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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#51

Post by aimor »

Why does everything in the future-web have a price tag attached? If anything I want less business middlemen on the web period. I don't understand why funding through direct sales will give a better product than funding through advertising:

"And yes, the non-zero price point will mean you have to budget it with your other costs. But faster access to higher quality information will make you much more competitive globally, so you can decide if the investment will be worth it, like any other purchase you make. This will in turn incentivize these products to be even better, a positive feedback loop driven by entirely aligned incentives."

For businesses I think this effect is only driven by competition regardless of revenue model.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#52

Post by ryandvm »

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…

> since I can't set it as my default browser in Safari

Wait, what? It boggles my mind that technologically inclined people continue to use this user-hostile, walled garden nonsense.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#54

Post by low_tech_love »

akrymski wrote: post #37

> The more you tell your assistant, the better it can help you, so when you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it’ll provide options based on what you like to eat and how far you want to drive. Ask it for a good coffee maker, and it’ll recommend choices within your budget from your favorite brands with only your best interests in mind. The search will be personal and contextual and excitingly so! Actually…

I think the point is precisely that PageRank is not being used anymore.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#55

Post by jchw »

aimor wrote: post #51

Why does everything in the future-web have a price tag attached? If anything I want less business middlemen on the web period. I don't understand why funding through direct sales will give a better product than funding through advertising: "And yes, the non-zero price point will mean you have to budget it with your other costs. But faster access to higher quality information will make you much more competitive global…

I hate to seem condescending, but the "why" is basically what the essay is about for the first 75%. The issue that advertisements have is that the incentives and desires of advertisers usually misaligns with users, sometimes greatly. It's not a concept that's particularly new; for example, take Wikipedia's reasoning for not accepting advertisements. (I'd like to ignore the unrelated issues with Wikipedia funding here, since it's not relevant to this particular point.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Funding_Wikipedia_th...

I don't believe direct sales fixes everything. There's no single party whose ultimate wishes are fully aligned with what's best for everyone. I do think, however, that direct sales and donations are preferable to ads in this regard.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#56

Post by aabaker99 »

I just signed up and tried it a little bit and I like what I see so far. I find myself increasingly frustrated with Google search results for a particular use case: searching for documentation. For example, today's work had me thinking about Python's datetime and timedelta and I wanted a reference on what functions are available. With Google I am annoyed with results from geeksforgeeks.org and freecodecamp.com because they are not reference materials and generally only cover some basic use cases. In Google, those two sites are in the top four results. In Kagi, they are not. Instead, there is a longer-form blog post from guru99.com, stack overflow, and the official Python documentation.

Now, I will admit that for this particular query Kagi and Google results are pretty close. But my general experience is that when I search in Google I find that I have to look farther down the search results to look past the blogspam to find the authoritative reference.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#57

Post by yamtaddle »

artificial wrote: post #21
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…

Search peaked 10 years ago. There's lots of regression in Google Search. For example, you used to be able to search images by specific dimensions. You can do this today on Yandex. The quality of results and promotion of sponsored results, the scraping and displaying of site contents so users visit less (how is this legal btw?) Not respecting verbatim searches.

About '08. Spam took over right after that. Used to go in waves of better/worse as they played cat-n-mouse with spammers, but they seemed to kinda give up right around then.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#59

Post by c7b »

> Ask it for a good coffee maker, and it’ll recommend choices within your budget from your favorite brands with only your best interests in mind.

It sounds all great and I agree that we should be prepared to pay for quality services instead of expecting everything to be free (so I will have a look at kagi). But this promise makes me skeptical: Twitter is apparently going to lose money on their "$8/m for half the ads" deal with US users because the ads make more money than that for them. Sure, paying for your services is going to mitigate the incentive problem, but it might not fully eliminate it. Of course, kagi has a reputation to lose with its users, so that is another line of defence, but I guess the best way to build such trust would be to be maximally transparent, even about the incentive structures.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#60

Post by leobg »

ketzo wrote: post #50
rgbrgb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personalized results. If you Google yourself, you just see what you see. But you can never know what others will see.
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