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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#101

Post by PaulHoule »

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

PageRank is gameable but harder to game than some of the competing algorithms (such as a straight link count.)

The real consequence PageRank had was that it got web pages to stop linking to each other…. Google gaslighted people into removing the competition they could have had navigating from one page to another through links. (e.g. web directories)

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#102

Post by sergimas15 »

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…

awesome

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#103

Post by SahAssar »

matai_kolila wrote: post #44
pdabbadabba wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> blatant SEO attempt

It is marketing and trying to influence the discourse, but I don't see how you can call it SEO.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#104

Post by Ar-Curunir »

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…

Do you think that running servers, writing code, maintaining systems happens for free? How else is the service supposed to fund itself?

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#105

Post by c7b »

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.

Isn't FB marketplace just another search engine? It seems unlikely that the algorithm would be able to purely guess what you currently (actually) need.

And moderated groups don't sound like a solution to the 'I have a concrete question that I want an answer for right now' problem either (unless you're thinking of massive live chats with many lurkers, which sounds more like the web of the past, tbh).

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#106

Post by pornel »

nordsieck wrote: post #65
leobg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Personalized results. If you Google yourself, you just see what you see. But you can never know what others will see. That just turns it into a statistical problem. I don't think you can escape the problem of a search engine being used as an oracle.

Ranking has many many signals, which are mixed in non-linear ways, and are dampened and vary over time. You only get low-resolution low-frequency sampling of the result.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#108

Post by entwife »

I have always imagined PageRank to be modeled after how academic papers are judged. What cites that publication, and who that publication cites, are quite important information to put a publication in context. For the same reason, I don't think PageRank will go away.

Two improvements that I'd like to see in search results are: (1) the ability to exclude particular domains from search results; and (2) the ability to over-weight certain referrers (i.e. a link from Encyclopedia Britannica is worth more than a link from Wikipedia, which is worth more than a link from MySpace.)

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#109

Post by Invictus0 »

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…

Google's revenue is over 280B annualized from last quarter's numbers. Let's just assume that every person on earth is using Google at an equal rate. That's $35 worth of revenue per user per year. There is no way that you can come close to that without doing ads; the median global income is less than 4000 international dollars per year. So naturally, there is a strong pressure for companies to pivot to ads once they run out of other ideas to grow the business.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#110

Post by valarauko »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #38

Why would you create a search engine that looks exactly like every other search engine? And further, specifically Google. Why would you not take the chance to completely reimage search into something way better than the absolute random crap we have today? Whatever the next web discovery engine looks like, it'll look and feel entirely different. It won't be the equivalent of someone saying, "Hey Facebook is bad, look…

At this stage, the chief complaint of most prospective users is the quality of search results from the market leader, rather than the layout or user experience. It's a 5-person company, and I'd rather they focus their efforts on the search algorithm.
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