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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#111

Post by drc500free »

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

I'd say rather that it wasn't designed for modern adversarial scenarios. Google won the search engine wars because PageRank did better in the late 90s adversarial environment, where every page was packed with white-on-white keywords. It was significantly harder to create a counterfeit influence graph than to keyword spam with hidden text elements.

That all seems pretty quaint these days, but even worms and viruses at the time were versions of "my goodness, who would ever write a script that emails itself to your address book, or copies itself across the network to all the other unsecured PCs with passwordless full hard drive access?"

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#112

Post by thfuran »

julienb_sea wrote: post #100

Hot 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.

The problem with ads isn't that they're present on screen (though that can get annoying), it's that their presence causes a fundamental misalignment of incentives. A paid service without ads is primarily incentivized to provide value to the customer. An entirely ad supported service is incentivized to provide value to advertisers first, potentially to the detriment of the users, and to users only to the extent that it brings in more ad money.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#114

Post by thewebcount »

aimor wrote: post #78
jchw wrote: post #55

Earlier 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.

If they don't make the website provide value to me, I will stop paying them. If things are popping up that are irrelevant to my search, that's not helping me. If it's not helping me, I stop paying, and they feel a hit. It's probably not a big deal if a single person does it, but if enough people do it, then they either change to get those people back (or replace them with new customers), or they go out of business.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#115

Post by jmyeet »

This is marketing. That's all it is. It may as well be called "Search engine alternative to Google declares Google's secret sauce is dying".

This reminds me of posts from 10 years ago where "the future of search of social" (this post says "user-centric" instead). Even Google feared that outcome (given the then-meteoric rise of Facebook; oh how the turns have tabled). Personally I find the musings in this post to border on nonsencial.

But here's the interesting part: certain ideas are sticky just people want them to be true. The core one here is that "search is broken" or even the lesser "Google is getting worse". It's one many on HN like to push. I don't think theres any quantitative empirical evidence of this. It's people wanting it to be true and you'll see it on every thread about DDG (as one notable example).

Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of "Google killers" who seem to have all fallen into different versions of this trap.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#116

Post by holoduke »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #75
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.

Always add the keyword 'forum' to your search terms. It filters out most of the crap.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#117

Post by ineptech »

> In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data, knowing its incentives align with yours.

This is true IFF this software is open source and running on my own server. Hard to see how this can happen.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#118

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

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.

One option is to create a 'slow search engine' that only re-ranks pages once a year, doing the computation during the year and then updating the ranks all at once. You could evaluate the ranking before releasing it and patch obvious exploits, or even patch out exploits after the yearly release using data from before the release. This should slow the info leak to a crawl

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#120

Post by MomoXenosaga »

I will always remember a commercial wherein some shitty marketing company promised to hack Google's algorithm and get you on the first page.

So what destroyed the relative purity of search engines and the early web? Money. How do we solve it? Money apparently.

Yeah good luck with that.

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