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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#171

Post by cardanome »

g_p wrote: post #157
cardanome wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

I don't think there is much cause for worry that Kagi themselves might use the data for anything bad BUT data leaks do happen and more importantly Kagi will need to play ball with whatever government that exists in the markets they want to have users in, be it the USA but also China, Russia or whatever.

We already know that Google is in fact cooperating with these entities. Not only by giving out user data but also by actively censoring certain things. So there is a precedent.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#172

Post by lossolo »

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'm paying for YouTube Premium and you get YouTube Music for free + ad-free too. I've started paying because ads were annoying on my smart TV YT app and I already used YT Music.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#173

Post by kbyatnal »

smt88 wrote: post #164
kbyatnal wrote: post #145

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…

For a long time, I've been considering a different solution to the problem, which is to create a human-curated whitelist-only search engine. I do think your idea is great and something with a lot of value for many use cases. The only issue is that it won't surface certain things like restaurant contact info and Wikipedia that people often need to be a top result.

yup totally agree, but I think it's nearly impossible to compete with Google and make something much better for certain types of queries (e.g. factual info, location queries, etc). They have too much data and too much of a head start.

The best way to compete with them IMO is to choose a slice of queries that they perform very poorly at (like non-SEO spam results) and build something 10x better. But that brings up the challenge of getting users to remember to come back to your search engine.

It's tricky for sure, with no clear answer. But for the first time in a long time, I sense that we're approaching a tipping point for Google's dominance over the web.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#174

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

fleddr wrote: post #168

You can't compare the good faith web from 1996, which consisted of a bunch of nerds blogging, to today's web. Everything of any importance in our society moved online, and much of it needs monetization. And since on average users won't pay a cent for anything, ads it is. We very much have a role in this outcome ourselves. Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, s…

I, for one, look actively for services I can pay for.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#175

Post by dchuk »

smt88 wrote: post #164
kbyatnal wrote: post #145

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…

For a long time, I've been considering a different solution to the problem, which is to create a human-curated whitelist-only search engine. I do think your idea is great and something with a lot of value for many use cases. The only issue is that it won't surface certain things like restaurant contact info and Wikipedia that people often need to be a top result.

"a human-curated whitelist-only search engine"

This is a good idea. Basically harkening back to the old internet directory days, combined with the powerful indexing tools we have now, and then use all the great language models and topic modeling tooling to make the querying great.

Said another way: moderate and protect the index, instead of trying to clean up the results of queries.

You'd need to monitor the whitelisted sites in various ways to make sure they don't bait and switch and turn to spam later, or get hacked and go to shit.

You might even be able to monetize on the publisher side by allowing sites to pay to be indexed faster/more regularly, which could potentially (but not totally) help with spam control too. Every publisher wants traffic.

You might be able to jump start the whitelist by getting folks using a plugin so you can know what domains they spend time on in the first place and index those when signal strength warrants it. Gotta be careful about that being gamed too though. Also I think this is actually the core principal of Brave's search engine come to think of it.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#176

Post by stellalo »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #113

The blog post credits Google founders for PageRank but probably the credit should go to Baidu instead. Check the history section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

The history section mentions the work of Baidu’s founder as somewhat related to PageRank in that it scores based on links. Work of others are also mentioned in the same section as “influential” for the development of PageRank.

If we just trace back bibliographic references to decide on the inventor of PageRank, it will probably be Archimedes.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#177

Post by t0bia_s »

twobitshifter wrote: post #163
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…

The sad truth is on average advertisers will pay more for your attention than you’ll pay not to have ads. So people continually complain about YouTube ads but ignore their option to pay to have them removed.

Why wasting money on "feature" that can be done with same result for free? uBlock, NextDNS, pihole, etc. No-one is asking for ads by default, ever.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#178

Post by api »

fardo wrote: post #165
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…

>It's incredibly refreshing to know that the company providing my search results has an incentive to make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers Cable television and netflix have made it quite clear that payment does not mean “no ads”, it just means “no ads, yet”. It still might be a better alternative in the short term, but the moment growth starts to peak, companies follow where the incentives lead…

Having the actual user pay is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a user centered product or service. It doesn’t guarantee the company won’t double dip but without a direct economic model nothing is even possible but ads and surveillance.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#179

Post by PaulHoule »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #124
PaulHoule wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never saw a web directory that took a serious approach to using automation to curate the directory. It's probably more feasible than people think because it's a matter of classifying links up or down (relevant or not) which is a much more ontologically and mathematically tractable problem than learning a ranking function or trying to classify things into one of N>2 categories.

I think the problem may more have been the lack of a sustainable revenue model. Getting volunteers to curate the directory is particularly destructive because the people who most want to volunteer either (1) want to promote something or (2) want to get paid so somebody else can promote something.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#180

Post by [deleted] »

bratwurst3000 wrote: post #135
Invictus0 wrote: post #109

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…

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…

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