In parallel, we are developing LLM-content detector technology to be more efficient at detecting such content regardless of how it is monetised (and we will offer this as an API once developed).
(Source: have created such schemes, although would generally not recommend them to my customers nowadays)
This could also be an attack vector for adversaries looking to pollute Kagi's search results and/or force you to divert resources to policing it.
In fact, I would rather they not get penalized for it, since low-quality SEO content is a good way to show up in certain other search engines (Google), and every business wants to show up in Google, making that content quite common even from reputable businesses making a quality product.
So, we shouldn’t penalize low quality, SEO, spam because of people’s wants? I do want them to penalize those sites because they are a disservice and more often than not crappy, unsecured WordPress that drowns out those that are not spam.
Thank you Kagi team! A shame how far Google’s results have fallen.
Edit: also SEO is one of the more seedier parts of the software industry. Tons of unaware small businesses conned into these awful, low quality sites. I literally quit because it was so morally bankrupt.
Combine that with that guy who boasted about his 'SEO heist', I think it's a very valid concern.
I've also found that type of developer marketing valuable many times in the past. It's sometimes obvious its going to end in a pitch for the product, but often it does a good job summarizing the key problems in the space, mentioning or showing other solutions / offerings, and pitching which tradeoffs they made for their own product and how they solved issues.
Even if you don't go with the ad, you can quickly pivot to other named players or get a better understanding of the terminology or jargon to start searching more.
And we…want to discourage writing useful web pages, even though articles on understanding TypeScript's type system aren't all that closely related to their main product…? What am I missing?
I don't see the problem with what you're describing. It seems like one of the most contributory ways to market well.
Another decent one would be linux sysadmin info from Digital Ocean and the likes.
But for every joelonsoftware there are 99999 sites that have all copy/pasted the same tutorial about something basic and try to push some random product or just ads.
The problem is that people keep consuming the samey low quality content instead of skipping it (think superhero movies and Netflix series that are all indistinguishable from each other). As long as they're satisfied with that, they'll fall for fake product reviews too.
Someone did something like that to identify HN authors (as in correlating similar writing styles between pseudonyms) a few years back, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
Or a study applying similar analysis to LLMs: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.07305
Of course, LLM output can be tweaked to evade these, just like humans can alter their writing style or handwriting to better evade detection. But it's one approach.
