[Fede_V]

I think the complaints about SEO spam are valid - but - I think msweibel and pg misdiagnose the challenge. The challenge is that you are dealing with an adversarial system, and, the better your search engine is, the more widely used it becomes, the more valuable it is for your adversaries to find ways to game your rankings.

Any new niche search engine will go through a small window of time where they have the luxury that none of the sites they are indexing are spending all their effort trying to reverse engineer your signals, and optimize against them. I'm incredibly skeptical that they can remain useful once people all the SEO efforts of various marketers start to be turned against them.

[ajmurmann]

The main motivation to SEO crappy content seems to be ads and affiliates links. What if you take the motivation away to SEO crappy content by deprioritizing sides that contain ads or affiliate links? Of course Google would never do this, but someone else could.

[inetknght]

> The main motivation to SEO crappy content seems to be ads and affiliates links.

Maybe the main observed motivation. But I'd argue that a lot of that is just a fraudulently-profitable front to much more devious problems.

[Drew_]

This doesn't work because all of the "good" content has ads and affiliate links too.