Hacker News results cite flagged comment

brandtkurowski

I did a search for "jwz" and the third result was:

{A mentally ill San Francisco restaurant/nightclub owner who is eternally bitter that he did not become a billionaire like his colleagues and contemporaries ...}

While I find the quotation amusing (as I expect would he), I was surprised when I clicked through and could not find the same text on the page! It wasn't until I checked the page source that I realized Kagi had excerpted a quotation from a comment that was hidden by default due to being flagged.

While it may be the best comment on that page, it doesn't seem like Kagi should be citing flagged content that is visually hidden on the page being linked to.

k7absp2h

The content exists on the page; it is merely hidden by the platform's interface layer, not deleted.

Asking Kagi to suppress accurate results based on third-party UI preferences sets a dangerous precedent. Today it is a collapsed comment; tomorrow it is a "sensitive content" warning; eventually, it becomes the opaque algorithmic censorship that makes competitors unusable.

A search engine's job is to index what exists, not to follow the editorial preferences of every platform. Respect user intelligence and let individuals decide what to view. Do not break the fundamental contract of search to mirror third-party moderation layers.

brandtkurowski

k7absp2h in theory I agree, but in practice this feels like Kagi is enabling (or even encouraging) the old SEO practice of filling pages with invisible text to manipulate rankings.

This is a subtly different case since it's about content moderation decisions, but I still think it's odd for Kagi to excerpt content that's visually hidden. It betrays user expectations. I may expect them to index that content, but I don't expect them to show me content that I don't see when I follow the link.

k7absp2h

brandtkurowski