What I don't understand about this explanation is that Google's results are abysmal compared to e.g. DuckDuckGo or even Brave search. (I haven't tried Kagi, but people here rave about it as well.) Sure, all the SEO is targeting googlebot, but Google has by far more resources to mitigate SEO spam than just about anyone else. If this is the full explanation, couldn't Google just copy the strategies the (much) smaller rivals are using?
I wasn't responding to the article; I was responding to the claim that Google's results are bad because of all the SEO. It's a claim I've heard from Google apologists including some people I know at Google. I think it's nonsense both for the reasons I stated and for the reasons enumerated in the article.
It is about Google not wanting to say goodbye to the sweet dollars from spammy sites.
Otherwise making the probably number one requested feature, a personal block list, wouldn't have been impossible for a company with so many bright minds.
I mean: little bootstrapped Kagi had it either from the beginning or at least since shortly after they launched.
People always think they lost against SEO spam. But my main reason for quitting as soon as an alternative showed up was because they started to overrule my searches and search for what they thought I wanted to search for.
For a while I kept it at bay by using doublequotes and verbatim but none of those have worked reliably for a decade now.
That isn't SEO spam. That is poor engineering or "we know better than you" attitude.
Google's search results are just bad. For example, search: "Does Quebec have an NHL team?"
The results suggest that Quebec does not have an NHL team, because it confuses the province of Quebec with Quebec City. Montreal, in Quebec, has the Montreal Canadiens and this isn't mentioned in the search results at all.
When a large search engine deranks spam websites, the spam websites complain! Loudly! With Google they have a big juicy target with lots of competing ventures for an antitrust case; no such luck for Kagi or DDG.
It’s definitely a concern where I work (not Google). Deranking anybody who happens to share a vertical we’re in is colorable as an anticompetitive action[0], and due to our dominance in another sector (not search), effectively any anticompetitive action anywhere is a no-go. And since we don’t have time to review whether a particular competitor also competes in one of our verticles and run everything by legal, nothing gets de-ranked manually.
0: for context, us doj does not take antitrust action against companies simply for market dominance; it requires market dominance plus an anticompetitive action. However, they don’t like monopolies, so effectively any pretext can be used — see the apple lawsuit or the 90s ms lawsuits for how little it takes.
