I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass.
Presumably Google would love to have useful results beneath all their ads, but can’t seem to win over all of the “organic” blogs.
We mitigate SEO spam effectively by downranking websites that use ads or trackers.
SEO spam websites predominantly rely on ads for monetization, which makes them easily detectable. This strategy of combating ads in every form, everywhere, has proven to be an efficient method for prioritizing high-quality web results.
I was wondering if there's any student discounts? For research I certainly search like a professional, but don't have the income stream to compensate.
Google's creators had correctly identified this problem and their knowledge of it is why early google was good.
https://alexandre.storelli.fr/advertising-and-mixed-motives-...
> Advertising and Mixed Motives (Sergey Brin & Larry Page, 1998)
> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
> But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Once they earned their place as a monopoly the same understanding was applied to wield it on the darker side.
> “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
They know exactly what it is that they are doing.
If not, I recommend cosidering Orion browser on iOS [2] with Kagi built in.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions....