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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

131–140 of 380 posts

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Writing blog articles like this and posting them to social media to create crosslinks is a very common SEO strategy to "trick" PageRank into promoting your site higher in search results.

It's the whole purpose behind all of those random blog articles on corporate sites; to improve PageRank ranking.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#133
"We Are Building A Web Where The Default Is Social" -- Mark Zuckerberg, 2010

He then described how people will first do their usual _web searches_ via FB search bar. To my knowledge, that didn't happen. And he has since pivoted to "the future is private".

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/zuckerbergs-buildin-web-de...

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#134

What a completely disconnected-from-reality article. There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you're looking for, and so many people do it literally on a minute-to-minute basis that it's flat absurd to call that ineffective. It's trivially easy to learn something by typing a question into Google; maybe when writing an article try gut checking it against obvious observed reality first. I simply c…

Which part is disconnected from reality?

Google is a horrible search engine, you routinely have to hack it to get searches not linking to the centralised web. The first 5 results are ads, followed by Youtube links or a Quora/Reddit on the topic.

If you used the web 20 years ago you know what a good search engine was like.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#135

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…

what I find strange is that selling ads makes more money than selling service. Because at the end the people watching the ads are buying the stuff advertised so those who adverstise have more money for advertising…. So for it to be rentable people have to buy way more than the ad revenue google makes. If spending for google ads is 1% of bussines budget and budget has to be at least Revenue……..with 280 billion revenue for google it would be 280.000.000.000.000 that we as humans have to spend for stuff that was advertised on google so someone pays google for ads so they can run google search etc ….

35 dollar is maybe ok… …. Maybe better than spending 3500$ on … I dont know … stuff is good also ..

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#136
post #40

The OP over-reaches in that PageRank is just a small ingredient in Google's ranking, which covers many other components from TFIDF score to anchor text features and yes, PageRank. Naturally, Google used PageRank as a differentiator in its marketing, but technically. Bing has been known to use >150 features to score the relevance of a page, given a query, so one would expect Google to exploit a similar order of magnit…

Thanks for posting the interview with Shadi Saleh. I found it interesting they were able to mitigate sanctions by using FOSS software. I wish Saleh had gone into more depth on the hardware side of things which I imagine is also complicated by sanctions.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#137
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> $10/month (honestly I would consider $20) with 100M paying users

That would actually be $12B ARR, since that price is per month while ARR is usually per year.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#138

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…

I'm with you; I'm a paid Kagi user for a while now, and unlike various attempts at switching to duck duck go (et al), Kagi is actually fully working for me. I do not switch back to Google more than once a month, and each time I've gotten "worse" results so far.

I'm sold, literally.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#139

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 lo…

I like the idea. Maybe a 'Search for me' button instead of the current 'I'm feeling lucky'. Or two columns or tabs for personalised and general results. Sounds easy, but I am not aware of any search engines that offer this, unfortunately.

On the other hand, a lot of the search results bias stems from the search query itself. "Does X cause Y" for example will show results that echo the search, and not show opposite results. Simply because you did not ask the opposite or a more open/unbiased query like "X Y".

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#140
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

Was researching Ad spend as the ad-tech industry is falling apart. https://imgur.com/gallery/1Aw3t4i This is not a search result anymore. This is an outrage.
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