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Comment by spooneybarger | Hacker News Reader

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spooneybarger

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I think it’s more likely that Kagi users value relevant search results & accurate information.

The anti-Pinterest political party

That's the only party I can get behind!

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.

yes they do mate - yes they do… :)

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.

> blocking political sites you don't agree with?

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.

Edit: I wanted to link the original "things that cause and prevent cancer" list page, but it's not online anymore unfortunately https://web.archive.org/web/20140807144235/http://kill-or-cu...

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.

What direction was the skew?

foxnews.com is near the top of the block list.

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.

And here's the same thing for MSNBC

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defen...

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 interpret that as a skew.

Skew in the user base at least

That's natural. Kagi users are mostly techies and techies skew left.

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.

I found it interesting too, not sure why you're being downvoted.

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