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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#121

Post by andromeduck »

andirk wrote: post #17
andromeduck wrote: post #10

I've always wondered why Google doesn't have some way to provide an explicit signal from the users like favorite/bookmark or explicitly like/dislike a search result. It's often pretty fustrating to try and find something you know you've seen before but don't remember quite the name of or exact keywords.

Google added some "plus" button when Google+ was pretending to be a thing. It made no sense though as how would someone know it's a good result before they visit it?

Yeah I think a browser frame button like "favorite" is what is needed.

Ideal would probably be face/eye tracking to check attention/response but thats way too creepy to work.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#122

Post by mrkramer »

>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. 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!

This is exactly what Google is trying to do....unsuccessfully. I doubt you will have the scale to outperform Google if you try to replicate Google's AI model and replace ad based search with subscription based search. My point is don't do what Google is doing, think differently.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#123

Post by wolpoli »

PaulHoule wrote: post #101
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)

Indeed, after Google, links slowly disappeared and no one could really "surf" the web anymore.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#124

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

PaulHoule wrote: post #101
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)

Google didn’t gaslight the web: Web directories died out because they go stale, fast, and require far more human curation than is economically viable. I remember Yahoo effectively deprecating their directory pages long before I heard of Google, back when I was using Dogpile and CompuServe.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#125

Post by projektfu »

booleandilemma wrote: post #83
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Google search always gives lousy results, except when you have complained about it, in which case people who check your work always get optimal results. /s

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#126

Post by andirk »

andromeduck wrote: post #121
andirk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google added some "plus" button when Google+ was pretending to be a thing. It made no sense though as how would someone know it's a good result before they visit it?

Yeah I think a browser frame button like "favorite" is what is needed. Ideal would probably be face/eye tracking to check attention/response but thats way too creepy to work.

Brave browser uses "attention" as the main factor. It's currently used for their paying the content creators and charging for ads, but with their new search engine [0] it may be a factor there too.

[0] https://search.brave.com/

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#127

Post by simonbw »

BasilPH wrote: post #49
lesuorac wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic argument not being watertight is the problem. This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads, they just didn't make enough money otherwise. Afaik [1], there's about 5 employees and the revenue only covers server expenses while they're still trying to get more headcount. Not an expert on bootstrapping but I'm pretty sure you don't want to expand faster than your revenue does otherwise you stop being able…

They mention that users can invest in them through SAFEs. This only makes sense if they plan an exit, either by selling or through an IPO, or am I missing something?

I think it implies that they intend to take VC money at some point in the future, like a series A, and they’re trying to avoid VC money now while they can get better terms. I don’t know if that necessarily means they plan an exit, or if they’d be happy just being profitable, but I do think it implies they plan to grow significantly.

EDIT: Their website says that they don’t plan to take VC money, so I have no idea what a SAFE means in this case. The point of a SAFE is that the investor is guaranteed the best terms when a priced round of investment happens.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#128

Post by leoh »

Invictus0 wrote: post #109
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 r…

I very much disagree with your premise

* one does not need $200-300B ARR to run a search engine; and merely making a ton of money does not mean that the way that one has been making that money will continue forever

* using Kagi, one realizes how much the web has been perverted, in my opinion, by the obsession with the ad model; there are many nice, novel things that Kagi could introduce which would reduce ad revenue for a company like Google, but would be useful and novel for Kagi without loss in revenue (on the contrary — could help); ie google is incentivized to keep people on the site through various irritating means; a search engine that isn’t distracting and gives me what I want — I would be more than glad to pay for (and already do pay Kagi $10/month)

Other thoughts:

* Supposing $10/month (honestly I would consider $20) with 100M paying users; that is $1B MRR which is not bad at all and is more than plenty for a meaningfully sized team with meaningful salaries.

* Just like how lowered energy prices during and after the Industrial Revolution made manufacturing at scale feasible, the incredible amount of high quality OSS and infrastructure these days is making it increasingly feasible to do things Google did 20 years ago — something unthinkable for even the best engineers of that era. Not to mention the relative ease of collecting capital with payment services (let alone VCs, etc.) today — even with a looming recession factored in.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#129

Post by cardanome »

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…

While I am very willing to pay money for a user-centric search engine the requirement to do so directly conflicts with the greatest must-have feature that I need from one: Anonymity.

Now the issues is not just privacy but making sure it does NOT optimize search results based on prior searches or other facts it knows about me.

Now the big problem is that one would think delivering the exact search results that I am looking for is a good thing. No. It is super dangerous. It can causes me to live in a bubble, blinding me of possible opposing opinions. It is feeding my ignorance.

So there is a goal conflict here. I don't know how to solve it. I wish there would be something like Wikipedia for search engines but even the wiki models has its problems and biases.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#130

Post by andirk »

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.

For HTML, CSS, Javascript, and browser APIs, I simply add "mdn" to the search to guarantee I get the official-ish MDN docs. From there, I can dive in to W3C specs, etc if needed.

Those training wheel search results are annoying but they're highly ranked probably because most people like and use them.

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