211–220 of 229 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t get it. “Link building” is not 2007 stuff. You find 2022 articles with that. If you don’t believe it it’s not my problem.
yeah but the 2022 article was written in 2010. It just has a "Last Updated: 2022" because Google is dumb and falls for that every time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was under the wrong impression that this [1] was the announcement blog post for Yep. As I read the comments here initially, many mentioned that blog post and I did not pay attention to the date on it and just took it for granted. [2] It seems that the 'announcement' post I was referring to isn't fresh announcement for Yep but a 2019 blog post by the founder explaining the concept. In any case my math was meant to b…
> In any case my math was meant to be a critique of the proposed model, not any particular product, and I still stand by that analysis. Except that your conclusion was to declare that search ad revenue is "not much" money, which is both plainly false and extremely strange for you to say, given that the entire premise of your own search engine is to take ad revenue out of the equation because the company profits and p…
My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check.
The reason I say that is because math does not care about my feelings, what you or I want or what the idea suggests. It has to work.
If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed. It is a terrible idea.
Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SEO itself is sleazy. Any gaming of search is sleazy, whether active or passive. The NSA is sleazy, even though they simply report on "the state of affairs".
Hi, I have a small SEO consultancy. We work with tech companies (mostly B2B saas), many you’ve heard of. You’re right that some approaches to SEO are sleazy. They are a bit old fashioned at this point, and usually result in short term results which crash and burn. Google does actually care if users don’t find a good result; they are working on improving the results every day. But you’re wrong in the sense that SEO do…
Even with just your own description of your activities you can find perverse incentives and negative externalities.
You aren't exactly incentivized to just create content that satisfies common queries. More fully, you're incentivized to create content that makes people think (rightly or wrongly) their query is being answered while also marketing your goods/services to them as much as possible.
Even assuming the best intentions to actually answer the query - be it altruism, discerning searchers, fear of Google, or something else - the content itself is hardly unbiased. This isn't inherently some kind of moral failure on your part, but it's hardly negligible either for the searcher. Everybody is going to have different thresholds here for what crosses the line, but I think it's understandable that some people are just unhappy having to even put in the time and energy to disentangle this aspect in the first place.
And this dovetails into one of the obvious externalities. Who is doing SEO, and who isn't? That totally unaffiliated small-time blogger that just happened to write up a bit of info after having the same problem as you probably isn't doing a whole lot of SEO. At least, they aren't hiring you to help increase their hosting costs. Somebody trying to find less biased views ends up having to wade through all the sites making enough money to pay for SEO first, to actually find what they're looking for. It should be pretty obvious why that does no favors for SEO's reputation.
But as I said at the beginning, you're not wrong either. This stuff goes deep into 'small' questions like profit-motives and competition for limited resources. Obviously and trivially correct answers aren't here.
I really do appreciate that you're approaching this from the much better intentioned side of things. One of the few things that might be obviously correct is that your approach is better than the sleezy way.
But that doesn't make it all rainbows and sunshine either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In any case my math was meant to be a critique of the proposed model, not any particular product, and I still stand by that analysis. Except that your conclusion was to declare that search ad revenue is "not much" money, which is both plainly false and extremely strange for you to say, given that the entire premise of your own search engine is to take ad revenue out of the equation because the company profits and p…
You are putting words in my mouth and starting to get personal at the same time. My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check. The reason I say that is because math does not care about my feelings, what you or I want or what the idea suggests. It has to work. If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than…
Please quote me, because I never put any words in your mouth, and accusing me of doing so is brazenly false and escalatory.
> and starting to get personal at the same time.
Bringing attention to the hypocrisy of your baseless claims is not a personal attack, particularly when the only question raised was your own company's status and publicly stated philosophy about the industry being directly discussed. You are not a victim in this situation.
> My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check.
This is the exact claim that you just accused me of "putting in your mouth," so you're doubling down on your completely faulty analysis, while also claiming I've somehow antagonized you into doing so.
> If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact
As folks in this thread have explained to you multiple times, there is no such thing as an even distribution of traffic. In reality, the content creators who currently get very little search traffic won't be affected by this additional revenue source, but they aren't expecting to and nobody is claiming that they will. Whereas a content creator who does receive a lot of search traffic would see an increase of revenue that is significant relative to their overall income.
You are still trying to push these fundamentally absurd notions that all content creators have the same sized audiences and that the search engine should be responsible for their baseline revenue -- and if the company doesn't meet those literally impossible requirements that no other business in the world would ever be held to, then the concept is somehow inherently flawed and won't have any relevant impact.
> and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed.
You're inventing problems that don't exist. The advertising and content industries have utilized minimum payouts for decades. The claims process could be as simple as a site verification code, which has also been used for decades by thousands of companies.
> It is a terrible idea. Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale.
This explains everything about your commentary, and I find it to be anti-social at its very core. You appear to be plainly declaring that money can only be impactful when invested in large businesses that "scale" -- scale at what, nobody knows, but apparently scaling is inherently beneficial to society in some way -- and that supporting small businesses is a "terrible idea." That is illogical, harmful and completely unjustifiable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are your thoughts on Neeva?
Not OP, but I loved Neeva’s results. That being said, it’s a bit too personalized to my liking. For example, it automatically detected my location to display the weather, and the app’s search history cannot be disabled without private mode. For a “private” search engine, it did way too many personalizations by default. These few things, and a somewhat confusing UI made me switch to Orion (Kagi).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are putting words in my mouth and starting to get personal at the same time. My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check. The reason I say that is because math does not care about my feelings, what you or I want or what the idea suggests. It has to work. If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than…
> You are putting words in my mouth Please quote me, because I never put any words in your mouth, and accusing me of doing so is brazenly false and escalatory. > and starting to get personal at the same time. Bringing attention to the hypocrisy of your baseless claims is not a personal attack, particularly when the only question raised was your own company's status and publicly stated philosophy about the industry be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You are putting words in my mouth Please quote me, because I never put any words in your mouth, and accusing me of doing so is brazenly false and escalatory. > and starting to get personal at the same time. Bringing attention to the hypocrisy of your baseless claims is not a personal attack, particularly when the only question raised was your own company's status and publicly stated philosophy about the industry be…
When conversation between two humans derails, I always remember The Egg: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
I don't trust Ahrefs at all. The whole SEO industry is tainted, and Ahrefs is not a good part of it. I don't want a search engine that pays "creators" (a search engine finds things, if they want to monetize it it is after it is found). I want a search engine that runs exactly as many ads as are needed to pay for itself, nothing more. Preferably with an option to pay for myself as an option. I'm guessing that means ht…
What are your thoughts on Neeva?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it’s how it works because I see that crap daily in footers, especially in the travel industry. Open any hotel listing on TripAdvisor and count the “[something] in [location]” links in the footer.
Travel, huh? I wonder if clickbaity links show up for things like life insurance, weight loss, and personal injury lawyers. Don't blame SEO because capitalism necessitated that businesses use whatever means possible to get their product in front of your face.
I love how there are now many little search engines trying to differentiate themselves from Google. A few others worth checking out are: 1. https://search.brave.com (they use their own index / my personal favourite) 2. https://kagi.com 3. https://neeva.com
I'd like to throw mine into the mix (we're a non-profit that plans to donate 80% of our profits to other non-profit organizations and charities, but we need more traffic before Google will enable ads, so at the moment then we're ad-free and not generating any income to donate): https://ask.moe
Consumers don't need another monetization model exploiting their web search.
They need a distinct web index/crawler infrastructure that bypasses SEO.