It matters to me because I believe the results are organically rated, i.e. nobody paid my search provider directly for top results.
With Google you become used to skip the first paid results that visually differ every so slightly — so much so that less technically inclined people, when I observe them, will click the paid results not knowing the difference.
I believe that, currently, Kagi is not building a profile of me based on my searches.
Basically, if I’m searching for something, and I’m not looking to buy something, the search is a lot more honest and a lot less stressful.
Ads on other sites can be adblocked, this is orthogonal; you can block ads on Google, but I just don’t trust that the algorithms are in my best interest, because I didn’t pay for anything.
How does any of that effect the fact that the results will probably be the same, taking you to the same page as bing or google, which in turn are ad supported?
Not really. Kagi weeds out those pretty well in practice. The results are mostly same as from Google, but the crap is removed and organic sites get a boost.
The only place where Kagi is mostly worse is figuring out that the query is actually about a specific place and results should point to a map. At least for me.
Which makes sense. There are no Kagi maps. It might be interesting to leverage OSM.
> Not really. Kagi weeds out those pretty well in practice. The results are mostly same as from Google, but the crap is removed and organic sites get a boost.
It doesn't do that because that's impossible. If you search for something that's in the news, you visit the news site retrieved by the search engine. That has no bearing on the fact that site will, most likely, be heavily ad supported, most likely.
> organic sites get a boost.
Sorry but I can't infer any meaning from that fragment. What is an "organic site"?
Please see their article [1] for details, before claiming something is impossible.
TL;DR: They check how many ads and trackers are on websites and punish those in the sorting.
Most of the useless websites are full of affiliate links, ads and tracking so they naturally get downgraded.
If you’re talking about a niche topic with only one result you obviously still get that one result, but I’d argue for most search terms the issue lies in ordering the very many results.
Why does it matter when 95% of the links you click on those results will carry a dozen adverts?
You are paying for a minor level of practical self righteousness