Google's Stance on Advertising in 1998; The case for Kagi

It is interesting to read the original technical paper from Google, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin explicitly call out how advertising reduces the quality of a search engine. Some of the best lines are:

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

A search engine could add a small factor to search results from “friendly” companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market.

Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.

In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines.

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.

Kagi

Enter, Kagi. They are a premium search engine that can only be used if you pay for it. I love Kagi’s charter:

Kagi is committed to creating a more human-centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities, and society as a whole, with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved.

Kagi’s whole point is that by only having paid tiers, the values of the company are aligned with the users. They don’t have to worry about selling your data or showing you ads to make money. They only make money when you pay them, so they are incentivized to make the best product possible.

I’ve used Kagi as my only search engine over the last year and the search results are always spot on. Before Kagi, I used DuckDuckGo. I liked that I could get off of Google, but always felt like I defaulted back to using Google when the results weren’t very good. Kagi doesn’t have that problem at all, and I think it’s because they can focus solely on the best experience for the user. I hope Kagi sticks to the beliefs Google had in 1998 and continues to provide a great search engine focused on the user.