Kagi is indeed a great search engine. Why oh why can't it just be an option on the Safari search engine preference panel? Maybe the login.
You can set as the default search engine with a Safari extension
The Age of PageRank Is Over
91–100 of 380 posts
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#92In a word, no. I’ve spent a lot of time on SEO over the past couple years, and inbound links still matter a lot to search rankings and traffic. This is clear evidence that PageRank still matters.
From a more macro perspective, I’ll believe Google is failing when a competitor starts eating their lunch. What I see right now are a bunch of would-be competitors who want to eat their lunch, including this company. The blog post is probably best understood as aspirational rather than descriptive.
As a user of search, Google results are frustrating at times, but is that because “pagerank is over?” Or because it’s an incredibly hard problem they’re working on? Google does not have to be objectively perfect to keep succeeding, they just need to be better than other search engines.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#93It’s about time. Google results are so full of promoted and sponsored content that you must use tricks to get past it. Even so most of the best things are no longer findable via Google even if you know what you are searching for!. I’ve been using Kagi for a few weeks now and really like the results. I signed up for a paid account to support their progress.
Cool but why do I need to do a login to even give it a test drive? Immediate turn off.
Because they only allow 50 searches per month in their free tier. You can check how the UI looks using the "Example search results" area in the home page.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#94> 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 f…
That's no really relevant to Google or Kagi.
YT Premium is a reaction to the infeasibility of subsidizing the extreme cost of hosting video streaming with ads alone. The scale of ads needed to cover hours of streaming video vs. ads to cover search results are magnitudes in difference, and people are more willing to pay to make those streaming ads disappear.
Even so, with a paid option, the vast majority of YT users still use Youtube w/o the Premium subscription.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#95Is there a way to provide feedback to Kagi that a link isn't relevant in their search? Searching "us election results" for example gives me the results from 2020.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#96PageRank was never as important to Google as Google said it was, the idea of indexing keywords that appear in link text was much more important.
It took years for peer-reviewed papers to show any benefit from PageRank at all, part of it is that a real relevance function has to balance the keyword x document influence vs the document influence and you don’t come out ahead ranking an irrelevant document highly if it has a high page rank. (E.g. a popular document that is irrelevant is… irrelevant)
If you believe the original paper, PageRank is simulating the density of a random walk over web pages and Google has been able to sample that density directly w/ Google Analytics, Chrome browser telemetry and all their other web bugs.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Making money by selling the product doesn't by itself give them an incentive to produce a better product.
Selling more product / continued subscriptions is the incentive.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#98> 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"…
It's an easier sell than $20/month, for example, especially since the idea of paying for search is already a hard sell for most people. Even if Kagi eventually fails, it'll be an interesting experiment and finally gives all the people who repeat "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" an opportunity to put their ideology into action.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't entirely follow, though; the idea is that you want the people who pay you to be satisfied with what they're paying for so that they continue to do so, convince others to do so, and are willing to increase their spending. If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be a conflict of interest for advertisers in the first place.
There's reasons that the incentive to keep the users satisfied may not be followed, but it's mostly tangential, and relates more to other forces than it does where the money comes from.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#100Hot take. As long as ads are clearly indicated, and non-promoted results are easily accessible and usable, I don't have a problem with Google relying on ad funding for their main development efforts. The amount of behavior they have made accessible to anyone for free has produced an immense amount of qualitative societal value. IMO this far outweighs the annoyance of ads present on various search results.