What 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?
Why would it mean that their days are numbered? Nothing wrong with having steady income from a loyal customer-base, even if that customer-base is niche.
It would mean that if they are operating at a loss and hoping to capture more of the market later. But if they're profitable then the main danger is a competitor coming along.
Growth mindset is a big part of our sick society, unfortunately. It's the only thing our politicians like to talk about, after all. Being a stable business delivering value is as good as dead.
I think the bigger danger is the competition around AI chat assistants. There are other paid assistants, but you already see that even the paid assistants are getting trained to promote certain corporations.
Bing Chat (chatgpt without login) has replaced more than 80% of my searches. Still with kagi for the remaining 20% but if my searches run out I probably use duck again for those
Loyal Kagi customer here, based on their posts and in my dealings with them, they are doing their thing and doing well
They are focused on privacy, do a great job of it, and their AI assistant is top notch (highly recommend you take a look, can choose from many models and swap out responses instantly, not even getting into the awesome search features)
Not commenting on your (good) who is the main audience question, rather the other point about if Kagi is doing well
I subscribed my girlfriend to it as well and tell people whenever the moment is appropriate
Really rooting for these guys to succeed long term
As an aside, when I got my Kagi subscription the first thing I did was lower Pinterest results
I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one. They need to record every search and connect it to your account. Duckduckgo is more known for privacy and searches well through tor.
126 teams x 5 or 6 members = 1,000 accounts at 10 per day 10k
4500 family plans: most will take the 20 a month plan 100k
45000 individuals lets say they are all paid most on the 5 dollar plans lets assume on average 6.50 is earned 300k
Then you have orion+ members at 2000 giving an extra $15 per account. 30k
They probably make 450k a month
They have 19 employees on linkedin and they are listed at under 50 everywhere else. Lets give them 25 employees at 100k average salary which would be 2.5 million in salaries which might be low.
Add on costs to actually run the website (paid search, servers, office costs) which hopefully cost less than 3.5 million.. the rest is profit.
I'd say they are doing well enough. My average of 5/6 per team might be much higher if they have a few 100+ sized teams. I think the mode would be 5/6 regardless of the average.
> I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one. They need to record every search and connect it to your account.
Looking at their privacy policy they state the following:
> We may store web requests made by user browser temporarily, with strict retention periods, for debugging purposes, and in a manner that they are not linked to an account.
Do we know that they spend money on this or is that inferred?
I asked because the search you've linked to only seems to list relatively niche chess videos on one creator's account. And the videos themselves are also ad-supported. It's (at least) not impossible that the sponsorship association is not budgeted in the way that (I think) you infer.
"I watched Daniel King for 10 years and have previously donated to him, now I am happy that we are in position to sponsor his work which I believe is extraordinary.", this also definitely sounds like monetary compensation to me.
That’s a great segment to target. I’d take that any day over most others. It’s also a pretty hard bunch to please, so pretty defensible unless you somehow beat Kagi by a lot.
It’s also much bigger than their customer base. Keep going, Kagi.
> I'm guessing it's not just any software devs, is web developers specifically that use Kagi.
I do both, and I have MDN pinned. The thing is, if I search for C#, Python, Java, I get great results on any search engine. If I search for web stuff, I get tons of crap and mediocrity. MDN is almost always what I want instead of some other stuff.
Regarding "days numbered", I agree with the gist of the other replies ;)
Perhaps it just means technically inclined people are the first to see value and use in some product. Whether word of mouth spreads and people will find value in paying for search engine + goodies - time will tell.
Kagi's days are probably not numbered because of web devs (web devs are not going away any time soon, even with advancements in LLMs) but rather because of the indexes they use, or rather don't use.
Kagi is fairly good at ranking results and essentially making do with what they have, but in my experience it does not seem very good at all for searching for anything particularly obscure. It's like how DuckDuckGo uses Bing - nearly useless if you're not searching popular sites (like Wikipedia, MDN, etc.)
DuckDuckGo likely also had almost exclusively tech people as users because the average person doesn't even think about search engines and more importantly doesn't want to. Alternative search engines only have a chance at getting a wider audience when Google messes up enough that people need to think about it.
With Kagi this is more significant because paying for a search engine is an even larger obstacle than simply switching.
> Am I drawing the wrong conclusion? Does that mean Kagi's days are numbered?
It is developers who are more likely to take digital privacy more seriously than the rest. And so, it seems like Kagi is indeed on its way finding product fit with the most demanding segment (from a digital/information privacy standpoint) there is.
For any tech, it is fully expected that early adopters belong to a niche. Whether Kagi wants to make the leap or stay in this segment is upto them. There is no indication that they have saturated the market even in their niche ("developers"), while this niche itself on its own might be lucrative enough.
Besides, Kagi may very well venture into other products to sell to the same market segment.
If anything, to me, the writing that's on the wall for Vlad (Kagi's creator) right now is... "The world's your oyster".
You literally just wait for them to complain about Google, then say “Well, you get what you pay for.” They will be curious because everyone knows search is free.
Their days aren't numbered because they've built a sustainable business with a small team of developers that doesn't require a huge user-base to fund. Arguably if Kagi were more popular it would be worse. Just the fact that they aren't Google and use their own ranking while being small enough to avoid the notice of SEO hackers carries them a long way.
I’m one of them. I love Kagi, although the first week or two had a ton of !g. Now I only really bang for local areas, conversions, or shopping (maybe).
If they can sustain, maybe they can takeoff. Search in GenAI world is hard, and Google has other focuses with talent and inference chips too.
I hope their days aren’t numbered!
I think it needs some UI improvements. It’s ugly, and I find it can hinder actual use.
More usability improvements on features. There’s a lot I’m still not leveraging because I haven’t bothered learning. Maybe they can build an LLM tool to help with this?
And I don’t care how, but make it easy to make it default on all browsers, mobile mainly. Maybe they fixed this recently, but when I was swapping browsers recently, this was annoying. If they can’t fix this, they probably won’t make it.
Just some top of mind thoughts as high-usage, 95%+ non-coding user.
I'd rather gather that the normal people subscribing to Kagi are simply satisfied with the better quality search results, and don't bother so much with domain ranking.
The "hacker" type of computer user is zealous in everything they do.
What's important is that Kagi refrains from letting hacker zealots influence their business too much, because normal people also deserve high quality search results, and most knowledge workers are not software developers.
Well 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.
Apparently Pinterest has half a billion users[1], presumably significant number of those appreciate those search results. I am also going to guess that there is little overlap between those 500M users with HN's 5M users[2] or Kagi's 43K users[3].
So while those results-gated-behind-logins might seem annoying to us, we are in the minority.
I remember a few years before Pinterest’s IPO, there were random statistics flowing around about how unique of a demographic Pinterest had compared to the rest of the internet. It’s mostly female dominated compared to the rest of the male dominated internet. Not just any female demographic either, but upper middle class, high income, young women †. There was simply no other online service that had that as its main demographic to the degree that Pinterest did. I remember thinking that must be a really attractive target for online advertisers and maybe I should keep an eye out for the IPO. Luckily I forgot. Its stock has been mostly lackluster.
†: hell son that was during my dating years. I was going on a lot of dates with women specifically in that demographic. Once I got to know a woman I would research her on google while narrowing my search to Pinterest. Out of 20 or so women I recall there were only 2 that didn’t have Pinterest accounts. The rest had, very active, Pinterest accounts.
It's a great tool for finding inspiration and creating moodboards.
Tangentally, IIRC the setting for the next Elder Scrolls game was all but confirmed after some creative at Bethesda accidentally made public a Pinterest collection with weapons and armor from the medieval arab world.
Try it, you may like it. I use it for collaborative visual brainstorming with real life projects (e.g. fashion or photo ideas) and it works well for that purpose.
Man I hate to say you're completely right, but you're completely right.
I remember years back being in some social thing where someone was railing on social media and pontificated "absolutely noone wants what Facebook is", and I grudgingly had to retort "you don't want Facebook, but a half a billion people (at the time) obviously do".
Many of us are reluctant users. There because our friends our communities are. I would love FB to go away.
I am the admin of two FB groups, both UK home education related (one about exams and qualifications, the other for single parents). I do it because I feel I should help the community (especially as the crappy commercial groups that target the same audience), which is made up of non-technically inclined, mostly middle aged women - i.e. FB's core demographic. I cannot remember the other demographic nos offhand, but its 95% women in the exams group, and 98% in the other (and both have 1% other/did not say), and the age profile reflects the fact that people have school age (or just over, in the 16 to 18 age group) children.
I had actually planned to try and push the community towards forums, but with the Online Safety Act in force that is not a risk I am inclined to take.
My cousin runs a family group where she shares photos and wishes people happy birthday. I would prefer her to use WhatsApp but she is the one running it.
A lot of my friends post family news, important things like births and deaths and weddings on FB.
I understand what you're saying, but my own observation is "many of us" == "a tiny minority". "There because our friends our communities are" is exactly it...our friends and communities don't care as long as FB and the other social media cesspools are the default. I too have tried to get various relations to not make me log into social media to be part of their life, and I get some variation of "oh, you weird little infosec guy, that's way too much work and it's good enough for all of us".
It also has a ludicrously smooth and fast UX and makes it possible to access the high resolution original photographs (up to 100+ megapixels) by modifying url parameters.
Images are served from i.pinimg.com/ and the url params can be changed from "[0-9]+x(\/[0-9a-f]{2}){3}\/[0-9a-f]{32}\.jpg" to "originals/(\/[0-9a-f]{2}){3}\/[0-9a-f]{32}\.(jpg|png)".
I'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.
I 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.
It'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.
I 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.
I wonder if that's something that can be addressed by embedding the right metadata into images/videos? Most people don't bother even checking e.g. Exif data (let alone stripping or otherwise altering it) when reposting content they find online.
I can't speak for every platform but when I was working with frequent photo posts, most in-camera or post-editing metadata was stripped out on instagram and facebook. Some smaller sites like Gab didn't seem to mess with it as much, but the bulk did. I wouldn't be surprised if all of the other big ones did, too.
It was incredibly disheartening to have no recourse to attribute my own work, other than to smear some gross watermark on it. The automatic removal of that metadata, along with AI image generation, are some of the reasons why I gave up on the hobby entirely.
It's incredibly hard and stressful to derive any sort of pleasure or interest from something when the second it's exposed to the internet, any sense of humanity you tried to attach to it is stripped away, burned, and commercialized for the monetary benefit of some ethereal financier. It's the sound of an invisible vacuum cleaner, whisking away any sense of joy or life you wanted to share with the world for common love; the death of sharing. For-pay hugs.
Pinterest is always a dead end for me. I don't have an account, so I can't actually access anything that the link is taking me to. It's a giant turd in my search results.
And even if you are logged in, good chances you get redirected to some other useless page rather than the image you were trying to view. Or if you're not logged in, by the time you do get logged back in, you lose the original link and you're dumped on a random feed.
I'm one of the minority that loves Pinterest. Happy to have them in my results, honestly. A lot of times they are the only remaining source for a specific image that has faded from the rest of the Internet.
When I've been reverse-image searching for obscure things, sometimes it's been the only result (despite not being the original source). I'd rather see pinterest than nothing - but I suppose you can fix that with downranking rather than banning them outright.
Compared to the AI slop flooding image search results, pinterest is increasingly looking "better than the alternatives".
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.)
The 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.
Yeah, 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.
> 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.
Even as an Arch user, probably at least 80% of my usage of the Arch Wiki is just going through "Troubleshooting" list of previously seen issues and solutions for whatever thing I'm dealing with. I don't go in expecting that everything will work exactly the same for me, but over the years I've ended up with quite a few headaches solved by pasting the right line in the right conf from one of those sections.
Oh 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.
Similar 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. :)
I often wish there was a date attached to the articles there. I get that a wiki format is ever evolving and as a result there isn’t necessarily a meaningful date that could be added. However, unlike an article about Jupiter, carbon fiber or WW2 on Wikipedia, the date for when a guide was written about Power Management on Linux is very relevant. I often find myself trying to sort of deduce that from the history page, then I fail then I have to go look up if that information is in fact the most recent.
I'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.
If 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
Two 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.”
First 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.
Bleh, 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.
I don't understand. Opening the page in a logged-out state, it looks the same to me (just that there are not buttons to pick whether you want to raise/lower/block a domain when you're logged out). What's the different view you mean?
When 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
It'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.
They'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.)
I 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)
Why 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?
I 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.
I 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.
You 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 ;)
Yeah, my understanding is that they are trying (and I think I remember succeeding so far?) to be revenue positive/sustainable from the beginning, and not trying to rely on "grow and make money later" that other companies used.
Which I prefer; I got burned by Neeva shutting down shortly after they started (for a pretty mild version of the word "burned", it cost me very little, but it was annoying).
What 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).
Interesting 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?
Tiktok 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.
Tiktok 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.
What 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
Just 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Is 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"?
These 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.
I 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
It 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.
For 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
This will be controversial, but w3schools isn't bad for the niche it targets today.
It, however, has a long, well-earned reputation from being likely the worst site on the net for a decade, back in the early days. Even if I have a question that I think it would answer well, I still recoil at the thought of clicking a link to it.
It's targeting a different market. The MDN web docs are excellent reference material, but if you're learning or early in your career they're impenetrable. W3Schools has a reputation of over-simplification (to the point of being wrong sometimes), but that's not at odds with being useful to people at a particular stage in their career.
For another example, I gather that most of the high school chemistry I learnt is wrong, but it was mostly pretty useful in understanding the physical world as far as I needed to progress in my education at that age. W3Schools can be useful in that respect.
Education is a series of smaller lies. It's one of the corollaries to "all models are, wrong some are useful."
Some lies are actually better than the truth. My favorite example is that shooters are taught to imagine their sights being in line with their gun and that's they're shooting horizontally. But they're not, they're shooting in an arc so over short distances bullet just rises a little. Don't ask why. Why it's cool is that people using this model are better shots.
I've used w3schools a fair bit, but hardly for their web stuff.
I've used it for looking up SQL, XML/XSD/XPath and such when I had some specific question. Found it quite helpful, and still use it as a quick reference every now and then.
I haven't gone to that site in a long time, but back when I did work that was related to its content, it was somewhere between useless and actively bad. From reading this thread, it seems to have improved since, but it has a tarnished reputation. I use Kagi, and if w3schools had come up in a search I'd likely have set it to block before even considering clicking the link; it's got a tarnished reputation.
Content that kind of looks like technical docs, but without linking authoritative sources, date when it was last reviewed, software it was verified against etc.
Nowadays with AI slop websites all over the place, plus formerly legitimate newspapers not attributing sources & edits either, this may not seem that special. But w3schools earned their reputation when that was exceptionally rude. Also, straight up wrong all over the place. But that is more of a symptom. And to be fair a lot of the software back then was straight up wrong, too. Tough job documenting the reality of the WWW correctly while IE was around.
Every 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.
I 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.
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.
I 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.
They 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.
The 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-... ). Many people, on searching for current events, prefer news to news-based fanfic.
How 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.
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-...), so it's not surprising that people paying for a service to look for actual information would block them.
There'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 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.
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?