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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#71

Post by larve »

I've been using kagi exclusively for the last 3 months. I pay $30 because I feel it's worth it and I can afford it. While I tried to use duckduckgo, I found myself reverting to google on every other search. With kagi, I never had to, and I have built myself a set of useful filters based on what project I'm working on. This, along with switching to mastodon, means that I almost never encounter ads anymore. I honestly feel like I got my "internet" back. I didn't realize how much the google search suggestions would taint my day to day.

I whole heartedly recommend kagi. My favourite feature is the "blast from the past" that shows results that are not online anymore, but links to web.archive.org.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#73

Post by mrkramer »

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…

>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.

Google already does this with YT; YouTube Premium[1] offers you YT experience without ads plus extra perks. And YouTube Premium has apparently more than 25 million subscribers in US alone[2] and 80 million subscribers globally[3]. My thinking is power users are ready to pay for ad-free experience and casual users probably not because they are not heavy users.

>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.

A lot of spammers and fraudsters see advertising as their most effective gateway and tactic to scamming people so I wouldn't count on reliability and safety of all ads that you see.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/premium

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1261865/youtube-premium-...

[3] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-music-premium-8...

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#74

Post by rgbrgb »

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.

I mean blackbox in the sense that I can't explain how it works or look under the hood and understand it. Many machine learning models you want to be explainable for UX or debugging (e.g. Netflix's "because you watched X"). This is a rare case where it's better if you can't figure out how it produced a result.

Instead, you want to throw queries and user behavior into a blackbox algo and have it tell you a result then give it feedback on whether the result was good (did the user come back and ask the same question? did they click the top result and leave or did they have to come back and click through many more?). I think this is kind of how google works now, though results are frequently meh. Millions of backlinks will get you noticed but your ranking will just keep dropping if users don't appear to find your content useful (e.g. they hit the back button a lot and keep searching).

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#75

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

aabaker99 wrote: post #56

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 becaus…

The blogspam has made Google and Bing/DDG almost completely unusable for technical searches.

Go search for something like "postgres cte" and you won't find anything useful until probably halfway down the page. And maybe not at all.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#76

Post by karaterobot »

I don't think Google even uses PageRank anymore, do they? So, the title is correct, but not super meaningful. It sounded like the battle cry he's sounding is more like "The Age of Search Advertisement is Over", so why not use that as a title?

By the way, I've been a satisfied Kagi customer since the day the beta ended, and I have nothing bad to say about the service. Okay, it would be nice if they remembered I like to view temperature in Fahrenheit, but whatever.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#77

Post by [deleted] »

jll29 wrote: post #40

The OP over-reaches in that PageRank is just a small ingredient in Google's ranking, which covers many other components from TFIDF score to anchor text features and yes, PageRank. Naturally, Google used PageRank as a differentiator in its marketing, but technically. Bing has been known to use >150 features to score the relevance of a page, given a query, so one would expect Google to exploit a similar order of magnit…

[deleted]

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#78

Post by aimor »

jchw wrote: post #55
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…

I could have been more clear: I don't understand why the non-advertising business's interest is aligned with that of the user. I follow the idea that advertising creates a conflict of interests, but I don't follow that not advertising aligns interests. The business is there to sell a product for the most profit. Making money by selling the product doesn't by itself give them an incentive to produce a better product.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#79

Post by shafyy »

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 don't understand why funding through direct sales will give a better product than funding through advertising

The more the economic incentives of a business are aligned with the customer's interest, the better. Of course, it's not perfect, and business still might have an incentive to show ads on top of charging you, but it's certainly much better than having hugely misaligned incentives as with Google and social media today.

> Why does everything in the future-web have a price tag attached?

Because it uses real resources like humans and hardware that cost real money in the real world. You don't ask why you need to pay money to buy an apple at the grocery store, do you?

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