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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#41

Post by pdabbadabba »

matai_kolila wrote: post #11

What a completely disconnected-from-reality article. There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you're looking for, and so many people do it literally on a minute-to-minute basis that it's flat absurd to call that ineffective. It's trivially easy to learn something by typing a question into Google; maybe when writing an article try gut checking it against obvious observed reality first. I simply c…

> Edit: Oh wait I found it; the author is Vladimir Prelovac, CEO, Kagi Inc. What does Kagi Inc. do? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader, but I bet you guess it in one try...

Point taken. But it's not as though this was concealed. The top line of the page is "Tales from Kagi." The piece is hosted on blog.kagi.com. The author's signature at the end of the piece reads "CEO, Kagi Inc." The final line of the post is "I hope you join us [i.e., Kagi] on this journey."

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#42

Post by notatoad »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #7

Honestly not sure if search engines are the future at all, at least for commercialisable content. More and more I find myself searching through moderated social media like Reddit or Facebook Groups/Marketplace for product recommendations or local services. Gave Kagi a go, but it seemed to be even worse than Google for what I tried.

i think general purpose search engines will always have a place, but they're ultimately a tool you use for finding information, not necessarily a tool you should be expecting to make decisions for you.

so many of the complaints about google search results seem to be along the lines of "i asked google what X i should purchase, and they served me an ad", whether that's a first-party ad on google or search results that are external ads. If you're only attempting to use a search engine to find facts, it's a much more satisfactory experience.

search results for opinions are and have always been trash - they don't serve you the best opinion, or the most trustworthy, or the most well-reasoned. they serve you the opinion most relevant to your search terms. and that's probably not what you want.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#43

Post by tyingq »

knicholes wrote: post #28
widdershins wrote: post #18

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…

Oh, but you CAN tell if they're sending those keypresses back to the mothership by monitoring the networking tab in your browser.

Maybe. They can hold batches and smuggle them in various ways.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#44

Post by matai_kolila »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #41
matai_kolila wrote: post #11

What a completely disconnected-from-reality article. There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you're looking for, and so many people do it literally on a minute-to-minute basis that it's flat absurd to call that ineffective. It's trivially easy to learn something by typing a question into Google; maybe when writing an article try gut checking it against obvious observed reality first. I simply c…

> Edit: Oh wait I found it; the author is Vladimir Prelovac, CEO, Kagi Inc. What does Kagi Inc. do? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader, but I bet you guess it in one try... Point taken. But it's not as though this was concealed. The top line of the page is "Tales from Kagi." The piece is hosted on blog.kagi.com. The author's signature at the end of the piece reads "CEO, Kagi Inc." The final line of the post…

It just bothers me that this blatant SEO attempt is an article about how SEO ruined PageRank.

Maybe it doesn't bother you, just thought it was worth calling out explicitly.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#46

Post by knicholes »

tyingq wrote: post #43
knicholes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, but you CAN tell if they're sending those keypresses back to the mothership by monitoring the networking tab in your browser.

Maybe. They can hold batches and smuggle them in various ways.

If they have an auto-complete feature, the keypresses WILL be seen in not even in a smuggled way. They'll be directly in the URL to the search function!

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#47

Post by cube2222 »

I've been using Kagi on and off for the last few months. I often forget about it since I can't set it as my default browser in Safari.

But in general, especially when looking for specific phrases or trying to find discussions related to a topic, it's working extremely well. Whenever I used it, I was happy with it, and the search result quality was better than in Google.

It's good to note though that iirc Kagi does actually use commercial search services by Google/Microsoft behind the scenes, in addition to their own custom components.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#48

Post by unstatusthequo »

cube2222 wrote: post #47

I've been using Kagi on and off for the last few months. I often forget about it since I can't set it as my default browser in Safari. But in general, especially when looking for specific phrases or trying to find discussions related to a topic, it's working extremely well. Whenever I used it, I was happy with it, and the search result quality was better than in Google. It's good to note though that iirc Kagi does ac…

They have a Safari extension. Have at it!

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#49

Post by BasilPH »

lesuorac wrote: post #39
widdershins wrote: post #18

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…

The economic argument not being watertight is the problem. This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads, they just didn't make enough money otherwise. 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…

They mention that users can invest in them through SAFEs. This only makes sense if they plan an exit, either by selling or through an IPO, or am I missing something?

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#50

Post by ketzo »

rgbrgb wrote: post #36
yarg wrote: post #6

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

There's maybe a good argument there for blackbox (non-interpretable) ranking algos.

How would you really blackbox a search ranking, though? A website owner can always just search for themselves, and see how their ranking changes.

When there’s so much money at stake, people will go to great lengths to reverse-engineer the things that put them higher in the page, no matter how you try to hide the levers that make the rankings work.

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