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Comment by csprimer-in | Hacker News Reader

I fail to understand the complexity of it, can you help me understand how is it different from other search engines ? Thanks in advance !

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Sites are ranked higher when they have no ads. Fully open source.

That's a good starting point..

> Sites are ranked higher when they have no ads.

That’s a pretty clever filter tbh. Sounds so evident that I’m amazed nobody thought of it before.

I’d love Kagi to have such an option.

> That’s a pretty clever filter tbh. Sounds so evident that I’m amazed nobody thought of it before.

I did. I posted it on HN as a comment. It was a very popular (by my standards) comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40438288

The thread was interesting, with a lot of people posting rebuttals for why such a scheme would obviously not work. Equally obviously, someone else thought it was a good idea and went and implemented it.

> Equally obviously, someone else thought it was a good idea and went and implemented it.

Maybe I misunderstood, but it's not obvious to me that someone read your idea, thought it was good, and then went to implement it.

https://github.com/searchmysite/searchmysite.net/graphs/code... looks like the bulk of the code was added 2 - 4 years ago.

So then definitionally not independent then because their funding comes from elsewhere

According to the site, the funding comes from its "Search as a Service" feature[0], where anybody can pay them in order to have a search service focused on their site (which does not have to be in the public index and thus doesn't have to be personal/independent).

So, in the sense that the funding (aims to) comes from larger companies, you are correct. It's not VC, but it does seem like it could end up relying on payments from large companies, making it potentially vulnerable.

[0] https://searchmysite.net/pages/about/#search-as-a-service

That too, but I was referring to the sites in the search themselves. They are not independents but in the pay of someone else if they're not generating revenue.

As someone with a commercial digital garden with ads (and a $3/mo sub for the ad-adverse) I like to point out the tension in that whenever possible

Not necessarily. As a counterpoint, I have a site (<https://www.automidiflip.com/>, which I posted to HN on launch 8 years ago[0], which provides a service and does not have (and has never had) any ads whatsoever. (It inserts a reference to automidiflip.com in the MIDIs it creates as a credit, but no ads in the sense that most people mean.)

Granted, it's a niche service, but over the past year it's still been used to flip MIDIs about 23 times a day on average, so it's definitely not unknown. I don't see any need to monetise it, though.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13553224

That's right. Most search engines are funded by advertising, where there is the clear conflict of interest[0], not to mention incentive for spam etc. Alternative models include a subscription fee (which I don't think would work for a small niche search like this) and donations (which may or may not be sustainable). Looking through some of the support forums for the big search engines, I'm pretty sure that enough site owners would pay a fee for support to pay the running costs for a large search engine, although for a smaller search engine like this there needs to be something more than just support, hence the search as a service features.

[0] "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers", to quote Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in their "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" paper from 1998.

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