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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#151

Post by x62Bh7948f »

irsagent wrote: post #16

I started using Kagi and Orion a while back and it has changed how I used the web. Both the products Kagi offers has only increased my productivity and removed the internet junk that I am used to seeing on the web. A note on Orion, the ability to use extensions from both Firefox and Chrome store is why it is admirable, the cherry is Mac integration and its similarity to safari with the tree-view tabs.

I’ve been using orion for a while, but sometimes with a couple of YouTube tabs open the bottom of my M1 MacBook Air gets uncomfortably hot.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#152

Post by nmstoker »

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.

Yes, eliminating and boosting favoured sites are both excellent feathers on Kagi

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#153

Post by freediver »

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…

Simply because you need to get the basing things right like the correct infrastructure and it is a safer bet, specially when you are bootstrapped. The article lays out the vision for the future of the search that Kagi wants to build.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#155

Post by freediver »

ballenf wrote: post #12

Is there a search engine that just omits pages with surveillance tracking scripts? Could it be done? Then you can check google or a mainstream engine when needed.

Yes, Kagi has that option (it is called non-commercial lens). It also shows number of ads/trackers for search results.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#156

Post by mrkramer »

freediver wrote: post #147
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)

You said >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.

This is what Google is doing under the hood and they have the upper hand because they collect absolutely everything about the user. Yea there is a lot of noise but their advantage is enormous because theoretically the more they know about you the better search results you will get.

I respect the policy of letting users decide what data they want to hand in(volunteering their data) but I don't see how this can scale in the long term because users most probably don't even know what they know and they don't know what exactly they want.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#157

Post by g_p »

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 think if you can assume some level of trust in your search provider (i.e. through payment - let's get to that in a minute), without which you should probably be looking for a new search engine, then you can trust the search engine to not optimise results for you. If they tell you they don't, then do, then you likely have deeper-rooted issues with the search engine you use.

On the point about payments, there are some potential approaches to handling this, but they tend to be a bit complex and technical. I"m not sur ethis is really a technical problem though (or at least one where a technical solution is what's needed).

A challenge of taking traditional payments is that the identity of the payer is inherently "linked" (to some extent) to the transaction. You could maybe use a privacy.com type intermediary or similar.

What you could do however, is buy a "kagi voucher" or similar, which would be an RSA-blind-signed token that you generated client-side in JS. You'd send it to the server during the payment transaction, and be given back a signed version of the token, which you unblind client-side, then give a backup copy to the user to save, and set it as a cookie to authenticate payment has been made.

That should, in theory, at least un-link the payment from the user. Ultimately though, a bad actor can still trivially correlate your searches (and payment, if you used same IP or browser fingerprint), and all your searches are linked by a common cookie.

So you decide to create some kind of token fountain, which you can auth to with a blind-signed token, and get 50 "search passes" from. Those could be unique per-search, and just be "bearer tokens" you can use. You'd have to trust that this token fountain doesn't record which search passes were issued to which "blind token".

Ultimately, it feels like this problem then becomes "do you trust your search engine?" - I'm not sure this is a problem that technology needs to solve, as ultimately your search provider is seeing your queries and IP, and most users won't realistically change this. A provider that isn't incentized to act against your interests (i.e. something like Kagi which isn't advertising to you or selling data) seems to address this for most user scenarios.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#158

Post by lmeyerov »

freediver wrote: post #141
BasilPH wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Going public is a qualified event for a SAFE to convert -- it is a financing -- but curious about the dividends

SAFEs are often capped, so taking awhile doesn't matter so much, except maybe interest calcs

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#159

Post by ryandrake »

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.

"Do you want to learn about blogspam? If so, you are on the right page. You will learn about blogspam here. One of the most major things about blogspam is that it exists on the Internet. You just learned that blogspam exists on the Internet. In this way, you have become educated about blogspam.

Now that you know about blogspam, we'll move on to the next topic: How to find blogspam. It's actually very easy to find blogspam. You are on the right page if you want to learn about finding blogspam..."

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#160

Post by g_p »

x62Bh7948f wrote: post #151
irsagent wrote: post #16

I started using Kagi and Orion a while back and it has changed how I used the web. Both the products Kagi offers has only increased my productivity and removed the internet junk that I am used to seeing on the web. A note on Orion, the ability to use extensions from both Firefox and Chrome store is why it is admirable, the cherry is Mac integration and its similarity to safari with the tree-view tabs.

I’ve been using orion for a while, but sometimes with a couple of YouTube tabs open the bottom of my M1 MacBook Air gets uncomfortably hot.

There was a recent bug fixed, specifically on YouTube, due to ad-blocking causing a constant loop fetching and reloading an icon or something to that end, I believe - it was fixed in a recent release.

I suspect that was what you were seeing, and if so, updating should have addressed it.

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