31–40 of 380 posts
The people who used to make niche sites that helped people and linked to other sites moved to youtube. Plenty of excellent youtube channels that 10 years ago would've been websites. I don't really have a problem with this, all things change.
EDIT: I'm dumb. Please do not reply or I will Sylvia Plath myself.
It has been for a long time. PageRank was never designed for adversarial scenarios. It reminds me of KPIs like lines of code - it's only useful if it cannot be manipulated. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Actually Google is already doing this. Results are personalized and contextual. It can't really know what I feel like eating this evening because I don't, but it can guess.
I applaud the author for trying, but I don't see an alternative to PageRank being proposed. How exactly is Kagi proposing to rank results?
And no, I don't want an AI generated summary when I search for the best tutorial to do X. I want a list of tutorials. The question is how to rank that list, and I've yet to see anyone do a better job than Google.
Google is far more than PageRank. Its an AI ranking model that has the largest training dataset (queries and clicks).
Ads may suck, but simply charging for the same service isn't really innovative. Would I pay for a version of Google without ads? Probably not. But that's just me - I actually like to know who is advertising for particular searches. A company with an ad budget to rank at the top of ads is probably more trustworthy than an anonymous website.
Why would you not take the chance to completely reimage search into something way better than the absolute random crap we have today?
Whatever the next web discovery engine looks like, it'll look and feel entirely different.
It won't be the equivalent of someone saying, "Hey Facebook is bad, look at MY social network!" and it being the exact same layout and user experience as Facebook, with different margins, padding, fonts and colors.
Whatever comes next, it'll be like comparing Twitter to Facebook, or TikTok to Instagram.
As the kids used to say, this ain't it, chief.
I've been using Kagi the last few months. I've never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I don't really 'notice' them. Like most, I now search reflexively, as an extension of the mind, so I only 'notice' search when it's bad. What really excites me is that is that I'm paying them. That sounds odd, but seriously. It's incredibly refreshing to know th…
Afaik [1], there's about 5 employees and the revenue only covers server expenses while they're still trying to get more headcount. Not an expert on bootstrapping but I'm pretty sure you don't want to expand faster than your revenue does otherwise you stop being able to make all the decisions for the company.
> Yet, despite being acutely aware of the dangers of ad-supported search, selling ads was adopted as the primary business model of the new search venture just a few years later.
Google was successful as a superior search engine, pushing out AltaVista and similar, earlier alternative search engines and Yahoo!-style portals curated by humans. However, Google wasn't a successful business for quite some time. Eventually, they adopted (some people would say "stole" - there was a lawsuit) Yahoo!-owned Overture's ad model, which changed everything. Yahoo! owned Overture, and Overture had a critical patent. Yahoo! made one critical mistake: they settled the lawsuit for relatively little money. The rest is history.
Now many people complain about decaying search result quality levels. That just means there is space for a new search engine, how exciting! The good news is it has never been easier and cheaper to start a full-text index of the Web and associated search. For about 50k (a Xoogler's estimate, not mine) you should be able to get going. Sites like Gigablast show it can even be done as a one-man show, which I would not recommend (to many complexities in "small" bits even HTML to plan text conversion, load balancing, incremental inverted index updating etc. - all requiring nowadays some specialist expertise in a game where you can't afford to reinvent the wheel because you don't know the scientific literature/state of the art). The one thing that is hard to get is initial user traffic. But I think HNers will be happy to give each new engine a try!
In summary, I think there never was an "age of PageRank". But you may say Google Web search is past its prime. Perhaps Google could change that if they wanted - it may be that it isn't much of a priority at the moment, hard to say (they are (too?) big now).
Edit: Here, I've interviewed Shadi Saleh, the architect of Syria's search engine (if you think it's impossible to get up and running with a small team): https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2019/07/syrias-first-web-searc...