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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Introducing: Kagi.

That's not what Kagi does. Nor does its "Small Web" search mode, as it only searches blogs that have been manually added to a specific GitHub repo (so for most part is a collection of US tech blogs - not very diverse at all)

No VC-backed or commercial search engine would do what OP is talking about. But I can see a use for a niche search engine that ranks websites inversely proportional to the number of trackers and ad networks they depend on. Heck, I would pay for that, but I'm a nerd.

Maybe marginalia.nu would like this idea.

> not what Kagi does

Kagi maintains a "non-commercial index (Teclis) and non-commercial news index (TinyGem)" [1]. They also "prioritize non-commercial sources," implicitly downranking monetized sites. (Also, you can manually downrank problem domains [2].)

My devices have randomly switched back to Google or DDG from time to time. The first thing I did was check my ad blocker was working--I was simply stunned by the amount of blogspam puke.

> No VC-backed or commercial search engine would do what OP is talking about

No ad based, i.e. free, engine can, not sustainably. A paid one obviously can and does.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-quality.htm...

[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize...

https://kagi.com/smallweb

> That's not what Kagi does.

We do actually. We penalize the sites with a lots of ads/trackers on them in our results and boost non-monetized pages. It is one of the main reasons Kagi reults have a specific 'flavor' to them. (Kagi CEO here)

You surely have huge exceptions to this rule, or major silos like Reddit, Twitter, StackOverflow, Youtube, Facebook etc. would rank towards the bottom.

Which the average Joe wouldn't like, hence my comment that no commercial search engine would implement this feature correctly, on purpose.

Not really exceptions (all treated equally) just there is nuance in the algorithm. Having some ads doesn't mean you go straight to the bottom. And when searching for youtube you clearly want youtube.com - so nuance applied but that is the principle driving it.

What’s the reason that search engine would ask for a login? (Like Kagi does)

Because it's a paid service? That's the entire point.

And that also enables tons of user-centric features they talked about, starting with the earliest ones and my favorites: being able to uprank and downrank domains (like, "ban pinterest", "pin Wikipedia", "downrank w3schools", "uprank cppreference", etc.), and adding rewrite rules to results (like "reddit.com" -> "old.reddit.com"). Both of these are personalizations tied to your account, so they're active on any device as long as you're logged in.

They've added more cool stuff since, but these two alone were what has kept me a paying customer for the past years.

Ok the paid part makes of course sense.

However I still find it a bit creepy to know that they know all about my searches and even up- and down votes.

Google at least can be used in incognito mode.

Google knows what you search, even in "incognito" mode, and even when you're logged out. They correlate your IP address with your search profile and use everything you search for in your ad profile.

Kagi does not track search history, period. There's no history attached to your account even if you wanted it. The login is purely for authentication.

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