Opt-in collaborative shared result ranking

Niko

carl
I really like your idea and agree that these communal rankings could get really messy and political for Kagi. It should stay simple and have features that enhance rather than replace like Kagi's philosophy states. I feel like these communal ranking features end up replacing once search and creates a sphere of influence.

marcel001122 Couldn't agree more with your point and touches upon what I am trying to say in the above paragraph. Foundational features like this are very dangerous and like someone said before in this thread, it creates a pandoras box.

The super lenses idea I believe is the best solution/compromise to this OP's requests, from what I've read.
Enabling the subscription to rankings created by users using the super lenses idea, rather than a communal automatic ranking system, would avoid associating kagi with certain opinions as well as alleviate the risk of the default Kagi search being taken over by bots or certain groups pushing their website cause they managed to get the highest communal ranks.

Desoroxxx

I thought in the past of doing exactly that for my own search engine (before discovering Kagi), and I quickly realized that the time spent on a website is not proportional to its quality, in many cases it is actually the opposite.
Plus, it would worsen the SEO problem and just make websites optimize for you to spend more time there.

A more manual but less flawed approach would be community rating, literally just rating the results manually, but even that is a very flawed approach, since it could allow mass-downvoting or upvoting potentially instrumented, and also, nobody wants a big popup saying "please rank as a good result if you liked this".

In reality allowing "community" based ranking will probably never work because it will end up being instrumented.

pyrodonkey

Vlad I would not have a downvote/upvote system for search results. I don't need to do that on other search engines, so why would I need to do it on Kagi?

Temanor

I think this is a cool idea, but just because I spend a short amount of time on a webpage doesn't necessarily mean I didn't find what I was looking for.
I haven't read through this entire thread, so this may already have been brought up. I'm not sure what would be a good solution to this except for just not opting in to the feature.

Kernic

Anybody remember Web of Trust (WoT), that got fucked up?

I would like to have something similar here. Users can rate a search result with some metrics (content, advertising, … or something like this) and optionally add a comment.

When there are at least X reviews for a domain, the shield icon for all search results to this domain (the one on the right side of results) gets colored according to the reviews from red to green.
When there are X reviews for a specific result, there could be some icon in the shield (a checkmark?) and the review results for this specific page can be shown as color.

With this, we won’t interfere with the ranking, but users can decide to not click on a result, check the detailed ratings and rank the domain for themselves.

Why domain and page specific? I think there are sites where some content is great, some is bad. For example: I searched for a free video edition software a while ago. I found a list that compared different options and this list was really helpful. But the list was on the website of one of these options that isn’t really free, also other content on this site wasn’t that great. So I would rate this specific list up, but other parts of the website down.
Another example could be help pages of companies or Reddit. Not quality of content differs from topic to topic. So the overall score is based on all reviews as it reflects the overall quality of the website. But specific pages can be great or bad.

edapstah

The idea tempts me. However, I think it's a dangerous temptation. I don't like the idea of that data being collected or tracked, even if opt-in. There's the ~~possibility~~ likelihood of the pool being soured by bad actors, which I don't think is avoidable (RoxyRoxyRoxy makes a good point).

Something like this should be in the realm of a third-party group/extension instead. Kagi should rather focus on other features.

I'm of the opinion that implementing this would deteriorate Kagi.

Metaright

These suggestions strike me as not only counter to the commitment of minimizing user data collection, but also as solutions in search of a problem. It is not convincing to me that integrating other users' preferences and behaviors into my search will result in better results. Tracking time spent on results is invasive and involves either solving or ignoring the edge cases mentioned earlier, and other users' votes on results are just not relevant to me, nor would I care to involve them at all even if they were.

calm-tea6189

The discussion on this thread has convinced me to remove my upvote. I wish we could leverage the experience of other users more directly to improve results, but on balance it seems unlikely to work out that well. And even if Kagi could find a way, it would likely require a disproportionate amount of effort compared to the value added.

I do still believe that dismissing the idea entirely is unnecessarily cynical. Kagi is better positioned to make this work than others. But it isn’t easy or sure and focus is needed at this stage for certain!

jackkkk

This is a bizarre idea, but I'd love to rate some specific links or results as "great". It would be good to have the option to surface links which many users love higher in results pages. Almost like a "mini-reddit" but embedded into results.

When looking for blog posts or resources it would be good to raise results that other users have found interesting, complementary to how the "small web" domains are handpicked but for specific links.

fxgn

Duplicate of https://kagifeedback.org/d/4502-opt-in-collaborative-shared-result-ranking ?

jcf

Add inline feedback mechanisms in search results to flag low-quality content. Current search results frequently surface spam repositories, deprecated projects, and keyword-stuffed content above official documentation.

https://kagi.com/search?q=cloudflare+pages

Top two results:

github.com/cf-pages: Chinese spam repository for "Telegraph-Image" (unrelated to Cloudflare Pages)
github.com/cloudflare/pages-action: Deprecated repository with stop-sign emoji

The actual Cloudflare Pages documentation (pages.cloudflare.com) appears at result #7, below irrelevant "Interesting Finds" and HN discussions.

This pattern is particularly acute for technical queries where official docs should rank first. User flags could provide signal to demote spam/archived content without manual curation of every domain.

User-facing

Flag button on each result with categories: spam/scam, deprecated/archived, wrong topic, low quality
Single click, no modal dialogs—friction kills adoption
Optional: show aggregate flag count (e.g., "12 users flagged this")

Backend requirements

Threshold system: N unique user flags before ranking impact
Pattern matching: flag github.com/cf-pages → affects similar spam repos
User trust scoring: weight flags by account age, historical accuracy
Distinguish severity: "never show" (spam) vs. "demote heavily" (archived repos) vs. "slight penalty" (marginally relevant)
Review queue for high-velocity flagging (abuse detection)

Edge cases

Legitimate controversial content shouldn't be suppressible
Domain-level patterns (github.com/) need different thresholds than specific URLs
International results need locale-aware flagging

The moderation burden is real, but the potential upside on improve search results could be worthwhile.

Maybe this feature already exists and I've simply missed it?

jcf

This issue has escalated beyond needing a feature—Kagi is now prioritizing malware over legitimate results.

https://kagi.com/search?q=soundsource

The top result is a malicious GitHub organization impersonating the legitimate SoundSource product from Rogue Amoeba (rogueamoeba.com/soundsource). On a laptop, you must scroll through an entire page of Kagi’s curated sections (videos, “Interesting Finds”, etc.) before reaching the actual vendor site below the fold.

This represents a fundamental SERP quality failure. GitHub organizations—regardless of reputation, age, or authenticity—are ranking above established vendor domains for brand queries. This pattern affects multiple searches (cloudflare pages, soundsource, likely others).

GitHub has been unable to solve repository spam at scale. Kagi needs defenses against this attack vector independent of GitHub’s remediation efforts.

It feels like a bias towards GitHub and open source is negatively impacting the quality of search results. Perhaps I’ve inadvertently influenced my search results as these values somewhat align with my own.

fxgn

jcf I can't reproduce this, for me the legitimate link is the first result. Do you maybe have GitHub pinned in your results?

jcf

fxgn I don’t think so — the pin next to GitHub doesn’t look to be toggled on to me.

Edit: that’ll be it! I’ve increased the rank myself. I think I expect things to be orange now that I’m using Tahoe day to day. The grey pin looks like it’s inactive to my retrained eye.

PEBCAK. 🙈

fxgn

jcf

The grey pin looks like it’s inactive to my retrained eye.

Well on sites that you don't pin, there's no pin icon at all, but I guess it's possible to use custom css to make pin icons orange if you want that 🤷

jcf

fxgn I think there's an argument to say there's already an established pattern within the Kagi UI where orange indicates an active state. The tabs have an orange bar underneath, the Quick Answer has an orange lightning bolt, and other UI elements that aren't selected are grey.

I wouldn't be surprised if user testing showed an orange pin was more commonly recognised as active, especially given all results on the page have similar grey pins meaning only one state is represented at a glance.

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