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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

81–90 of 380 posts

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#81
post #36
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.

Then you get SEO witchcraft consultants who charge an arm and a leg for what they promise is a secret but oh-so-good method of improving page rank.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#82
Seemed like a perfect opportunity for Apple -- they could give their customers an actually useful search engine subsidized by their hardware sales. At the same time they could starve google and bling of the user data provided by customers using search in safari or siri.

Instead they are going the other way. Sad.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#83

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.

I searched for that (without the quotes) and this was the 2nd result:

https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-tutorial/postg...

The first result was the official documentation.

What else are you expecting?

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#84
post #31
post #25

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.

But then, you can't really search youtube as efficiently as you can texts. That's the only downside for me, sieving through tens of videos just to find something that might be in the middle that's releavant to what i'm searching.

That’s true but there’s also a steep positive benefit in information density and fidelity.

Compare written instructions for e.g. fixing a car vs a video of a person showing you how to do it. Latter is much more helpful

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#85
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then you get SEO witchcraft consultants who charge an arm and a leg for what they promise is a secret but oh-so-good method of improving page rank.

The current state of the world!

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#88
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…

If you want less middlemen on the web, you are probably not in favor of advertising. Price tags only involve a middle man of the payment processor. Advertisement involves ALL of the advertisers on the platform.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#89

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.

Maybe it's just me but search results for that were very helpful in my case. Official documentation, stack overflow questions, an informative blog about cte gotchas, all within the top half of results.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#90
post #71

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…

Congrats! I’ve recently started the journey towards more decentralization and kagi seems to be the next logical fit. So far I’ve self hosted backups with s3 replication and next cloud over tailscale has been amazing but I’m still trying to figure out social media.

How does the workflow look like for sharing an album of pics with friends and family (who are on traditional social media platforms)?

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