scroll and you will see product comparisons across multiple vendors so you can pick what best suites you. Kagi's shopping search will always return a detailed discussion of which product to buy not a competition amongst advertisers promoting where you should buy. Kagi is focused on providing you the best results to make an informed decision not polluted by affiliate links and advertisements.
On second read, I think what the Kagi doc means is that they don't provide first-party affiliate links (i.e. if you click on an Amazon.com search result it's not using their affiliate). They will still show you search results that have affiliate links embedded (but presumably don't affect or negatively affect ranking).
Kagi is better than Google, but just yesterday it returned the top link to Amazon-linking “check the price for this item on Amazon right now” affiliate spam. So it’s not perfect.
I think it’s pretty good. I understand sometimes we root for the good guys like Kagi and look at their work with rose tinted glasses and even think they’re perfect, like you did, but it’s not really feasible.
A pattern I’ve noticed from people not working in tech, or more junior people in tech, is that they have a thinking that software can ever be perfect. If either of those categories describe you, I can tell you from experience no software is ever perfect!
In adversarial environments, this is true. In non-adversarial environments, software of a certain defined scope can at least get very close to perfection.
Ultimately a site can get around affiliate / referral detection with internal links that redirect though I suppose. So the crawler would need to follow and track all links to detect this. Also sites will surface different links / content based on user agents, so I don't know how effective this is.
Kagi is a paid search engine to avoid the manipulation that Google welcomes. To avoid every trick and targeted tricks it may be cost prohibitive. Fortunately Kagi isn't popular enough yet for targeted manipulations to have a noticeable impact.
> Kagi surfaces shopping results featuring unbiased reviews and no affiliate links to help you identify the best product across categories. Top results include discussions focused on helping you find the best item to purchase - you are not bombarded with affiliate links and ads. Continue to scroll and you will see product comparisons across multiple vendors so you can pick what best suites you. Kagi's shopping search will always return a detailed discussion of which product to buy not a competition amongst advertisers promoting where you should buy. Kagi is focused on providing you the best results to make an informed decision not polluted by affiliate links and advertisements.
1. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html