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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#141

Post by freediver »

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?

Other options include going public or paying out dividends.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#142

Post by an1sotropy »

CalChris wrote: post #33

PageRank was all Larry Page. The cited article was about the search engine. https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en

As other comments have noted, PageRank didn't come out of a vacuum; some history is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#History

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#143

Post by ukd1 »

mrkramer wrote: post #73
akrymski wrote: post #37

> 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…

I find YT premium fully worth it; the ads are horrible, and totally inturrupt watching something - enough that I pay, as I couldn't stand it otherwise.

Google, less so - but I pay for Kagi as I like the results better, and prefer how they say they're tracking me.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#144

Post by Calamitous »

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…

Another nice thing about Kagi is that you can eliminate domains from your search results. Obvious content farms are pretty easy to spot and remove.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#145

Post by kbyatnal »

IMO this article misses the biggest issue with search engines today. It's less about any ranking algorithm (like PageRank), but rather the root cause is with indexing. No matter how much you fine tune your ranking system, if your index is filled with SEO junk and blogspam, you're fighting a losing battle from the start.

For some reason, a lot of these search engines like to brag about the number of documents in their index, which never made sense to me. Maybe it was true in the past, but on the modern web, larger index !== better results. In fact, I'd argue the opposite since you're much more likely to serve SEO spam.

That was my motivation to start hacking around on CrowdView (https://crew-rho.vercel.app), a search engine specifically for forums and discussion content (e.g. forums, discords, twitter, reddit, etc). It has a curated index (today, curated by yours truly) to remove SEO junk and help you figure out "what does a real, genuine human think about this think?"

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#146

Post by mrkramer »

entwife wrote: post #108

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 o…

>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.

You are correct but in the scientific community there are no armies of spammers who persistently try to outperform other scientists by writing fake research papers and spamming citations. There are cases of fraud here and there but not at the scale of the Internet or to be exact the World Wide Web(WWW).

>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)

Google probably already does this but exactly how nobody knows because of their blackbox algorithm policy. Speaking about this suggestion; it depends on what you search query is....you need to assign specific weight values to certain referrers in relation to search queries from X,Y,Z categories.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#147

Post by freediver »

mrkramer wrote: post #122

>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 option…

The difference is Google is trying to do this with the data extracted/mined/tracked from the user (pulled), while the model proposed in the article is based on users volunteering their data to the search engine (push) because incentives are aligned and they trust it. A sbtle difference, but the latter can produce vastly better outcomes as the quality of the data would be presumably much higher. (auther here)

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#148

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

cardanome wrote: post #129
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 lo…

I thought: couldn't the details about the user live on the client? And the user could delete, modify, decide not to use them.

This way you get anonimity and custom results

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#149

Post by AndroidKitKat »

Calamitous wrote: post #144
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…

Another nice thing about Kagi is that you can eliminate domains from your search results. Obvious content farms are pretty easy to spot and remove.

My favorite feature is being able to boost a certain domain up in the the results (or even pin it if you really would like). I often search for different Pokemon and prefer the information that a site like Serebii.net gives me over something like Bulbapedia.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#150

Post by freediver »

Minor49er wrote: post #80

I was curious and went to their Pricing page. Their link to pledging "5% of its profits" to supporting non-profit organizations for a more humane internet leads to a dead AWS page

Oops.. The correct link should be https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html
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