[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

Kagi having a small user base is actually an intrinsic advantage in that there is no SEO spam arms race.

It is not worth it to website operators to spend money/time trying to game Kagi’s algorithms.

Because of this, as a paying user, I hope they can find a sustainable business with a relatively small number of paid users, where they can make nice profits and have nice salaries for their employees based of selling a service to a relatively few people who value it.

[wiether]

Also do note that there isn't really a "Kagi's algorithm", since every Kagi user will received customized results based on how the set their account.

To game Google, you do stuff on your website content ; try various keywords regularly with authenticated and unauthenticated requests and see how your actions on your website affects your position on the requests' results.

With Kagi, you can't do unauthenticated requests, so the results you'll get will be unique to your account. So what you'll see is not what another random user will get. I guess you can still create new raw account each time, and maybe use the free-tier, but it's going to be a lot of work on your side without any assurance that the results are going to be the same on most user's results.

Furthermore, now that the team learned their lessons about monitoring usage more closely[^1], it's going to be quite hard to play this game without being noticed.

[^1]: https://status.kagi.com/clrnl9zwl97290beoine8zlvzx

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Also do note that there isn't really a "Kagi's algorithm", since every Kagi user will received customized results based on how the set their account.

Of course, there is a "Kagi algorithm" that takes the website's contents and ranks it according to the search. The algorithm, of course, takes into account user preferences, but there is a massive amount of commonality. Yes, that ranking algorithm probably can be games, just like Google's algorithm is gamed now with SEO spam.

However, because of the size, there is no real incentive to spend time/money gaming it, but it is misleading to suggest that there is no algorithm.

[xigoi]

If I understand correctly, the results on Kagi are only personalized based on the manually set whitelists/blacklists, not based on user tracking.